While the rest of the MMA world continues to look forward to what will surely be one of the great weekends in the sport’s young history, featuring some of the world’s top heavyweights (Affliction: Banned), lightweights (Dream 5), and middleweights (Ultimate Fight Night), let us continue our look back at our favourite middling and indeed baffling light-heavyweight enigma. That’s right: our completely disproportionate Kazuhiro Nakamura retrospective continues apace! Last week, we followed Nakamura through his triumphs over the ever-ready Dos Caras Jr., the slightly dangerous Chalid Arrab, the hard-done-by Murilo Bustamante, the possibly diving Stefan Leko, and the wildly inconsistent Kevin Randleman. We also bore witness to his second (and presumably last, although who knows what tomorrow might bring?) loss to Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, and his freak shoulder injury against Dan Henderson. Recall that the note sounded throughout these early matches was Nakamura’s considerable promise, his potential to develop into a formidable competitor in Pride’s 205 lbs division. At the conclusion of Nakamura’s slightly plodding decision win over Randleman, Bas Rutten strangely proclaimed, “A new star is born!” Stranger still, it sounded like he meant it. “Beautiful victory, unanimous decision — we’re gonna hear a lot from him,” was Bas’s bold prediction. Well, sort of, in that, here we are, right?

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Our completely disproportionate Kazuhiro Nakamura retrospective rolls on! Last week, we considered the general phenomenon of Kazuhiro Nakamura and looked into the earliest stages of the baffling ordeal that is his mixed martial arts career. We saw Nakamura look poised and preternaturally relaxed in his debut match against Antonio Rogerio Nogueira before tiring and falling prey to a lovely armbar from the back, and we saw him fight Daniel Gracie at a pace that beggared belief (given his chubbiness) en route to a decision win. His first of many! This week’s installment begins with Nakamura taking head-on the only luchador to ever break Kengo Watanabe’s arm with a German suplex in DEEP (can you believe there was only one?). That’s right, it’s Dos Caras Jr.!

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As you know, Dave Meltzer covers the business of mixed martial arts better than anyone. But, as you might also know, his technical knowledge of the sport is very much a work in progress. This is true of all of us, of course, whether we’re casual fans, devotees, or martial artists who train in grappling or striking arts ourselves. Mixed martial arts is a sport marked by such rapid technical innovation and evolution that we’ve all found ourselves behind the curve at one time or another. We’ve all had our, “wait, what on earth was that?” moments as we’ve been exposed to techniques for the first time. But unlike most of us, Dave Meltzer unfortunately has his “wait, what?” moments recorded for posterity. And the June 23rd edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter has a real doozy.

Recapping the June 15th Dream 4 event, Meltzer offers this somewhat baffling analysis of the finish to the Shinya Aoki / Katsuhiko Nagata Lightweight Grand Prix match: “[Aoki] remained on top, doing very little until using what was called a gogoplata from the mount, but really wasn’t, as it was more of a forearm choke except using the shinbone instead of the forearm.”

Wait, what?

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