With all the standard responsibilities and commitments of life during the last days of the year, I’ve found it incredibly difficult to find time to get to a computer and relay my thoughts to the people actually interested in what I have to say. To those people, I say I’m sorry for my lack of appearance on here and especially for my half of a K-1 Dynamite!! preview, which definitely should of been completed and didn’t get finished. School is getting crazy, but the good thing is that I’m FINALLY on my last required English class in college ever! and my Anthropology 101 class is pretty fun. Enough with all that stuff, let’s talk about a beautiful way year ended with Yarennoka!!
I think it’s incredibly apparent by now that I LOVE JAPANESE MMA and by elimination we could all easily say that PRIDE was Japanese MMA for a while, so this Yarennoka!! show did mean a lot to me. I don’t think that the incredibly “quick” PRIDE 34 show did PRIDE or the DSE crew any justice and was not the way they should’ve gone out. Thankfully, Yarennoka!! came along and maybe sent PRIDE away in peace. I say maybe because I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the last time we’ll see a show like this or at least hope that this isn’t the last one of these types of shows.
I think all of us watching this show were just waiting for the Lightning Bolt Hand and Sakakibara to just show up at any second, which were basically the only things missing from the show to completely qualify it as PRIDE. I think it was the little things that made it strictly PRIDE and a trip to the past. Kei Grant and Ms. Lenne Hardt doing what they do, judge Matto pulling double duties, Takada’s drumming skills, incredible promo packages, and many other things were definitely great additions to the show and will be hard to come by again in the near future.
I think this upcoming year its going to be weird not having any of those things in a show. Call me crazy, but I do love Ms. Hardt’s original style of delivering fighters names and fight times. My personal favorite being at PRIDE Final Conflict 2005 during Ricardo Arona’s intro in the finals, where she kind of free-styled his name to the rap music he had going. I think I’m in a certain state of denial after the whole PRIDE end but this show actually did more to depress me really.
Other than the obvious reiteration of PRIDE demise, the other thing that I found kind of “not good” from the show was Misaki vs. Akiyama fight. Not the fight itself because the fight far surpassed my expectations. I am a bit mad that Akiyama lost considering I’ve been a huge fan of him for a long time, but that wasn’t the thing that really got to me. It was the end of the fight, which was not handled well at all by the staff, the japanese fans, and Misaki himself.
I think it was incredibly apparent from the start that this fight would be a very heated one. I think if you manage to get the Japanese fans booing than you have maybe done something incredibly wrong and Akiyama has done something bad to the Japanese fans, or so they claim. Well, the second that Akiyama made his appearance they started the booing and no it wasn’t one of those Yuji Shimada boos, it was more of a disgust thing. Misaki’s entrance was the complete opposite to Akiyama’s calm demeanor.
This fight was definitely a back and forth battle but definitely ended wrong and should’ve been overturned the same way Akiyama’s infamous greasing scandal did exactly 1 year ago. Akiyama’s left hand was clearly on the mat while Misaki drilled him with a kick from hell. This kick we now know will keep Akiyama out of action for a minimum of 1 month, while a knee injury he suffered will make his appearances non-existent until March of this year. Although kicks on the ground weren’t necessarily enforce all night, specifically by PRIDE Head Referee and HUSTLE’s Private Shimada, Yuji Shimada. The difference between the kicks that Aoki and Azeredo managed to unload compared to Misaki, were the fact that both Azeredo and Aoki were on their backs while Misaki was like a bull running towards Akiyama.
Also, to add insult to injury in front of all the people, Misaki “lectured” Akiyama in front of them after suffering a bad loss. He said that he had infact hurt the feeling of the people and especially of the children. He also mockingly used Akiyama’s sort of catch-phrase “Judo is Great” at kind of weird time. The Grabaka Hitman also said “Everybody Japanese is Strong” and that’s where I think Misaki did infact go a bit too far. It’s bad to kind of use someone’s saying in front of them but is a completely different thing to bring up such a controversial fact. I think that this fact should’ve been avoided and just ignored but he brought it up anyway. I do hope that these 2 meet incredibly soon and hopefully this fight takes place in South Korea, where Akiyama is a huge draw and would sort of make sense considering the 1st would’ve taken place in Japan.
Sidenote: For some reason Japanese fighters always have the children on their minds, not just with Misaki mentioning them but Norifumi “Kid” Yamamoto recently decided to change the name of his gym from Killer Bee to Krazy Bee in order to make it sound not so extreme for the children.
Loading ...
January 7th, 2008 at 12:05am
Thats funny about Kid Yamamoto, because he also finished his NYE fight with a couple of illegal kicks.
It seems like the dirty fighters love kids. Something about that sounds weird.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:35am
The Pride Glory days are over, so move on. It was a money laundering front for the Japanese Yakuza (mob) and nothing else. In addition, they never tested for steroids in Japan at all. Pride was the wild west of MMA, no regulations and fighters cranked up with all the roids uou can imagine. ZERO Credibility, IMHO. How can you reminisce so positively about an organization that literally killed itself?
Along with the freak shows (Butterbean, Hong Man Choi,etc), the PRIDE style of booking makes the sport look like a total FARCE.
I’m glad the promotion finally died. MMA is way better off with out it.
January 10th, 2008 at 9:26am
Pride was fun because it was so different for U.S. spectators. Look at a UFC production. It’s boring, bland, and you can guarantee that Mike Goldberg is going to say the same 10 phrases over and over during each event.
If Pride could resurface without less of a mob-influence, that would be great. It’s not like the UFC is perfect, look at the Fertitta’s and their mob ties. You don’t think the UFC was founded with some dirty money?
Pride couldn’t be bad for the sport. Without that organization, you wouldn’t have seen the Liddell-Silva fight at UFC 79 or Dan Henderson going up against Anderson Silva. Things would be very different with a consistent UFC monopoly throughout the years.
January 11th, 2008 at 8:14am
Leroy-Leroni, take your UFC biased arse back to Sherdog where we… I mean you belong.