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Bushido Welterweight tournament
By Zach Arnold | April 6, 2006
DSE announced a 16-man Welterweight tournament format for the Bushido series. The three Japanese top names of the tournament will be Akihiro Gono, Makoto Takimoto, & Ryo Chonan. The promotion announced the next Bushido show taking place at Saitama Super Arena on 6/4.
Dan Henderson (Welterweight champion), Murilo Bustamante, Dennis Kang, Phil Baroni, & Paulo Filho have also been booked. The 2nd round of the tournament is scheduled for 8/26 at Nagoya Aichi Rainbow Hall, and the 3rd round is scheduled for 11/5 at Yokohama Arena.
Topics: All Topics, Japan, MMA, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 6 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Oh dear lord. Stop with the GPs nobody cares anymore.
I just think they should be running an 8 man Welterweight GP, considering the talent pool really isn’t much deeper than that, unless they bring in guys like Matt Lindland and Anderson Silva from outside PRIDE.
Even with an 8 man GP, doing another WWGP so soon is stupid. Nothing changed since the last one, nobody had a chance to show real improvement. They should go with one every 2 years, like they do with the MW.
I don’t disagree with you, although personally I think PRIDE should import in free agent guys like Lindland and Silva and run one with more top end opposition as their pool is really small and they’ll pretty soon run out of viable matchups in the division, IMO.
I’m looking forward to it myself. I think Joey Villasenor is expected to make his Pride Debut in this tournament as well. So a tournament with:
Dan Henderson, Murilo Bustamante, Phil Baroni, Paulo Filho, Denis Kang, Akihiro Gono, Ryo Chonan, Joey Villasenor, Makoto Takimoto, and with guys like Murilo Ninja, Kazuo Misaki, Amar Suloev, Murad Chunkaiev..etc rounding out the brackets seems like good stuff to me.
Other good possibilities for fighters Prise should consider include:
Thales Leites, Travis Lutter, Matt Linland, Martin Kampmann, Jose Landi-Jons, Patrick Cote, Jake Ellenberger, Tony Bonello, Leonardo Lucio Nascimento, Flavio Luiz Moura, Gregory Bouchelaghem
The concept itself isn’t what bothers me. Its that they’re now running 2 or 3 tournaments a year. The fans don’t care about the tournaments anymore because there are so many of them. Their importance has been completely diluted. They just ran a WW GP at the end of last year, and as someone else said, nothing has changed since that time, so why run another already? The answer is lazy booking. Its the easiest way possible to fill cards.