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Thoughts on the Japanese NYE 2007 MMA events
By Zach Arnold | January 1, 2008
(I want to apologize for not responding to e-mails sent to me today, as Hotmail for some reason is acting up and giving some weird error messages when I send replies or try to delete mails.)
“The message you selected could not be found. It may have been moved or deleted. Please click the folder again to refresh the view.”
I really hate the ‘new’ Hotmail.
There were a few things that stood out to me about the two MMA shows on NYE in Japan.
The most glaring event was how a man behind a jail cell has recaptured power in the fight scene.
The ghost of Sakakibara
It was clear to anyone watching the DSE event at Saitama super Arena that the ghost of Nobuyuki Sakakibara hasn’t disappeared from the scene. The production set-up was ‘traditional’ PRIDE. No changes from the PRIDE heydays whatsoever.
So, it is disheartening and confusing to see the MMA media online continue to push the spin that somehow, someway, this event in Saitama was being promoted by ‘disgruntled ex-PRIDE employees.”
Give me a break.
As Fightlinker has noted in the past, the Yarennoka logo was trademarked by DSE. DSE has not vanished in terms of the company shell (which still exists).
Watching members of the MMA media online put a babyface spin on the backers of the Yarennoka event reminded me of watching people cheer and celebrate John Gotti on the streets of New York City.
Except John Gotti wouldn’t gladly bend over for a rival like DSE did for NYE.
Kazuyoshi Ishii strengthens his power base
The man’s in jail on corporate tax evasion charges and yet, his henchmen (rumoredly starting with Seiya Kawamata) pulled all the right buttons to basically make the DSE show a secondary event for K-1.
You wouldn’t know that with the way the media covered the shows, but one thing became very clear on NYE — Ishii is back in power, and where that leaves Sadaharu Tanigawa is anyone’s guess.
As commenter white ninja has pointed out on this site before, Ishii’s master plan has always been to construct a situation where the entire Japanese TV pipeline for MMA goes through him. You could see this plan in execution when Tanigawa set-up bouts involving Yoshihiro Akiyama and Choi Hong-Man to be picked up by DSE. If DSE wanted any TV exposure, they had to go through K-1 and do business on K-1’s terms.
Produce the event for us. Pay the fighter salaries. Do the dirty work for us, then we’ll put the matches only involving K-1 guys on free-to-air TV.
And, oh, by the way — we’ll manage to kill your buyrate on SkyPerfecTV PPV.
Whatever the business model was going into the DSE event in Saitama (and notice the lack of blue-chip sponsors for the ring canvas at the DSE event), it got changed towards the end and (in my estimation) for the worse. K-1 not only got everything they wanted, but they also pulled JZ Calvan from a potentially bad match against Shin’ya Aoki (so the two-time HERO’s tournament champion didn’t lose on NYE). Then, to put the cherry on the sundae, K-1 had Shigeru Saeki (the DEEP boss involved in the DSE event) make the announcement about the fight cancellation at the DEEP gym. In Japanese circles, this was a big no-no because it was Saeki and not K-1 who took the PR hit for it. He lost face.
As for the match outcomes involving Yoshihiro Akiyama and Choi Hong-Man, Ishii was in a no-lose situation. If Hong-Man somehow won his fight against Fedor, it would have been a great upset and totally destroyed the legend of PRIDE. With Fedor winning, K-1 managed to get the fight on much cheaper terms than if they had to actually pay the guy and promote him. Again, they let DSE do the dirty work and took advantage of the situation. Regarding Akiyama, it was a win-win situation. If he won the fight, then he beat a midlevel PRIDE guy. If he lost the fight (which he did), then they could always book a re-match between Akiyama and Misaki in South Korea and draw enormous heat.
K-1 is becoming the Japanese WWE
When you watch large-scale K-1 shows, you notice that the fans on NYE really only pop for the big names and stay silent for the undercard fights.
I call it the WWE syndrome.
Vince McMahon transformed traditional pro-wrestling into a real-life cartoon and a real-life movie. You go to the arena for a WWE show and you see the giant Titan-tron, fireworks, and over-the-top production and it feels like you are watching a movie taking place in front of your eyes.
That’s exactly what the K-1 NYE events are like. The big stars get the pops, all the fighters get elaborate entrances, and it’s like watching a giant concert. The event transcends watching a normal fighting event.
K-1, at this point, is the Japanese equivalent of WWE. If you’re not associated with K-1, the perception is that you’re not as big of a star as a K-1 fighter is.
Topics: HERO's, Japan, K-1, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 14 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Yup, K-1 has finally done it. They are top dog. They were always number two to PRIDE’s one, but not anymore. What’s next? A PRIDE/DSE invasion angle?
And to get off topic, but watching the Sakuraba/Funaki match; was it me, or was Funaki jacked to the gills? Seriously, Masakatsu Funaki was always muscular, but lean (think Shawn Michaels, Benny Urquidez, Bryan Danielson, etc.) but at K-1 Dynamite his chest and shoulders were BIG! I think he got a “secret sauce” if you know what I mean…
Funaki was in awfully good shape, especially compared to Sakuraba.
“K-1 has finally done it. They are top dog. They were always number two to PRIDE’s one”
Always?
Yeah, I always thought it was debatable that K-1 was more popular than PRIDE at points.
I wonder how much cash M-1 had to front for the event or was there contribution Fedor only?
You make it sound sinister that K-1 has the upper hand and knows it. They already won any rivalry that they once had with Pride…or you could say it was more Pride losing than anyone looking good. Of course they took advantage of the situation, just like any pro wrestling promotion does when they work with the remains of a defeated former competitor. Yarennoka was promoted as a one-off, so DSE gave no indication of wanting to compete with K-1 going forward.
You also claim JZ is lying about being injured. Proof??
I wrote:
Don wrote:
I never said that K-1 or Calvan lied about his injury.
I said that Saeki was left to deliver the bad news and take the PR hit for the fight getting canceled.
“Yeah, I always thought it was debatable that K-1 was more popular than PRIDE at points.”
Yeah, they were always neck-and-neck when it comes to popularity. K-1 was popular in the early 2000’s mostly because of Bob Sapp and its other freak-show fighters. PRIDE had some goofy bullshit too, but not at a higher degree of K-1. And wasn’t it pretty much a rule that PRIDE usually always had a better live gate, but K-1 shows always got better TV ratings? Especially for the NYE shows?
Yeah, they were always neck-and-neck when it comes to popularity. K-1 was popular in the early 2000’s mostly because of Bob Sapp and its other freak-show fighters. PRIDE had some goofy bullshit too, but not at a higher degree of K-1. And wasn’t it pretty much a rule that PRIDE usually always had a better live gate, but K-1 shows always got better TV ratings? Especially for the NYE shows?
Their fighters got higher profile sponsorship deals also. K-1 playing second fiddle to K-1 was largely a construction of the western MMA media given K-1’s solid interest in kickboxing and the freakshow/legit fight ratio.
Zach, I apologize for misinterpreting what you wrote about JZ. Your wording was ambiguous, but I’ll certainly give you the benefit of the doubt.
Pride has never really been more popular then K-1 (though they did out rate them in 2006 NYE I believe).
To the average man in the street fighting is K-1. Pride is only a word known by the hard core fans. Pride was a sub-culture, K-1 is main stream.
Also, the talk of K-1 stealing ratings by telecasting the main fights in their Dynamite broadcast are way off mark. People seem to forget that Fuji TV had the old Pride NYE events at the same time the SkyPerfect PPV event was on.
Chances are that if you’re using Internet Explorer, your browser is set to not check for a new version of a page every time that you retrieve it, or, your cookies are not expiring properly.
In IE, change your “Check for newer versions of stored pages” setting to “Every time I visit the webpage” and clear all your temp files including cookies.
Personally, I think that cranking the cache down to next to nothing is also a good idea. All the caching was really designed for a dial up world. Your ISP is already caching all that stuff (and doing versioning) for you instead of grabbing it off the backbone, so as long as you have a good connection on the last mile, it’s pointless to store it locally.
It will be interesting to see where DSE/M-1 takes things in their next event. One thing that K-1 should keep in mind is that you can outsmart a criminal, but organized crime holds grudges.
The real question is whether what we’re seeing here in terms of the public politics is actually reflective of what is going on behind closed doors.
What are the real relationships between DSE, M-1, and K-1?
Just to add to the fact that the Yarennoka! is copyrighted by DSE, take a look at the PRIDE Bushido 13 intro video.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XthFveT_6_A
Go to 0:25 – 0:55 The Yarennoka! logo is there too and the guy repeats “Yarennoka!” repeatedly. This is pretty fishy. How can this organization really be ex-DSE when they are using DSE’s intellectual property? This lends strong support to the claim that DSE is still running things. Though it is possible that the ex-DSE folk just paid DSE a royalty in order to use their intellectual property (the Yarennoka! logo and whatever other copyrighted material they may have used).
But why would DSE, if they really are involved, get the ball rolling again? PRIDE died because it was bleed red ink for DSE. Considering that PRIDE was such a money loser after losing the Fuji TV deal, why would DSE decide to resurrect PRIDE’s ghost? This makes no sense from a business standpoint. Your product was dying, the product got sold and now you are raising the fallen sold-off brand from the dead? Why?