RINGS 2/15/02: 2001 WORLD TITLE SERIES ABSOLUTE CLASS TOURNAMENT GRAND FINAL

2001 World Title Series
Absolute Class Tournament Grand Final
February 15, 2002 in Yokohama, Japan
横浜文化体育館 Yokohama Bunka Taiikukan 
(Yokohama Cultural Gymnasium)

"'TO EXIST BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH' DOES NOT MEAN SIMPLY TO LIVE AND DIE. The attitude the student must seek is a vow to embody reality, without purposefully 'seeking death' or 'devaluing one's own life,' as these are anachronistic and romantic military notions. Basho (1644-94), the most famous haiku poet, is admired as the founder of that attitude. During his life he traveled extensively throughout Japan. As he lay on his deathbed, at an old countryside inn during one of his travels, a student asked him to compose a final verse. Basho replied that every verse he composed during his lifetime could be considered a final verse, so it was not necessary to compose one at that particular time." 

AS BEST WE KNOW VERY FEW OF US ARE ON OUR DEATH BEDS AT PRESENT AND FEWER STILL AMONG US ARE BASHŌ and so while none of this obtains directly (or does it, my friends [no]), I offer the above all the same as impoverished explanation by way of deeply imperfect analogy for why I do not wish to approach this the final entry of the RINGSbox portion of TK Scissors: A Blog of RINGS (as it was initially conceived, there were to be no other portions; this has since changed) really any differently than any other despite the great gravity of this our shared achievement (having watched a box of shows; and discussed them). I should note that the other day I went through my now pretty old copy of Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, & Issa (my favourite is Issa! to me he is a homely mope-Romantic a little like Larkin!) thinking that somewhere in there Robert Hass must have told that anecdote above about Bashō refusing a formal death poem, that must have been where I had read it, and only after I had flipped through a couple of times did I remember no, I read about that in Kyuzo Mifune's esoteric Canon of Judo, which comes in and out of print in the west but is rightly esteemed by all, and which we have totally seen before in these pages, have we not. "When answers to your philosophical questions arise spontaneously in the outcome of a competition, you will understand that judo is not simply a means to engage in warfare. It is truly sublime to understand even the smallest truth while you are grappling, as there is an infinite variety of human thoughts and movements." This book is so wild, and I was in no way ready for it when I first encountered it; it has taken me long years to truly dig it, if that is what I now do (who can say). "There is no regret in winning or losing," Mifune explains. "Competitions are an opportunity to express expertise and knowledge on both sides. One can look at oneself critically, without burdening one's mind with thoughts on life or fear of death. This is similar to the attitude of Basho as he faced death--there is no regret." If you can believe it, he goes on: "[I]f your will lacks intention and sincerity, you have reason to regret. To establish victory your intention must be clear and resolute, based on reason, without cowardice or evil intent. Therefore the loser will learn his weaknesses, and pursue his studies further, while the victor will surely advance further to mastery of judo's mysteries." Once you have convinced yourself of these truths, Mifune concludes this section ("Competition in Judo," which comes right after "Reason in Harmony with Nature") thus: "Acquire a swift and agile mind and body through diligent training. This will improve your use of energy, increase your insight into reason, and deepen your understanding of mankind." One might reasonably argue that with all this Mifune I actually have made a big deal about this being the final RINGS show despite my stated intention to the contrary but I would counter that really all I have done is to continue to quote the Mifune we have been quoting all along, and I am just getting some extra in because I have it open to an especially good part right now. Is that so wrong. 

ANYWAY even though Bashō didn't make a big thing about composing a formal death poem, here is the one that he wrote last, which totally makes it is death poem (it has been received as such); you often see it like this:

Sick on my journey, 
        only my dreams will wander 
        these desolate moors

But Robert Hass has it like this:

       Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
       the withered fields

But who knows, translations are weird. 

FINAL RINGS seems pretty final for it to say on a graphic, doesn't it (does it mean the tournament final? or is it declaring its true lastness?) and as if to not overwhelm us beyond consolation by this fact, those words flash but briefly across the screen and are soon replaced by a "1991" graphic before we are shown Mitsuya Nagai, long since mistreated and gone (my god, how I have missed him), shoot-style juji-gatame Herman Renting (I have missed him less) at ASTRAL STEP 2nd: AQUA HEAT in Osaka; now it is 1992, as Yoshihisa Yamamoto and Masayuki Naruse fight to a draw at either MEGA-BATTLE 4th: KOHRIN in Tokyo or MEGA-BATTLE 6th: HAYATE in Osaka (it could have been either but I cannot properly tell, forgive me); 1993 is nowhere to be seen here and instead we move to 1994 and young Tsuyoshi Kohsaka's kneeing of Nobuhiro Tsurumaki at RINGS 1994 IN YOKOHAMA (if they are showing prominent débuts the Yamamoto match must be from Tokyo, not Osaka); still in 1994 we have Wataru Sakata's juji-gatame upon and indeed over Minoru Tanaka (not a début, and I am at sea once again); 1995 is deemed unworthy but not so 1996, for that is the year of Kiyoshi Tamura's enRINGSening and his triumph over Dick Vrij before a near-rapturous Tokyo Bay NK Hall crowd (how they loved him that day; but where is he now; has he proven faithless [I don't mean this]); then on to 1998, and Kenichi Yamamoto stopped by Valentijn Overeem, and Hiromitsu Kanehara ashi-gatame'd by Mikhail Ilioukhine (I have no idea why they are showing these) and I think Yasuhito Namekawa knocking out Troy Ittensohn (not for real, don't worry); that was a lot of 1998, wasn't it, and so no time for 1999, but instead 2000, which of course brought with it Andrei Kopilov's rolling hiza-juji knee-bar dismantlements of men thousands of years less ancient, the ascendance of Hiromitsu Kanehara, and apparently nothing else they would care to show until 2002, at which point a voice intones AND NOW FROM HERE THESE LEGENDARY FIGHTERS CREATE A NEW GLORIOUS HISTORY.

What an odd selection of fighters and moments (to say nothing of textures) in those clips! I liked it very much but it was strange. And no Akira Maeda to be seen! You can list a dozen other people you would expect to see in a ten-year RINGS retrospective highlight but that's the one who is most notable in his absence, I think we would all totally agree instantly, right? And the way they are framed it, I thought at first maybe this was supposed to be like a final retrospective, but now I am thrown by new-glorious-future talk; when this aired, did everybody know this was the last one? Or did it only become clear when there proved to be no further ones? Certainly WOWOW EXCITE MATCH's Kenichi Takayanagi sounds more sombre than is his custom and he says Maeda Akira an unusual amount of times as he introduces Gong Kakutogi's Hideyuki Kumakubo to us once more (onegaishimasu; [onegaishimasu]). Also they are standing in a weird place instead of sitting at their desk and I am slightly uncomfortable with everything that is happening.

We are shown young boys in track suits getting loose in the ring before the show because even when everything changes not much changes and then we see the ever-elfin 宇野薫 Uno Kaoru jumping rope! That's right, even Caol Uno was in RINGS! I would position this as a Genki-Sudo-level RINGSurprise but not a a Sanae Kikuta level one; that was, to me, an occurrence with which I struggle still to come to terms. 

We are just about set for the opening bout to commence but before it does I would like to note the recent emergence of two notable blogs that address either (and perhaps inevitably both) shoot-style and kakutogi in ways that might very well prove of interest to you, the loyal TK Scissors reader (again I thank you): i) Jonathan and Lee, my old friends since forever, have decided to address themselves to the early history of Pancrase at https://hybridshoot.com/ (there is an @hybridshoot twitter account also), and ii) my newer friend Dan (newer but no less cherished, please do not mistake me; what a gift a new friend is) for his part attends to UWF Newborn at http://kicksubmissionsuplex.blogspot.ca/ and I do not know if I have ever mentioned that the title of his Fujiwara Armbar græppzblög d'antan made clear to me the necessity of "TK Scissors" as the name for my own? Well it's true! Would I have stumbled upon waza-blog-entitling without his example? I submit that I would not have, probably, no, and this our meagre undertaking would have been meagerer still. I do earnestly invite you to explore both these endeavours, should their prospect intrigue you even slightly, which, again, given who you must be to be here at all, I mean it's pretty much got to, right?

ONE MORE ITEM BEFORE WE BEGIN THIS IS BREAKING NEWS AND IT IS MAJOR THE MAIL CAME A LITTLE WHILE AGO AND WITH IT MY GONG KAKUTOGI FINAL ISSUE (unless I am mistaken and it has not in fact ceased publication which is totally possible) AND IT IS BEAUTIFUL AND LOOKS JUST LIKE THIS (I am unable to photograph my own copy at the moment, forgive me):

AND SO THE ADMIRABLY ODD TAKUMI YANO who was billed at times as "The Oriental Mystery" (these are not my words, I swear to you) faces Hidehiko Matsumoto the martial artist, not to be confused with Hidehiko "Sleepy" Matsumoto (松本英彦) (October 12, 1926, Okayama - February 29, 2000, Tokyo) who was a jazz saxophonist and bandleader who sounded like this, and looked, for at least one glorious moment in his long and seemingly rich life, like this:

Also look at the cover to his 1969 Festival of Enka collaboration with Yoshio Kimura:

I do not know who is pictured in that striking photograph but I do know that it is not Yoshio Kimura, who looked way more like this:

Which is yet another very strong look and were it not for referee Ryogaku Wada tethering us to kakutogi through his instructions to the athletes before him we may well have wandered ceaselessly in jazzrealms, never to return (thanks as always, Ryogaku Wada). Yano begins by doing his odd stances and then spinningly back-fists Matsumoto down in such a way that the match probably should have been stopped but, instead, Matsumoto was allowed to continue under penalty of lost pointo after he kind of hopped out over the bottom rope to the floor; I have definitely not seen that happen before! It is the only portion of either the first or second round to escape the unyielding clippery that takes us to the third at once. Yano continues to employ weird stances and notions and floppings and pursuits and in the end wins a pointo hantei on the strength of Matsumoto's lost point described slightly above.

Yoshinobu Ota appears here as simply Yoshinobu to face the RODEO STYLE of Naoyuki Kotani and he only gets to face it for 1:21 because that is how long it took Kotani to finish with the naked strangle of 裸絞 hadaka-jime, declared here sleeper holdo, desu by Kenichi Takayanagi because culture and language flow in ways that fascinate endlessly. Masatatsu Yano and Hiroyuki Ito are next, but we see only the third round of what one must assume has been a close-fought contest, in that it ends in a split decision in Yano's favour. No less clipped, or not much less so, is Hirotaka Yokoi's unanimous decision over Katsuhisa Fujii. We get all of Yasuhito Namekawa and Sam Nest, and the first round is a total delight in its many attempts at ude-garami and juji-gatame (Namekawa) and a hadaka-jime (Nest) so close to a finish (of Namekawa) that a rope escape (which are totally back!) was very much needed (by Namekawa). And a juji-gatame so close (for Namekawa!) that it to requires a rope escape (from Nest!)! That round was wild. The second round falls off this pace only slightly, really, and ends at 4:53 on Nest's very nice rolling entry to hadaka jime to the immense pleasure of his RINGS Australia second Christopher Haseman (we will see him again soon enough). 

So here is one of the strangest things in all of RINGS and, before it even happens, totally one of my favourite: 

Koshaka/Uno! Why on earth! And yet here it is. Although Caoru/Kaoru/Caol Uno will be known exceedingly well to many of you let us say by way of introduction to those who have not been so blessed that Caol Uno is a beautiful græppler and, though he fought all over, irreducibly a man of SHOOTO ever since his début loss (in which there can be no shame) to the great (the great) Hayato Sakurai at Shooto: Let's Get Lost. His 1999 Shooto Tenth Anniversary match against Rumina Sato is one of the better ones (matches) ever. He is wonderful. He is also tiny, which makes a match against Tsuyoshi Kohsaka a terrible idea! Except this is a five-minute exhibition match so it should all be fine. Kohsaka, for his part, is praying a lot, even for him:

I believe there are to be three escapes permitted and three knockdowns in this gloveless exhibition? Also the weights, while terrible, are not as bad as they could have been: 72kg to 97.9kg, and while I do not wish to trivialize that difference, Kohsaka has competed heavier, and Uno lighter. Seconds in I think this is very possibly a work! In fact I feel quite sure of it! And yet I cannot be certain. How unexpected and yet how fitting that something like this should occur in our final show! The pace of the waza here is extraordinary, more Kohsaka working at Uno's pace than Uno slowed to the heavier Kohsaka's. That TK scissors occur in the earliest moments cannot be doubted, nor can it be contained. This is amazing and I am overwhelmed as Kohsaka 払巻込 harai-makikomis his way out of a standing back-take and, in the ne-waza sequence that follows, TK scissors once more. Uno secures an ashi-gatame (leg hold) near enough the ropes that Kohsaka escapes, and winces a little as the hold is released, convincing me that this is shoot-style for sure. The variety of TK's takedowns argues the same: flying scissors, sutemi-waza (sacrifice techniques) from gyaku-ude-garami (reverse arm entanglements), and ah ok there's an Uno rope escape after a hiza-juji knee-bar, too, so we're even. The ne-waza throughout, my word. The end comes far too quickly in this almost unbelievably high-level shoot-style exhibition draw and poem.

The 横浜文化体育館 Yokohama Bunka Taiikukan pretty much can't believe any of this either. Uno bows deeply to Akira Maeda and then to the crowd in all four directions before Kohsaka speaks to shouts of Kohsakaaaaaaa (the correct shout). I have learned several basic Japanese phrases through audio instructional but alas Kohsaka speaks none of them here and so I am of no use to you in this. He does say RINGS a lot more than usual, that much I can tell you, so yes this is definitely being presented as for sure the final show, not just in the WOWOW presentation after the fact but to the live crowd as well; there does not seem to be any ambiguity about it. The crowd roars as Kohsaka's brief address reaches its end and I am totally having feelings of the swirling petals, falling leaves kind.

We can be pretty sure the next bout (there should be no further bouts) between no less stalwart a pair than Andrei Kopilov and Volk Han is a special match to be (shoot-style) contested by old RINGS rules, and we can say this because of the graphic that appears before it: 

Moments after the bell, Andrei Kopilov sits atop Volk Han in just such a way that it uncannily recalls an image of Russian judo great Tamerlan Tmenov sitting atop a young Fedor Emelianenko that I have tried to find before for our purposes here but it seems to be absolutely nowhere anymore; the one place that seems to have it by name returns a "404" now as though to demonstrate once and for all that the future has in key ways not worked out. This pinning predicament (I had that first as "pining" predicament, which it might also have been) does not last long, for BY OLD RINGS RULE rope escapes flow freely. Ah, yes, there, for the last time, is Volk Han's standing gyaku-ude-garami reverse arm entanglement that he executes with such vigour that my dry old shoulders ache half a world and thousands of days away. VOLK HAN HAS COUNTERED A KATA-ASHI-HISHIGI LEG-LOCK ATTEMPT WITH UDE-HISHIGI-JUJI-GATAME AND THAT IS A RINGSBOX WRAP ON BOTH THE NOBLE ANDREI KOPILOV AND OUR DEAR FRIEND Магомедха́н Аманула́евич Гамзатха́нов and this is hard.

Will Hiromitsu Kanehara and Mikhail Ilioukhine take to fight in the delightfully unexpected (by me!) shoot-style mode of Kohsaka/Uno and Han/Kopilov already? Could our hearts take it if they did? At the end of the first round I feel as though they are fighting for real but also I am (barely) self-aware enough (not really) to realize I am probably even more easily manipulated (or "worked") than normal due to a heightened state of feelings right now. In the end, this (probably-real?) match between the stout (in all senses) Ilioukhine and the stouter-still (same thing, all the senses) Kanehara ends as a deserved draw, desu. Ilioukhine hit a pretty tidy 内股 uchi-mata in the third, though! Kanehara is his usual self throughout and afterwards, which is a comfort; the man is an utter rock of smiling strangely.

AND SO ALL THAT REMAINS IS OUR ABSOLUTO-KYU TOURNAMENT GRAND FINAL ITSELF; it is, as the greatest ring announcer ever reminds us, very much our main evento.

National anthems are observed with sufficient but not excessive ceremony; the heavy-kyu title Fedor has already won rests atop Volk Han's shoulder. The bell is sounded and Christopher Haseman rushes in and is punched at once and is down nearly instantly, I think maybe four seconds in? He recovers well enough after Ryogaku Wada's count, and to his heart's great credit rushes in again, this time actually taking Fedor down and then in the ensuing scramble throwing with a low-key ura-nage. Great job for real, Christopher Haseman! Haseman is down a point for having been knocked down, and he loses another on a rope escape from a mae-hadaka-jime front choke, and then when he is knocked down again from punching that looked awfully hard that is it, there are no more points to be given; this is mercy. It is meet and right, is it not, that RINGS ends its final show by crowning as its double-champion (both heavy- and absoluto-kyu) the greatest heavyweight mixed fighter to have ever fought mixedly, then or now; it is meeter and righter still that this should occur at the end of a card that featured, to our joyful surprise, pure kakutogi alongside the shoot-style that has so long intrigued us.     

As WOWOW EXCITE MATCH's Kenichi Takayanagi and Gong Kakutogi's Hideyuki Kumakubo speak in soft tones of what has been, a young man exits behind them bearing an ASTRAL STEP 1st: SPIRIT-U poster because this has all been dream, and you are dreaming:

   

AND SO AT LAST THE RINGSBOX IS TRULY BEHIND US if you can even believe it (it seems we must concede this much); but TK Scissors, though initially conceived as quite singularly A Blog of RINGS, continues on as though instructed by the referee's call of よし yoshi (which is made when the players have mistakenly stopped and the referee can't tell why and s/he is like ok let's still judo everybody, yoshi) and will apply itself (should we be spared) in all earnestness to what we have come to understand (in deference to the great Tadashi Tanaka, whose work I am at once elaborating and probably misreading in what Harold Bloom describes as the revisionary ratio of Tessera in The Anxiety of Influence [I have never read the whole thing {or maybe any of it, I can't remember}]) as "The Long UWF" with, I hope, the workmanlike tenacity leavened by fancy and (should we be so blessed) art that defines both the waza from which we take our title and the noble 四段 yondan for whom that waza is itself named. "The Way is in training. One must continue to train," Musashi wrote in the Earth Book portion of The Book of Five Rings (RINGS) whilst a cave-hermit in 霊巌洞 Reigandō (literally "Spirit Rock Cave" [that cave-name is a bit of a letdown sure but it would be weird to not listen just because of that]). Finally, for now, let me again thank in all sincerity my many friends who have so generously helped with and encouraged this project from its humble beginning to its no less humble end (being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross [one of the worst kinds]) and also again I would thank all who have read any of these several-hundred-thousand words on a subject that is, let us speak frankly, maybe odd? And yet, to the extent to which so much of what we have explored here together occurs at the exact intersection between græppling and the æsthetic, it is literally crucial. And so here we have been.