August 11, 2001 in Tokyo, Japan
Ariake Coliseum drawing 4,000
ALEXANDRE KARELINE GILBERT YVEL DAN HENDERSON ANTONIO NOGUEIRA (AND MAYBE SOME BEFORE THAT, I DON'T KNOW, THAT'S WHERE THE TAPE STARTED) THESE ARE THE NAMES AND THE SPELLINGS OF THOSE NAMES THAT FADE EACH INTO THE NEXT AS WE DRAW EVER NEARER THE ENTITLING OF RINGS CHAMPIONS IN BOTH MIDDLE- AND HEAVY-KYU DIVISIONS AND THEIR NAMES SHALL EMERGE FROM AMONG THESE FEW WHOSE NAMES REMAIN STILL AMONG THOSE LISTED IN THE LIST OF NAMES LISTED:
Of middleweights we have Christopher Haseman, Gustavo Ximu (né Machado), Jeremy Horn, and Ricardo Arona who choose this to day give their enemy glory or else win it for themselves; of heavyweights, Mikhail Ilioukhine, Bobby Hoffman, Fedor Emelianenko, and "Renato" Babalu "Sobral". It is wrong of me to have said "enemy," really, because that's not what these people are, but I felt Homeric for a minute and yielded to it, forgive me. Kenichi Takayanagi, bardic as ever (I assume) welcomes Gong Kakutogi's Hideyuki Kumakubo as is his way and custom and we are with no delay ready for Christopher Haseman and Gustavo Machado! Machado is, as you will perhaps recall, the vanquisher of Kiyoshi Tamura, handsomest of shoot-style græpplers and indeed maybe men. AND WE ARE TRIMMING TIME ALREADY and that makes sense, there are a lot of matches to get through in this two-hour broadcast WOWINDOW and if any of them go long at all, as this one seems inclined to, we would be right up against it, wouldn't we. From what we're shown, there is not much to choose between these two, and one supposes that the parts we are not shown contain one guy just totally styling on the other (although who can say). After two rounds, a third is deemed necessary, and in it Gustavo Machado is deemed to have græppled (and in some instances hit) sufficiently to advance to the middleweight tournament final. Godo job Ximu! And good job Christopher Haseman, as it looked like he tried really hard too.
Ricardo Arona and Jeremy Horn, haven't they matched previously in these very RINGS? Yes okay I have checked and Arona won by decision (his 得意技 tokuiwaza or preferred technique or hey look at this that I found "1. signature move [assoc. with a martial artist, wrestler, etc.]; finishing move" yessss) almost exactly a year ago! Like within just a couple of weeks! Which I probably watched like six days ago and so this is not really a particularly strong feat of memory. We are shown really very little of this Ricardo Arona decision win but what we are shown is certainly consistent with Ricardo Arona decision wins we have seen at other times and in other contexts so I do not doubt the wisdom of this judgment in the least.
Mikhail Ilioukhine's hair is much shorter as he appears before us in 有明コロシアム Ariake Koroshiamu and it suits him, a nice clean look. The other day my foremost græpplepal arrived at judo with a look so fresh and so clean that a part of me briefly longed for the lightness of the all-over number one, where you just put the guard on your clippers and do your entire head and face (excluding eyebrows, which should remain lush at all times). This was my approach for I guess five years or so? I have opted in recent years instead to have unreasonably long hair (don't worry, I am also balding) and a big dumb beard, and neither of those things gets in the way at judo as much as you would probably think (have I tapped to a rolling beardlock or beardugatame? of course I have but it is infrequent), and I do not wish to forsake either, but for that one moment I was like yes; yes. I have long thought that it would be a great pleasure to shave off a full head of hair every morning but when you think of the protein demands such a growth-feat would require it all falls apart even in the realms of fantasy. I think what happens in this bout that we are shown exceedingly little of is that it is ruled a draw after two rounds, but Mikhail Ilioukhine decides he is unable to continue, and so the winner is Bobby Hoffman, who will criminally hurt a defenseless person soon. I would like to show you Mikhail Ilioukhine's trunks, and just his whole situation, before we move on:
In our next heavy-kyu bout we have Fedor Emelianenko (182 cm 102.9 kg) vs. Babalu (185 cm 104.3kg). Babalu is bigger than Fedor! Although I have definitely seen this match before I did not remember that aspect of it at all and it is quite surprising to me. They clinch in the corner and exchange knees before Fedor pushes off and throws terrrrrrrrifying punches as Hideyuki Kumakubo says sambo, judo. As though to prove that point, Fedor plants Babalu on the mat with a low and elegant 小外掛 kosoto-gake and then hits him very hard to the legs and body (poor Babalu). I am writing this part of this post post the night after Fedor lost to Matt Mitrione, just as we all expected he would, and I didn't even stay up for it (one of my friends at judo did, and his feed cut out right before the match! he got it back but he missed what he had been watching all evening for! Ah, the perils of the stream, as Melville probably wrote in one part). I saw a clip of the finish on twitter, and it was stupid, who cares. I saw too that the great young wrestling prospect Aaron Pico lost in twenty seconds or thereabouts, and it was stupider still (not that he lost [who among us], but that he is doing this at all instead of just wrestling and maybe making an Olympic team). You are supposed to come to this nonsense after you have gone as far as you are able to go in a legitimate sport, like how Fedor hit his ceiling as a -100 kg player on the Russian national judo team without serious prospects for major international success and now here he is wrenching Babalu, who finished sixth at Pan Ams in freestyle but that was as far as it was going, to the mat and then spins out of an ashi-gatame (leg-hold) and this is the way these things are meant to unfold. But who cares. Everything is gross.
That was a nice first round though! I think it was pretty clearly Fedor's, but Babalu did well, too. In the opening moments of the second, Fedor lands a hard low kick that takes Babalu off his feet, and then the ground hitting resumes in earnest until Fedor is briefly menaced by an ashi-dori-garami figure-four ankle lock that he is compelled to step out of and away from. They stand, and Babalu half-lands a spinning back-fist, but Fedor shrugs it off and drags him to the mat with another kosoto-gake but really a very different kind of kosoto-gake although both were plainly "minor outer hooks." That technique can range from a tidy little trip to something deeply and profoundly Mongolian like this one Amartuvshin Dashdavaa hit in combination with ouchi-gari (major inner reap) on Bekir Ozlu (TUR) at Grand Prix Tbilisi 2016:
Speaking of ouchi-gari, the first element of that renraku-waza (literally "connection technique"), that's what Fedor has just now used to put Babalu down again. It is perhaps worth noting that Fedor is wearing those low-rise three-stripe black trunks that are the ones your probably thought he was wearing before I even mentioned it. As the bell sounds to end the second round, and Fedor walks to his corner to meet with Volk Han's craggy warmth, the 有明コロシアム Ariake Koroshiamu crowd gives a hearty cheer for this weirdly fluid heavy-kyu fighter who does everything a little differently than everybody else who has done any of this before. There is a nearly feline looseness to his movements that draws you in even if you are (rightly) a little repulsed by what the end results of those movements are for the people who are in there but not him.
VOLK HAN VS. YOSHIAKI FUJIWARA DO I WAKE OR DO I DREAM there is no way this can possibly be a shoot though, right? How old is Fujiwara here, anyway: okay he is fifty-two. He looks alright for fifty-two! But I mean come on. Ah, so Kenichi Takayanagi and Hideyuki Kumakubo say the words sparring and tech-a-nique a number of times so they are plainly presenting this as an exhibition . . . and it is totally worked as shoot-style! Welcome back, shoot-style! It is a genuine pleasure to see you again! Volk Han even goes for the standing gyaku-ude-garami arm-entanglement that he always worries me with, but as a concession to both Fujiwara's frailty and my own he goes much lighter with it here than had been his custom in the high-days of it. The leg-locking here, my word, it grows ornate! It seems like the Yoshisaki Fujiwara/Shinya Aoki shoot-style match from earlier this year in the Inoki Genome Federation (without question the premier genome federation of our time) has been removed from youtube, but it remains very much available at this Russian site if you have not yet seen it or if you would like to again. Waki-gatame/Fujiwara armbars are threatened, the match ends in a draw, and Volk Han hoists Fujiwara aloft as the crowd loves everything:
And then Fujiwara picks up Han! This is all just so great. "Ride of the Valkyries" plays because Fujiwara's taste levels have always been high.
In another non-tournament match, Kindai University (近畿大学 Kinki daigaku) man of judo Hirotaka Yokoi defeats Ricardo Fyeet, who does not fight well but who is a character, by juji-gatame in but 2:34. You might well remember Yokoi from PRIDE, where he lost all four of his matches, but look who they were against: Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, Heath Herring, Mario Sperry, and Quinton Jackson. So that's okay, he shouldn't worry about that. He should take comfort, instead, in his hadaka-jime win over Bulldozer George at UFO: Legend. Or maybe from his second win over Ricardo Fyeet six years after this one! Isn't that weird? Next, the enigmatic Bazigit "Volk" Atajev, who will in time claim +90kg gold at the 2013 World Wushu Championships (as we have discussed), knocks out Aaron Brink in 1:09, and then we are ready for the middleweight finals! They (it) are (is) between Ricardo Arona and Gustavo Machado, commonly called Ximu, and so perhaps some measure of consolation is to be found for the losses of Hiromitsu Kanehara (to Arona) and Kiyoshi Tamura (to Machado)? No, probably not. WEIRD FINISH in only 1:29: Arona was clobbering Ximu pretty soundly in the corner, Ximu was knocked down, and as the referee, the one with the ill flat-top . . .
. . . came around to see what was up or maybe to stop the fight, Arona punched Ximu him fully and completely and illegally in the face whilst he was seated (on his very bottom) and the fight was waved off. I am not sure if Machado's corner are mostly arguing that their fellow was fine (if so, I disagree), or that the final strike was illegal (for sure), but the referee (whose name I really should know by this point but still don't, forgive me) stands by his decision, and explains it at length in Japanese (obviously) to the crowd, which is of little utility to the Portuguese-speaking athletes and so confusion reigns, but not quite disorder, as it is clear enough that RICARDO ARONA IS OUR RINGS MIDDLEWEIGHT CHAMPION LET'S HAVE ONE LAST LOOK AT THE BRACKETS (from prowrestlinghistory.com):
I should note that everyone has been saying heavy-kyu throughout, and there is an "Absolute Class" tournament coming up, so I think in this instance prowrestlinghistory.com (which has given us so much and for which we are grateful) is in slight error. It is also perhaps worth nothing, I think, that when Fedor and Arona stand together as newly crowned champions, you can't at all tell which one is the middleweight and which one is the heavyweight.
YOU WOULD THINK THE SHOW WOULD BE OVER NOW WOULDN'T YOU but instead it sees Tsuyoshi Kohsaka face a the non-Zaza Grom known to some as Grom Koba (and to others as Koba Tkeshelashvili), whose previous mixed fight saw him defeat Yasuhito Namekawa (always feisty!) by hadaka-jime. I am not sure why Hideyuki Kumakubo says "Renzo Gracie" a couple times but he does, and Kenichi Takayanagi seems to receive it as a normal thing to be talking about. Koba takes Kohsaka down with very little trouble and from this I deduce that he is a fine wrestler; he punches Kohsaka in the face whilst on the ground and is reminded that that is inappropriate and he is contrite. The TK Guard is once again called upon to guard TK and it does so ably. When they stand again, Koba drops low for the two-handed reap of morote-gari and Kohsaka sprawls a little and then knocks him very much out with a knee at 2:17 that was riiiiiight on the line of kneeing a fellow who was on the ground but Koba is in no position to complain, and Volk Han, in his corner, is just like hey real good job buddy in TK's direction so I guess it is settled?
Our main event is between Matt Hughes and Hiromitsu Kanehara, which seems like a pretty good idea! If you are wondering about weights, since Matt Hughes if of course best known for his exploits at 170lbs, whereas Kanehara has fought people up to and including Cro Cop, Hughes comes in at 86.5 kg and Kanehara at 89.3, so that's 191 lbs to 197. They are totally the same size, and I am sure Matt Hughes will be fine. This match, like several other earlier ones, is clipped for time, but through two rounds what we mostly see is Matt Hughes doing very well positionally whilst Kanehara half-menaces with a handful of submissions. One such submission attempt is a gyaku-ude-garami reverse arm entanglement, but Hughes gets out of it okay:
Kanehara pops right back up like nothing happened, don't worry, and actually ends up with his first really good position of the match when he takes Hughes' back in the ensuing scramble. You would think that huge slam would be the most remarkable part of this bout but no, that comes when Hughes is betwixt Kanehara's legs and Jeremy Horn in Hughes' corner advises him to "use [his] lats and elbows to keep those legs down low." He's right, of course, about keeping the legs low (Jeremy Horn unfailingly knows what's up in these matters and only a fool would doubt him) but I have never heard anyone invoke lat-use to keep your partner's legs low and I love it. I am a little surprised at first that there is a third round until I remember that this is not a tournament match so it's not the two-rounds-then-maybe-another format OH HEY NEAT so Hiromitsu Kanehara just rolled through with a sumi/hikikomi gaeshi from a a gyaku-ude-garami grip just like Mashaiko Kimura that's right:
And he maintains the grip to attack with juji-gatame! And he comes pretty close for a little bit! And then even as Hughes manages to get out of trouble in terms of position, Kanehara keeps the grip pretty well ahhhh hadaka-jime? No, okay, Kanehara looked like he was in position to choke him for a moment there. That was all really great! A little while later Hughes gets a couple nice slams but Kanehara ends up on top, which i had not expected to ever see. Hughes ends the round and also therefore the match tapping away with punches from the top. One judge scores the match a draw, and two score it for Hughes. Really good match! Kanehara came closest to finishing, but Hughes did very well in terms of control and also had nice slams so this seems just. Hughes exchanges kindnesses with Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, whom he seems to know, in Kanehara's corner. Hughes is pleased with his win, Kanehara is inherently merry, and so that's that! I really enjoyed this show!
ARONA IS OUR MIDDLE-KYU CHAMPION, FEDOR IS OUR HEAVY-KYU CHAMPION, THE RINGSBOX IS OUR TEXT, THIS TKSCISSORS RINGSBLOG OUR PLACE OF REFLECTION UPON IT, LET US CONVENE HERE AGAIN AS SOON AS WE ARE ABLE which I hope to be tomorrow, who can say, as I thank you once more and in an all sincerity for your time and for your attention to these matters.
WHAT DID DAVE MELTZER SAY? IN A YEAR WE WILL FIND OUT IN THIS VERY SPACE.
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