On today’s edition of Total MMA Radio, our own Iain Liddle sits down with Cage Rage’s Neil Grove and Marc Staehling discusses DREAM 5.

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Rickson Gracie in Choke: it’s the much loved (and much hated) 1999 documentary which spotlighted the Gracie family champion’s preparation and participation in the 1995 Japan Vale Tudo. What brought this DVD back into my player? Was it all the recent excitement about his 19 year old son Kron Gracie and his gold medal winning performance at the 2008 Pan American games? Was it Rickson’ recent appearance in the (excellent) jiu-jitsu episode of Fight Quest? I don’t know, but like YAMMA it happened… and sadly, I ended up enjoying it a little less than I thought I would…

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by Dave Walsh

Do you miss Japan’s boom? Miss Genki Sudo’s long, elaborate dance sequences and freak show fights? There are people at our forum who agree with you. Go figure.

I think after the past few weeks we’ve had some questions answered when it comes to the future of the sport of MMA. If anything, to some it might have been a cold, hard reality check, while to others it was the expected result. MMA in Japan was the standard for years. While the UFC was being shunned by the mainstream in the mid-90s we had PRIDE selling out big arenas and Inoki beginning to scheme up ideas to break into the market. That was then and this is now, and right now things have changed drastically. Two events in particular over the past few weeks; World Victory Road’s Senkogu and most recently DREAM.1 have proven that the Japanese style of MMA still has its place in the world of MMA, but not like it used to.

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By Marc Staehling

With the recent confirmation of the North American Debuts of Korea’s Dong Hyun Kim, and Japan’s Yoshiyuki Yoshida at UFC 84, I thought it would be appropriate to take a glance at last few years of international(Asian) acquisitions made by the UFC and WEC.

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by Kendall Shields

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This weekend’s DREAM 1 event is really our first look at the new reality of Japanese MMA. The entertaining and competitive March 5 World Victory Road Sengoku card (match-by-match coverage here, videos of most matches here) gave us Hidehiko Yoshida, Takanori Gomi, Josh Barnett, Kazuyuki Fujita, and Kazuo Misaki, all of whom are significant fighters and draws — and it was a great show — but DREAM is clearly on a different level. Between their concentration of promising young talent and proven draws on the one hand, and their network TV slot with TBS on the other, FEG’s HERO’S replacement looks set to be the premiere power in Japanese MMA. The March 15 debut show offers a mix of truly ridiculous mismatches and competitive Lightweight Grand Prix tournament bouts. If you’re a fan of Japanese MMA, you probably see the appeal of both kinds of contests.

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This real-time report is made possible through the generous contributions of internet piracy, which is probably the best kind. Of piracy. Most of these fights are available at Daily Motion right now.

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It’s safe to say that the deepest, and most consistently entertaining division in mixed martial arts is the lightweight division. Just a glance at fight of the year candidates over the last several years and you’ll see a slough of classic lightweight bouts. Uno/Sato 5/99, Penn/Pulver 1/02, Sato/Nakayama 11/02, Uno/Hansen 3/05, Hansen/Azeredo 4/06, Gomi/Diaz 2/07, Griffin/Edgar 2/07 and Huerta/Guida 12/07 are just a sampling of the fantastic lightweight fights that have taken place over the last several years.
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A fight between the biggest stars in the history of Japanese MMA. It’s UWFi versus PWF-Gumi. It’s Pride versus Pancrase. And no one seems to have noticed.

Masakatsu Funaki did more than anyone to build the sport of MMA in Japan. Pancrase was running shows before the UFC even existed and Funaki was the star. Originally groomed to be the protege of New Japan Wrestling star Antonio Inoki, Funaki was handsome, charismatic, and most importantly, he was good. Really good. He beat many of the sports biggest names in the early to mid-1990s including Bas Rutten, Ken Shamrock, Guy Mezger, and Frank Shamrock. When he did lose, like to his successor as Pancrase’s top star Yuki Kondo, it was always slightly shady. Funaki was so good, so far above the other guys in the business, that he needed to give them an leg up when he fought. So he’d challenge himself: ‘I’ll let the other guy get two rope escapes on me to get the crowd fired up and then beat him.’

Sometimes it backfired, like when journeyman Jason DeLucia tapped him out when he misread how far away the ropes were and couldn’t escape a kneebar. “From what I understand, he was supposed to carry me to three rope escapes into the match and miscalculated his distance upon the first rope escape — it happens. The promoters were very unhappy, needless to say,” DeLucia said. But usually it made for the most exciting and technically sound fights on the scene. When the UFC was still using “talent” like John Hess and Moti Horenstein, Funaki and Pancrase were putting the best fighters in the ring together in grappling classics.

“Pancrase, it was the stuff back in the day. It was the height of pro wrestling then, and we were pro wrestlers that did it for real. We were the shoot wrestlers in a sport everyone knew wasn’t real and we really captured the imagination of the Japanese audience,” former Lion’s Den fighter and King of Pancrase Guy Mezger said. “It was a lot of fun back in those days and there was a lot of notoriety to be had then. In the 17 years I was a professional fighter, that five year period was probably the most fun I had.”
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