Archive for the 'Masakatsu Funaki' Category

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It is somewhat reluctantly that I turn away from my download of the most recent Shooto show — which, about halfway through, anyway, is awesome — having just remembered my TUF commitments here at Total MMA. A man has only so many hours in a day to devote to this kind of thing, and so difficult decisions sometimes need be made. I am not complaining; I have more time for such things than can reasonably be expected. But know that while I speak to you now of TUF, my heart belongs to Shooto. I guess that’s always true to some extent.

Last week, as I’m sure you’ll recall, Dante Rivera took a close and controversial decision win over Brandon Sene in a match which asked of its judges (and of the viewing audience as a whole, of course), what’s more important in a mixed martial arts contest: modest but ultimately pointless positional control, or pretty much completely negligible damage from a somewhat disadvantageous position? Pointless positional control won the day! The fight itself wasn’t much, really, as Dana White observed, but at least it made you think, and that’s really more than you can ask of a show that begins with this kind of theme music. And it goes BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.

Oh right! Also last week, Jeremy May lime-juiced Matt Brown’s dip! Grudge match! Citrus tobacco grudge match! This should be great. This is the best season in forever. Who needs Shooto?

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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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