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.
2001 World Title Series
Absolute Class Tournament: Semi-Finals
December 21, 2001 in Yokohama, Japan
横浜文化体育館 Yokohama Bunka Taiikukan
(Yokohama Cultural Gymnasium)
NOT ONLY IS GENKI SUDO DEMONSTRABLY PRESENT IN RINGS TO THE CONTINUED AND COMPLETE SHOCK OF EVERYONE BUT WHAT'S MORE HE IS INDEED THE FEATURED RINGSist IN THE OPENING SOFT-VOICED VIDEO THAT HERALDS THIS WOWOW PRESENTATION OF THE 2001 WORLD TITLE SERIES ABSOLUTE CLASS TOURNAMENT SEMI-FINALS and no less striking that that, in my view, is the realization that, for the fourth time in five shows (and the fifth was a noble but minor 後楽園ホール Kōrakuen Hōru, a venue which RINGS has generally treated differently than others), the main event is a Hiromitsu Kanehara match! I hope that despite the ongoing and perpetual poverty of my art I have been able to put into these pages at least a hint of what lies in my heart on the subject of Hiromitsu Kanehara; and if I have, you will recognize at once that I am in no way bemoaning six months of Kanehara firmly positioned at the top of the card. But it kind of crept up on me! Between this, and the absence of footage of Kiyoshi Tamura in the high-level opening graphics these last shows, and the fact that Tamura's first PRIDE match (his long-form bludgeoning at the blue-gloved hands of a physically [and chemically] prime Wanderlei Silva) comes only days after the final RINGS show early next year (by which I mean 2002) strongly suggests that Tamura was totally gone at this point, doesn't it? Again, we are flying blind here in the truest sense of the term (in that we do not have Observers yet), but this would seem to very much be the case. And so Hiromitsu Kanehara! Good for him, I say. And just now I have read on his wikipedia page that one of his noms-de-guerre or sobriquets rouge is "RINGS Saigo no Ace" or "RINGS' Last Ace" which, had I seen that earlier, could have helped me. But it is still edifying!
AND SO WE BEGIN as we are welcomed to 横浜文化体育館 Yokohama Bunka Taiikukan (Yokohama Cultural Gymnasium) not for the first time (but very nearly for the last) by no-less-beloved (by me) a figure than WOWOW EXCITE MATCH's Kenichi Takayanagi and joining him as ever and always is Gong Kakutogi's Hideyuki Kumakubo. Our really very clipped opening UNIVERSAL BOUT elides the first round entirely, and shows us only the close-fought second in Hidetaka Monma's decision win over Kyosuke Sasaki, who is of U-FILE, and Kiyoshi Tamura is nowhere to be seen, so yeah he is just gone, man. Our second match, a bout no less Universal, sees Naoyuki Kotani (RODEO STYLE, his blue trunks boldly declare [one's thoughts turn to the tremendous Kazuhiro Nakamura's that once read TAKE TO FIGHT JUDO STYLE {see him against Kosei Inoue in his true judo days here}]) defeat Takahito Iida by the hallowed waza of 腕挫十字固 ude-hishigi-juji-gatame in just over three minutes. The undercard is really ticking along as we move to not a Universal Bout but one no less Official (I do not understand these designations but embrace the mystery of them) between Stephen Gillinder and shoot-boxing's Tatsuya Maeda, who wears black and red flaming tights and enters to "You Give Love A Bad Name." I am with him. And he is the victor! After boxing Gillinder up in a fashion that seems to me quite technical (please recall I know nothing of hitting and its ways), Maeda finishes with a fairly vicious 裸絞 hadaka-jime naked strangle that totally began as a crushing of the lower face: chains of love got a hold on he; when passion's a prison, he can't break free; ippon.
And now Genki Sudo enters like this, and fires off a confetti canon:
What you can't tell from those images, but what you probably can tell with your heart if you will allow yourself to truly feel, is that Genki Sudo has a spinning light on the top of his helmet. Also the music he enters to is completely panic-inducing techno of upsetting pace and persistence. This is a very intense experience! Kenichi Yamamoto has selected a much more sedate, boxingesque entrance of wearing an excellent hooded robe whilst his second carries a title belt high (it is possibly the UFC Japan tournament title he won some time ago? I can't think what else it could be) and "Ante Up" is quite rightly played while those things happen. The first round is spirited but largely unremarkable aside from just Genki Sudo's strange and wonderful energy and also his fleeting attempt at a "rubber guard" in the tradition of (imagine please a sigh that lasts the rest of my life and yours) Eddie Bravo. The Yokohama crowd enjoyed Genki Sudo's entrance very much but does seem to have loved that first round maybe? Both fighters swing and miss wildly with spinning back-fists early in the second round as though they were Masayukis Naruse (that's the plural). Sudo comes reasonably close with an ashi-sankaku-garami (leg-triangle-entanglement, known to some as omoplata) but cannot finish it (we worked on the rolling variation of that technique at judo just today); it does cause a lot of wiggling, though, that culminates in the more staid 裸絞 hadaka-jime for the finish at 1:46 of the second round. Yamamoto presents Sudo with what I am now sure is the UFC Japan Middleweight belt he won at UFC 23, an event we discussed in some detail earlier as it was the site of Tsuyoshi Kohsaka's match against Pedro Rizzo (it did not go so great).
I had totally forgotten for at least a minute there that we are still very much in the 2001 WORLD TITLE SERIES ABSOLUTE CLASS TOURNAMENT and indeed its SEMI-FINALS before Christopher Haseman caught Egidijus Valavicius in juji-gatame after spending kind of a while in a fairly gnar kubi-hishigi neck-crank from mune-gatame (chest hold/side control). That took just over three minutes and was quite convincing! Haseman has really had a lot of good matches. And here now in the other tournament semi-final we have Lee Hasdell against RINGS Heavy-kyu Champion Fedor Emelianenko (you can tell he is the champion because he has the title belt slung over his ensweatshirted shoulder). Fedor is smaller than Lee Hasdell, and that probably shouldn't surprise me, but it kind of does! All the same, Fedor flings him to the mat immediately. Hasdell does well enough in newaza to enjoy a moment or two on top, but they stand soon enough thereafter, and Fedor punches him so hard in the face. Hasdell is not knocked out or anything but has this look about him like what on earth was that as he is set-up for first juji-gatame and then a quick, jerking gyaku-ude-garami reverse-arm-entanglement/double-wrist-lock/figure-four/Kimura and although Hasdell is able to break the hold with a rope escape (I guess they're just back!) it is pretty clear that his shoulder is in a bad way from the hold. The next time they're down (Fedor just, like, dumped him), Fedor hits him awfully hard in the body and then grabs a mae-hadaka-jime front choke for the win at 4:10. AND SO OUR WORLD TITLE SERIES ABSOLUTE TOURNAMENT GRAND FINAL IS SET and it shall be contested between Fedor Emelianenko and Christopher Haseman. Fedor, we should note, is totally loved at this point, people crowding at the rails.
OH GOOD IT IS TSUYOSHI KOHSAKA and his moment of 黙想 mokuso before he enters the ring affords us a welcome opportunity to get a good look at his excellent TK hoodie:
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| tkhoodies.blogspot.ca |
Unfortunately my disc is skipping around more than a little right now so I am unable to show in detail how pretty much as soon as future World Wushu Championships gold medalist Bazigit Atajev so much as touches Kohsaka's face it does that thing where all of the blood in it comes out at once; this has happened with such frequency through TK's long RINGS (and elsewhere) career that we have come to not really worry about it and instead greet it like an old friend (oh hey, all of TK's blood; I hope you are keeping well) but it is nevertheless understandable that the referee would like the doctor to have a look at it for a second maybe. When we resume, Kohsaka has Atajev down in an instant, and has no trouble getting to strong positions (mune-gatame, tate-shiho-gatame, uki-gatame, really any number of fine gatame) and using those positions for a fair amount of punching (I cannot support this) and several attempts at ude-kansetsu (arm-bone-locking [I forever support this]). That's the first round! In the second, Atajev does well resisting an early takedown, and TK bleeds profusely again as Atajev comes out on top only to be TK Scissored into an ashi-garami (leg-entanglement) as I am reminded that the foremost technical insight afforded by this RINGSbox as we near its totality and can begin to speak in such ways is that TK Scissors is itself an ashi-garami and you had better believe I am going to teach them in concert the next time it seems appropriate to teach either! A yellow card is charged but I know not for what or to whom and I dare not go back and see because I don't know if I'm going to be able to get back to where I need to be given the scourge of disc-skipping that I am getting scourged by right now. Ah okay, it must have been to TK, because the judges' decision falls in Atajev's favour, and I think that is totally plausible if TK had a point deducted. In the post-fight locker-room interview we can see that Kohsaka's hair is starting to thin noticeably (or else how could we notice it). He's thirty-one now. This is when it begins.
WAIT A MINUTE WAIT A MINUTE OK THIS JUST OCCURRED TO ME HEAR ME OUT so when you play ファイヤープロレスリングA/Fire Pro Wrestling A, released 3/21/01, Kiyoshi Tamura (or rather "Iron Arm Takashi Minemura") is included in the RINGS ("ECLIPSE") roster, but when you play ファイナルファイヤープロレスリング～夢の団体運営/Final Fire Pro Wrestling: Yume no Dantai Unei!/Final Fire Pro Wrestling: Organization of Dreams/Final Fire Pro Wrestling: Dream Organization Management, released 6/19/02, Tamura is nowhere to be seen in RINGS ("GONGS") but is found instead under Freelance Japan and you have to sign him to RINGS (or to Pancrase or perhaps U.F.O. should you choose to run a wild counterfactual). Of course when you play ファイプロ・リターンズ/Fire Pro Wrestling R (9/15/05) he is merely listed as a Græppler alongside other former men of RINGS as all has fallen to ruin but my point here is that Fire Pro evidence of Kiyoshi Tamura's pre-RINGS-demise RINGS-exit has been available to me for ages and still I had not put it all together; what a fool I have been. How does all of this sit with Hiromitsu Kanehara, RINGS Saigo no Ace?
I guess pretty well! His opponent here is Paul Cahoon, about whom I know little aside from that long years after this he would lose a decision to my beloved Kazuhiro Nakamura at World Victory Road Sengoku 5. Woah look how serious Kanehara looks just before he's about to enter the arena; this is very much unlike what we are used to seeing of and from him:
You have chills, don't you; chills because of Hiromitsu Kanehara. His music is so good and I still don't know what it is, search though I might. Maybe I could use one of those programs for your phone that divines, through black witchery, what the titles of songs are? This would probably work (assuming I have not merely dreamt of the existence of such things) but realistically I will never do it. OH NO in the middle of an otherwise fairly uneventful opening round, Hiromitsu Kanehara has been radically 裏投 ura nage'd in the mode of the German suplexo but as we have seen in previous instances (all of them against Matt Hughes), Kanehara does not seem to be bothered too much when that happens? At least not during the match, while he is still warm and things don't really hurt that much, but maybe when he gets home and out of the shower it will be awful, I don't know (maybe he will shower at the gym first, actually; there are many variables). I would like to personally thank Hiromitsu Kanehara for once again sweeping someone over with hikikomi/sumi-gaeshi from a gyaku-ude-garami grip in the manner of Masahiko Kimura, which allows us to gaze upon this lovely gif once more:
Although we have attended to Kimura's demonstration of this waza very nearly each time anyone has done anything even remotely resembling it in any of the matches from any of the hundred-or-so shows we have RINGSblogged (more that, since we are on disc 127, and while there have been a number of two-disc shows, that number is probably only like a dozen) over the ten years (RINGS time) we have traversed these last eight months (time as it passes in the primary world), I think it is maybe this newfound prominence of Hiromitsu Kanehara that has allowed us to have it with us, this Kimura gif, nearly every time out of late! This is a really good match, and has such neat parts as Kanehara throwing a kick towards the head of this much taller fellow (all fellows are taller), Kanehara nearly finishing a juji-gatame in which the angle of Paul Cahoon's arm as indicated by the overhead camera convinced me it was broken (it was not; it was, instead, turned), and Kanehara getting into a near-ideal position to attempt the somehow-forgotten (not by me!) Akira Kikuchi's step-over yoko-sankaku-jime to gyaku-ude-garami side triangle choke to reverse arm entanglement (I still teach it!). Kanehara takes the split decision, and addresses briefly the 横浜文化体育館 Yokohama Bunka Taiikukan crowd, which receives him warmly.
AS WELL THEY SHOULD FOR HE IS THEIR LAST ACE IF YOU CAN EVEN BELIEVE THAT IT TOOK ME THIS LONG TO PUT IT ALL TOGETHER but such is the dark fen of the mind in which we loom and lurk until the Wrestling Observer Newsletter archives are brought up to date in the fullness of time and in accordance with the schedule that has been set. In closing, I would like to note that today is the day of Dave Meltzer's father Herbert's passing, and our thoughts are with him in this difficult time. Dave spoke lovingly of his father on Wrestling Observer Radio last night, and described his father's devotion to family, his love of travel, and the pride he felt in the work he had done developing the Fortran programming language. Rest in peace, Herbert Meltzer; condolences to Dave Meltzer and his family.
Thank you all once again for your time and for your attention to these matters. Let us reconvene as soon as we are able so to do.
2001 World Title Series Absolute Class Tournament: First Round
October 20, 2001 in Tokyo, Japan
国立代々木競技場 Yoyogi National Gymnasium
GOING OUT OF BUSINESS WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT WE'VE GOT UNREAL NEW GRAPHICS AND ALSO SHELLED OUT FOR "PURPLE HAZE" AND WE ARE BACK ON WOWOW AFTER THAT BRIEF FIGHTING TV SAMURAI INTERLUDE AND KENICHI TAKAYANAGI IS HERE AND EVERYTHING and joining him as always is Gong Kakutogi's Hideyuki Kumakubo who, intriguingly, says rope escape a few times as they're running down the rules? Are they bringing those back after their considerable absence? I am intrigued! Surely they are raising their memory only to make clear our new era, free of them? As things unfold I will let you know if there are rope escapes, obviously. That we have entered the ABSOLUTE CLASS TOURNAMENT portion of late-stage RINGS is I am sure already very clear to you but let us clarify yet further with the aid of tournament brackets whilst we await the action here at the suspension-roofed 国立代々木競技場 Yoyogi National Gymnasium:
At first, glance, certainly, that looks like Fedor Emelianenko and a field of seven whom he will hit too hard and also græpple, and the WOWOW broadcast confirms this our deepest suspicion by showing Fedor immediately after revealing the brackets and reminding us that he is currently our RINGS Heavy-kyu champion. BREAKING NEWS THIS IS HUGE LOOK WHAT THEY CALL THE FIRST MATCH ON THE CARD:
A RETURN TO ASTRAL-STEP NAMING CONVENTIONS? It is more than I could ever have hoped for. The Universal Bout in question seems to be Gen Isono's decicsion win over Eriya Matsud, of which we are shown only a portion of the second round, and then actually Hirotaka Yokoi (a post-RINGS Tsuyoshi Kohsaka ally, in time)'s 3:14 hitting victory over Ken Orihashi is called a Universal Bout too! I can't believe our good fortune just generally but also very specifically right now.
With matters universal now settled we turn instead to ABSOLUTE CLASS TOURNAMENT and in our first instance of this we are asked to enjoy the venerable Lee Hasdell's contest against Georgi Tonkov of RINGS Bulgaria, with whom such words as judo and sambo we associate (because they are said by Kenichi Takayanagi during Tonkov's entrance to soaring guitar heroism). Only now do I notice the extent to which Lee Hasdell resembles Vernon Wells (I have an autographed Vernon Wells baseball that I [and many others, do not mistake me] was presented with on-field on the final day of the 2003 baseball season for having attended all eighty-one home games that year [there was a rewards programme]; what I remember best from that day was the heat, and the sheer size of Carlos Delgado, my favourite baseball player [I wrote about him once]). True to the repeated words judo and sambo, Tonkov throws from a firm headlock in a manner we might well describe as kubi-nage (neck throw) or perhaps harai-goshi (sweeping hip) and attacks with the arm entanglement of kesa-garami from the scarf-hold of kesa-gatame. In time, Hasdell escapes and takes Tonkov's back, but is unable to do much from there, and they stand. Tonkov half-hits an uchi-mata makikomi! Like a wraparound uchi-mata! This Bulgarian whose name I do not recognize is doing great in his first mixed fight! Let me see . . . ah okay Georgi Tonkov placed fifth at the (then) recently-contested 2001 World Judo Championships at Olympiahalle München (that's in Germany), so that he would be throwing Lee Hasdell well should not stagger us like for example the punch that has just now staggered Georgi Tonkov, who is then finished by a flying knee. Lee Hasdell explains in the locker room that he practices that combination often, and also that, as a young boy, he was the high jump champion in his school, which accounts for just how flying his knee has just now been. That was all very interesting! It is a shame about the hitting, obviously.
Christopher Haseman, though never a small guy with super duper clear skin, gives up nearly twenty kilograms to Koba Tkeshelashvili or GROM KOBA as he is here known. Haseman, perhaps looking for every advantage he can get against his much larger foe, wings an arm over the top rope to avoid a takedown and also punches whilst doing that (that's a yellow card). Just this week I was tossed around as uke for the nikkyu test of a 110 kg student and I am 73 kg so I understand well the perils faced by Christopher Haseman and I am sure you will agree that these are not just analogous but in fact literally identical circumstances and conditions. Haseman kicks his partner in the groin for a second yellow card which is not a waza I even considered during the nikkyu test. Despite two yellow cards, the victory is rightly Haseman's, I guess, as he cracked GROM KOBA up pretty well from start to finish.
In a non-tournament match (OFFICIAL BOUT reads the title card) we have "Kenichi Ogata (shoot boxer) (born 1975), Japanese kickboxer," not to be confused with "Kenichi Ogata (voice actor) (born 1942), Japanese voice actor," and he is certainly well known to the 国立代々木競技場 Yoyogi National Gymnasium crowd, who have brought streamers, which must be a thing in shoot boxing!
He is defeated by 裸絞 hadaka-jime naked strangle in a mere forty-three seconds by Curtis Brigham of Winnipeg, who is unknown to me, but who I am now learning lost a RINGS USA match to Naoyuki Kotani and was stopped by little (and yet huge) Sean Sherk one time over the course of what looks to have been an interesting career.
We return to ABSOLUTE CLASS TOURNAMENT brackets for Fedor Emelianenko's match against Ryushi Yanagisawa and "Breathe" really did age much better than the other Prodigy singles, there's just no comparison, as is evidenced at least in part by how "[u]p until the 2012 PDC World Darts Championship, Dutch darts player Michael van Gerwen used the song as his walk-on theme.[6]" It was on the Big Shiny Tunes 2 compilation in Canada so its place in history could not be more assured. Fyodor, desu is Kenichi Takayanagi's call, and this is why he is the best in the business: he is unfailingly pleasant, and sometimes says names or waza I can make out and it makes me feel good when it happens. Ryushi Yanagisawa continues to be so much bigger than I expect him to be: here he's listed at 191cm/102.2kg, so that's nearly 6'3"/225lbs. Fedor is 182cm/102.9kg, so that's just a hair under 6' and 227lbs. So Yanagisawa is noticeably taller, and even though they weigh the same, he presents bigger in that he is leaner and more muscular whilst Fedor is characteristically squishy. Yanagisawa fires in a leg-kick that really catches Fedor and wobbles him, which the crowd understandably thrills to. It does not take long, though, for Fedor to heave Yanagisawa to the mat and move all over top of him with not just better speed than any other heavyweight but with much better speed than any heavyweight, like it`s not even close. He switches position with I guess the shoot heavyweight version of Kiyoshi Tamura's shoot-style middleweight speed, the speed that I would complain about in (otherwise utterly faultless) Tamura shoot-style matches but that Dave Meltzer would praise as like the whole point of Tamura shoot-style matches (I know others who feel this way as well and I do not mean to dismiss this view but merely note once more my [probably dumb] dissent from it). Fedor loses his top position when he attempts juji-gatame but every juji-gatame attempt is a worthy attempt and so nobody should ever fault anyone for it lest we discourage further juji-gatame. I am pretty sure Takayanagi and Kumakubo at one point discuss how Fedor's only loss came on a cut-stoppage against Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, and they take pains to make clear that it was an accidento. As the second round begins, these same two are definitely talking about how knockdowns cost a certain number of pointo and rope breaks another, and this is still slightly baffling to me, unless these previously open and public scoring of pointo is now to be handled privately by the three judges as part of their decision(ing)? That's the best I can figure now in my poverty but I am almost certainly wrong about this. TREMENDOUS EXCHANGE late in the second round as Fedor attacks once more with juji-gatame only for Yanagisawa to turn hard-towards, slip by Fedor's legs, and attack with his own juji-gatame with seamless immediacy as though the living dream of shoot-style had never ended. Fedor slips even this, and ends up atop his foe as the round ends. THIS HAS BEEN GREAT. In the opening exchange of the third round, Fedor connects for the first time with the kind of punch that one has worried all along he might connect with, and Yanagisawa is remarkably still there. I mean he's on the mat with Fedor on top of him, and he's not really doing much of anything to change that, but it is enormously to his credit that he is still anywhere at all. Yanagisawa has done exceedingly well in this match despite losing all three rounds, and comes, well, I guess not close with an ashi-gatame leg-lock late in the third round but his attack is vigorous enough that Fedor has to take it totally seriously. A clear decision win for Fedor, but everybody did so well!
I have probably mentioned before an old friend who doesn't live in the city and who trains (constantly, devotedly) elsewhere but who comes by the club sometimes, and is just the most positive person to be around? He is a judo shodan (he really should present himself for nidan soon [he is not alone in this]) and a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and he competes in these I guess one would say semi-pro græppling matches sometimes, and we won't see him for months and months and then he'll stroll in and just have this kind, brow-raised, open-faced air of delight about him an hour and a half while he employs exquisite waza ("I've got a detail for that one if you don't mind!") and makes everybody feel great about everything ("that's a great detail, I'm gonna use that so much, thanks!"), even the times that he buries you, and then at the end of the class when he is thanking you for like the eighth time he will be like everybody is getting so good, everybody is doing so well and that's how I feel about this last match except less intensely because I was not a part of this last match in the same that I am a part of a judo class with my students and friends. But I like having the feeling!
Okay so when Egidijus Valavicius knocks Yasuhito Namekawa down very early in their ABSOLUTE CLASS TOURNAMENT match, and Namekawa tries to convince Ryogaku Wada that he should be permitted to continue the match (he really shouldn't be), we are shown on-screen that Namekawa has lost a point, so I don't know what's going on with that at all, really. He takes Valavicius down, heroically, but it doesn't last, and Namekawa is struck down again and absolutely should not have been allowed to keep fighting, but he is, and then he is so swarmed with further strikes that he is sent reeling and Tsuyoshi Kohsaka in Namekawa's corner throws a red towel into the ring in surrender as he scrambles through the ropes to help. "No face punch, no face, no face" were Ryogaku Wada's ne-waza instructions earlier; would they had been carried over into tachi-waza (standing technique) as well. Wada has been, I think, an excellent referee throughout these many years of RINGS and this is the first time I can remember thinking he let a match get out of hand but that is very much what I think about this one. Namekawa seems pretty together and light-hearted about the whole thing when he faces the cameras in the locker room afterwards but this was a bad situation.
Our non-tournament Official Bout main event sees Hiromitsu Kanehara (RINGS Japan) against Kelly Jacobs (RINGS Australia), described for you by me (RINGS In The Living Room With a Baby Sleeping On Me). Kanehara is cornered by Tsuyoshi Kohsaka (a busy night for him!), Jacobs by Christopher Haseman (busier still!). As Kanehara takes Jacobs down with little trouble to open the first round it occurs to me HEY WHERE IS KIYOSHI TAMURA? He hasn't had a match since his tournament loss to Gustavo Machado (or "Ximu") in April, and I don't think he's been seen at all since; I don't even remember him cornering a U-FILE græppler or anything. Once we have access to the relevant Wrestling Observer Newsletters all will no doubt be clear, but I have just now checked ahead and it is a series wrap for Kiyoshi Tamura: he doesn't fight again in RINGS, and the next time he fights anywhere it is in PRIDE (like nine days after the final RINGS show) against Wanderlei Silva where, if I recall correctly, he lasted kind of a while which was actually worse because he just got hit more and longer. What are we to make of this? Was he injured for a while or something? Or did he see the way things were headed and bail? You will recall, perhaps, that Kiyoshi Tamura first appeared in RINGS not after the demise of UWFi, but wisely anticipating it. This is all mere speculation and I have no idea what is going on! I am starting to maybe get a handle on the points situation, though: I think maybe in non-tournament matches that are appearing under the title card OFFICIAL BOUT (or maybe in all of them I guess?), old shoot-style-era RINGS rules regarding rope escapes and lost points apply, because when Jacobs is caught in Kanehara's juji-gatame, he loses his first point with a rope escape, and when he grabs the rope again to avoid hadaka-jime, Kenichi Takayanagi declares it losto pointo ni; in the second round, when again juji-gatame'd, Jacobs must yield rather than seek the refuge of the holt-eves again because of how he is all out of points. I think I have it! Just in time for there to be like two more shows ever! Maybe they, like this one, will be totally good though? Join me, please, and we will see! Thank you once again for your time, and for your attention.
WHEN WILL BE THAT UNION AND EACH THING (BITS OF SURFACE BROKEN BY MY FOOT STEP) WILL WITHOUT MOVING MOVE AROUND ME INTO ITS PLACE AND THE OBSERVER ARCHIVE WILL BE UPDATED AND WE WILL KNOW WHAT IS GOING ON? I GUESS IN LIKE A YEAR AND A HALF BUT I WILL POST FROM IT IN THIS VERY SPACE THEN, I PROMISE.
