Segoku 6 Results

The fight card was interesting enough. Jorge Santiago and Satoru Kitaoka came out big winners of the tournaments. Both, strangely enough, finished their first fights in the first round with heel hooks (one of those wierd anomalies that you rarely see on the same card).

Santiago beat Kaz Nakamura in the finals while Kitaoka beat Japanese lightweight staple Kaz Yakota. The parallels are Hitchcockian, in fairness, but the real failures of one of the worlds top lightweights (or, perhaps, former top lightweights) was the major Halloween horror story.

Takanori Gomi, formerly the #1 lightweight in the world, dropped to 29-4, a record that while still impressive (though it really should be 29-5, given the loss to Nick Diaz), it becomes hard to take Gomi seriously knowing that he could collapse at any moment against opponents that aren’t really top guys in the sport.

Gomi lost a decision, which is a nice change of pace for him, as he usually gets submitted when he shows up looking like crap, but it is still disappointing, and he needs to get back on track. It is a nice chance of his opponent, Sergey Golyaev, to make a name for himself, but I don’t think that the Russian (with a career record of 11-6) is really on that track, even coming out of the great Fedor Emelianenko’s camp.

Overall an interesting card for the Japanese organization, but not their best. The Dream tournament had a lot more intrigue for me in terms of matchups, but I will say that the establishment of Santiago and Mousasi makes the Japanese scene that much more exciting, and the rise of a lightweight phenomenon like Kitoaka makes for some interesting matchups with Joachim Hansen, Shinya Aoki and JZ Cavalcante, given that all of the guys are good submission fighters.