One enemy too many: UFC testosterone narrative backfiring
By Zach Arnold | March 7, 2012
Dana was smiling during this interview with Ariel (click picture to watch full interview), but he’s not smiling any more
On a late Monday evening, Rampage Jackson decided to cause trouble and go on a rant against UFC on Twitter. In the process, he backed the assertion of his new-found love for testosterone and that he would continue using it.
- Mood swings: Rampage rages against UFC
- Rampage Jackson admits TRT usage, claims his doctor works for UFC
- Five questions the media should ask about UFC testosterone story
- Victor Conte: Ongoing testosterone fiasco will haunt UFC; Dave Meltzer says Bristol Marunde fought on Strikeforce show w/ TUE for testosterone
Hours later, Dana White was interviewed in New York City by Ariel Helwani. Before lashing out at Fighters Only over the Rampage Jackson interview where he supposedly made his testosterone claims, Dana attacked a writer for MMA Junkie. He accused the writer of using ‘off the record’ remarks about a Showtime executive.
- “What happens between a bunch of men behind the scenes, when they’re doing business… needs to be left behind the scenes, sometimes.”
- “No way in hell should [that] have been published.”
The rich irony of those quotes will be savored by the end of this post.
Dana proceeded to apologize to said executive during the interview with Ariel.
“He’s not going to be sending me any [expletive] Christmas cards any time soon.”
After trashing the MMA Junkie writer, Dana was asked about Rampage’s twitter rage.
“I talked to Rampage yesterday for about an hour and a half. Before all the, before all the tweets started and, uh… you know… Rampage just lost and I think Rampage takes his losses hard, you know? We’ll see what happens, you know. I’m always on-again, off-again with him, you know, as it is anyways. Listen, I have no beef with Rampage. I don’t dislike Rampage or anything like that, you know. I just think he takes the losses really hard and he takes criticism real hard, too.”
In a softball-ish way, Dana was then asked about the validity & credibility of Rampage’s remarks to Fighters Only.
“When I talked to Rampage yesterday and Lorenzo had talked to him right after we heard that and he said none of that is true, none of that is true. He didn’t say any of that. So…”
ARIEL HELWANI: “They misquoted him?”
“Who knows, man. Who knows. Actually, where I heard about it first time was at the first press conference in Australia and I kind of got it into it a little bit with the reporter and, to be honest and you know… shed some light on Rampage’s side of it, let me tell you what — this guy was a prick. This guy was a prick. He came up to me, he was trying to put words into my mouth and I said to him, ‘I see what you’re doing here and you’re not going to play that [expletive] with me. As he was talking to me, we were talking about Testosterone Replacement Therapy and all these other things, then he came back and said, ‘well, you just said.’ I said, ‘I didn’t [expletive] said that. That is not what I said. I see what you’re doing. Don’t play this [expletive] game with me in the middle of the interview. So, for us to sit back and say, ‘oh, Rampage probably said all this stuff and the reporter, whatever,’ I deal with this guy that day… this guy’s a prick, you know, this guy was acting like he was doing some investigative work for 60 Minutes in the way that he was interviewing me and he started saying [expletive] back to me that I didn’t just [expletive] say, you know? So… you know, I think you got to look at both sides of this story because I dealt with tons of media and I’m always honest with the way that it goes down and what happens. You’ve dealt with me for yeras and many, many others have and this guy was a [expletive] weasel.”
Let’s address what Dana just claimed here, shall we?
Continue reading this article here…
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 62 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Mood swings: Rampage rages against UFC
By Zach Arnold | March 6, 2012
Two hours ago, Rampage used “the Dana defense” in regards to answering someone’s question on Twitter about using testosterone:
“@KnowledgeNupe: @Rampage4real what’s up with admitting to testerone replacing? Are you going to be suspended at all?”No! Its not illegal!
He claimed that he feels like he is leaving ‘heaven’ to get back into training and that ‘my knee is held!’
An hour later, Rampage went raging on Twitter (as demonstrated in the screen captures up above) against UFC — including this gem:
“@VWAssassin: @Rampage4real your leaving the UFC?” Y should I stay? I don’t need them or anybody else negative dealing with my carrie
45 minutes or so after raging against the UFC and defending his new-found testosterone boost, Rampage tried to apologize to everyone for what he said.
Yes, the same man who ignited the proverbial cherry bomb last week with his Fighters Only interview talking about how his ‘doctor works for the UFC’ and that the ‘UFC doctor’ led him to an age-management doctor to get testosterone so he could fight in Japan. These are the kinds of remarks that can implode on you. So, you would think Rampage would have played it on the down low and stayed quiet. Instead, he starts going off (again) on UFC out of the blue.
So, was his interview with Fighters Only some sort of weird passive-aggressive deal to try to get fired from UFC? But why on Earth would he want to do that when his ‘doctor works for the UFC’ and took better care of him than he says PRIDE did? As Luca Fury promptly asked, “no MMA organizations pays more than the UFC, so does this mean you want to box professionally?”
- Rampage Jackson admits TRT usage, claims his doctor works for UFC
- Five questions the media should ask about UFC testosterone story
- Victor Conte: Ongoing testosterone fiasco will haunt UFC; Dave Meltzer says Bristol Marunde fought on Strikeforce show w/ TUE for testosterone
I wonder how Rampage’s old training buddy Michael Bisping feels about RJ’s new-found love for testosterone considering what the Brit has said about Chael Sonnen’s usage of the T in the past.
Would testosterone TUEs for Zuffa fighters be approved using USADA standards?
I was going to write a separate post on the topic, but Rampage made it easy for me to incorporate this item here.
Take a look at the USADA guidelines (August 2011) in regards to what criteria needs to be met in order to get a Therapeutic Use Exemption for testosterone:
- The Therapeutic Use Exemption Committee (TUEC) must review the entire work-up for hypogonadism. They need enough medical information, clinic notes and laboratory testing notes to make the same diagnosis, and arrive at the same treatment plan as you without ever seeing the patient.
- It is extremely unlikely that a Therapeutic Use Exemption will be approved for “functional” hypogonadism (a diagnosis of hypogonadism based on low testosterone levels but without a defined etiology).
- The International Standard for Therapeutic Use Exemptions specifically states that “low-normal” levels of any hormone will not justify the granting of a TUE.
- USADA will not grant TUEs for testosterone to females, including Hormone Replacement Therapies that contain testosterone, because there are permitted therapeutic alternatives available.
- The use of testosterone as an anti-aging medication for men is not justification for a TUE. Similarly, generalized fatigue, slow recovery from exercise and a decreased libido are not, in isolation, justification for the granting of a TUE for testosterone.
Let’s use Rampage’s situation, as he laid out in the Fighters Only interview, as a test case example.
On bullet point one, I have some doubts that this requirement would be met. On the second & third points, I don’t see Rampage getting a TUE just because he has ‘low levels.’ On the last point, Rampage would utterly fail in getting a TUE. He claims his doctor ‘who works for the UFC’ led him to an age management doctor, which resulted in the alleged prescription for testosterone. Rampage said in the Fighters Only interview that he was feeling like he was 25 years old, ‘doggy style’ as he put it. The last bullet point from USADA practically reads like the most succinct item you could possibly write to eviscerate Rampage’s legitimacy in using testosterone.
As for Bristol Marunde, the latest fighter under the Zuffa banner to be reportedly using a TUE in order to take testosterone… his older brother is the late Jesse Marunde, the World Strongest Man competitor who died in 2007 due to a genetic heart defect (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy).
Bristol reportedly joins Chael Sonnen, Dan Henderson, Rampage Jackson, Todd Duffee, and Nate Marquardt on the list of (publicly) notable names who currently are using TUEs for testosterone usage. As Rampage alleged in his Fighters Only interview, the UFC supposedly told him that there are ‘probably’ many more fighters out there using testosterone that we don’t know about yet. The list is growing.
Rampage closed out the Twitter proceedings with the following:
I know 1 place I’m not going back 2! I’m going 2 b with my wife n kids n sin no more! Just ask 4 forgiveness! #new I’d win this 1!
Sin no more? Get off the testosterone and stop defending your usage of it. Also, name your doctor ‘who works for UFC’ while you’re at it, too.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 26 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Victor Conte: Ongoing testosterone fiasco will haunt UFC; Dave Meltzer says Bristol Marunde fought on Strikeforce show w/ TUE for testosterone
By Zach Arnold | March 5, 2012
A timely update for you given that Dave Meltzer says Bristol Marunde fought on the Strikeforce card this past Saturday while getting a Therapeutic Use Exemption for… wait… testosterone!
Todd Duffee. Bristol Marunde. Rampage Jackson. Chael Sonnen. Nate Marquardt. Dan Henderson. The list is growing.
*****
Last week when Rampage Jackson had his version of a Kinsleyian gaffe with the Fighters Only interview over his claims that a “UFC doctor” (paraphrasing here) advised him to go to an age-management doctor (which allegedly resulted in a prescription for testosterone), we figured that Fighters Only would get enormous blowback… which is why we promptly screen-captured the money quotes from said interview for historical preservation. Oh, yeah, we also continued arguing for a permanent ban on MMA fighters being allowed to get a Therapeutic Use Exemption for testosterone.
So when I hurt my knee this time it was fucked but it was really a blessing in disguise. I really wanted to fight for the Japanese fans and so I went to see the doctor and he told me not to fight. I was like ‘whoa.’ I bust out crying, because I had missed Japan and… you know, I don’t like to tell people that I cry but I am a human being, I cried. I woke up at like three o’clock in the morning and I cried. I couldn’t train and I didn’t know if it would be a career-ending injury.
I never had surgery in my life. But I hurt this knee back in college, I hurt it before I fought Rashad and so I knew it was the same injury… a lot of fights when I am injured I don’t tell anybody but the UFC knew this time because my doctor works for the UFC. Its good that the UFC knew because they look after you, they take care of you even if its just in training. Pride didn’t do that.
I told my doctor not to tell the UFC but he told them anyway. I don’t like the UFC to know sometimes because I think sometimes got big mouths and then sometimes my opponent knows.
(later on…)
I almost pulled out but then I went to see the doctor and he told me to talk to an age-management doctor. So I went and talked to them and they tested me and said my testosterone was low; they prescribed me testosterone, to bring my testosterone levels back up to levels where I can be like… so that I am the same as young people, like when I was 25, and it would help build my knee up. I hurt my knee like a month ago and I only did three shots of testosterone but it put a lot of weight on me, a lot of muscle on me but it healed me knee up good enough to where I could fight.
It was hard for me to train, it takes time to heal, I couldn’t do certain things, but this was my first time ever using testosterone. I took what the doctor prescribed to me and I went to the pharmacy… I gave myself small doses and that shit immediately changed me, that’s why I am saying now I am not going to retire. I am not gonna retire no time soon, its just unfortunate that I got this injury.
(later on…)
So I spoke to the UFC and they were like ‘yeah, a lot of fighters are probably doing it but not telling anyone.’ Me, I keep it real, I am not doing anything wrong. Its legal and I am not abusing it and I am not going over certain levels. From what I learned about it, when I got tested my levels my levels were really low and the doctor was telling me that athletes can burn testosterone.
A couple of days later, most MMA & general sports writers focused on Rampage using testosterone as opposed to the much more important claims that his doctor “works for the UFC” and allegedly tells UFC everything about his medical condition. That’s why we tried to refocus the debate on where it really should be.
Outside of Ben Fowlkes’ piece at MMA Fighting about banning testosterone use in the sport w/ Athletic Commissions & UFC itself, nobody really stepped up and said much on the actually-critical aspects of Rampage’s interview claims.
However, don’t confuse silence with obliviousness. The power brokers and media know the story is out there and are paying attention. The climate of fear in the fight media is much stronger than in the general sports media. The perfect example of this is the media’s reaction (here, here, here, and here) to the New Orleans Saints ‘bounty’ scandal, where many a writer are calling for heads to roll and for IRS investigations.
Regarding the problem of fighters getting testosterone prescriptions while actively fighting… the stakes are way too important at this point to gloss over the can of worms that Rampage opened here. As with all Kinsleyian gaffes, his ‘crime’ is that he said something in public as opposed to saying nothing at all.
If you don’t believe this is an issue that could severely impact the MMA industry down the road, listen to what Victor Conte had to say to Steve Cofield & Kevin Iole on ESPN 1100 radio in Las Vegas last week on the subject matter. The Godfather of modern doping told it like it is during his radio interview.
“This is a total fiasco for the UFC and I think a lot of people have seen this coming for quite some time, especially now this is coming out because of this overseas bout where the UFC’s attempting to regulate themselves, which I think is ridiculous.
“But… just in general regarding testosterone replacement therapy, I think in the overwhelming majority of cases it’s simply they’re using it to cheat, it’s not valid. As an example you specifically hear with Rampage when he’s talking about putting his levels back like they were in he was younger. First of all, he’s only 33 years old. Typically your levels begin to decline at about (age) 30 at about 1% per year. When you’re doing injections of testosterone, typically they use 200 mg per week. There’s a half-life of about 8 days which you would average from that, after absorption, probably 16 mg a day which is more than double what your body would produce at its peak as a young man.
“So, my opinion is, he was taking at least double what he would take to replace his levels and put them back where he was before. So, I don’t think that going to one of these aging-management or anti-aging longevity-type clinics and seeing one of these doctors who in my opinion is not qualified to even determine whether or not a fighter should be using testosterone. They need to go to a board-certified endocrinologist. This needs to be done over a period of months. They need to be measured multiple times.
“This is just nonsense to me the way these guys are getting these hormone replacement prescriptions and basically using testosterone, a very powerful hormone, to cheat.”
More than anything else, this goes to the heart of the matter on Rampage’s claims that his ‘doctor who works for the UFC’ told him to go see an age-management person after allegedly telling Rampage that he shouldn’t fight on the UFC Japan card. An age-management specialist, not a board-certified endocrinologist. As Victor points out, going to an endocrinologist would require months of examination as opposed to weeks. In other words, a legitimate endocrinologist isn’t going to write up a prescription for testosterone on the spot for a fighter who wants to compete in short order.
I bring this up because I am reminded of an epic debate that took place on this site in October of 2010 when radio host Larry Pepe criticized Josh Gross for his claims about PED usage in MMA on Jim Rome’s radio show. You can read the transcript of Larry said right here. What I wanted to highlight from Larry’s argument that drug testing is working in MMA is what he said about the claim that fighters can go to a doctor and get steroids with a simple prescription.
So, how does Josh think that they’re beating the test? And again, I’m going to quote, ‘I grew up with a buddy who ran high-level track internationally and he says, you know, if you want to do it, you hire an endocrinologist and you can do this stuff and it’s not an issue to get around until and unless they adopt WADA-quality testing.’ Now, to those of you that don’t know, an endocrinologist is a medical doctor, a specialist who deals with hormonal imbalances. So, let’s set the stage. Those other 249 fighters who passed the tests, if this is the way you do it, would have had to walk into a medical doctor’s office and explain that they are illegally taking drugs because it is illegal to take anabolic steroids without a prescription and that they like the doctor to basically put their medical license at risk by helping them defraud the Government because athletic commissions are Government bodies, on a drug test so they can get in a cage and potentially do harm to another human being. That’s the scenario. You’re going to get a medical doctor to help you manipulate these tests, that’s what the medical doctor has to buy into and potentially put their license at risk. I mean, seriously? Are these endocrinologists just out there waiting to help and I would venture to say that there isn’t an endocrinologist in the world who could get 249 out of 250 fighters to pass a drug test. It just… it defies any logic,
If you believe we have a problem and that all these guys are beating the tests, then you also have to believe that either UFC fighters are the most sophisticated group of human beings in the world at beating drug tests or they’re able to get an extraordinary number of doctors all over the country, endocrinologists, to help them manipulate drug tests being done by a Government body and put their medical licenses at risk…
Well, what we’re finding out, at least according to Rampage, is that it’s not necessarily endocrinologists who are writing up testosterone prescriptions for fighters. Rampage said that an ‘age-management doctor’ got him a testosterone prescription. Dr. Mark Czarnecki, who was with Chael Sonnen during his California State Athletic Commission testimony regarding testosterone usage, is a general practitioner in Oregon.
Rampage was the one who threw the proverbial cherry bomb by saying that his doctor ‘who works for the UFC’ was the one who allegedly advised him to go see an age-management doctor and that’s how he got the testosterone.
I mentioned Larry’s comments on the matter because Kevin Iole asked Victor Conte a very basic, salt-of-the-earth question that sounds so simple that most people probably wouldn’t think to ask it due to fear of embarrassment. Why is it that boxers and MMA fighters, people who are in great physical shape compared to the general population, needing to get testosterone prescriptions? Just how much of the adult male population legitimately suffers from low testosterone levels?
“Well, typically all these reference ranges are based upon two standard deviations. In simple terms, that means only 2% will be outside [levels]. So, it’s not something that you’re going to see very often.
“So, you know, these guys… I believe the reason they’re testing these single times and being found to be low is because they’ve been using anabolic steroids and this, you know, reduces your own production of testosterone and then that gives them the single blood test that’s been required to be low to get this prescription.
“So, I think, like I said before, I would never say all of them… but I think it’s certainly the overwhelming majority have either been using steroids or they figured out a way to manipulate the system where they can get these prescriptions to use it and it’s simply to gain an advantage and to cheat. It’s not about a real medically-indicated need.
“When you use steroids or exogenous testosterone, that shuts down your own endogenous production or your body’s natural production and then when you go to the doctor you got a low level and of course then you get the ‘script and you use it accordingly and can obviously gain a competitive advantage.
“This is just… once again, like you say you got the best of the best (athletes). This is not about gaining an advantage to run faster than the guy in the lane next to you. This is the hurt game, this is about harming your opponent and I think that’s why it’s even more important to have effective testing in the UFC than even in an Olympic sport and I just really think the time has come. There are viable and effective options. VADA, the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association run by Margaret Goodman, the doctor in Las Vegas. There’s reasonable cost testing, it’s available, they do very effective what’s called Carbon Isotope Ratio testing for synthetic testosterone. They could really be effective at reducing this abuse of testosterone in the UFC.”
With all of the hullabaloo surrounding athletic commissions and Testosterone Replacement Therapy, Kevin brought up Nate Marquardt’s situation with the New Jersey & Pennsylvania athletic commissions last year over getting to the right levels during usage. During his Fighters Only interview, Rampage said that using testosterone made him feel like he was ’25 years old’ again.
So, we took a look at the transcript of the famous interview Nate did with Ariel Helwani last year. Here’s what he said on the matter:
NATE MARQUARDT: “So, again, three weeks out, um… I got the recommendation. My doctor decided to put me on a new treatment that was more aggressive because it was so close to my fight he said that it wouldn’t get basically it wouldn’t help me, it wouldn’t make me feel better by the time of my fight unless he did a more [aggressive treatment] and, uh, so I was on the treatment for two weeks and I took a blood test and, uh, which is normal throughout the treatment you had to take blood tests to make sure you’re within normal ranges and that test came back high and, at that point, my doctor said, well, you need to go off treatment and, uh, you know, let’s hope your down to normal levels by your fight. And, you know, obviously that was, you know, I was pretty much panicked at that point.”
As you might imagine, Victor wasn’t buying what was being sold.
“Once again, this goes back to how these guys get these prescriptions in the first place. I don’t believe the doctors that are writing these prescriptions are qualified to determine whether or not they even need testosterone replacement. That needs to be done by a board-certified endocrinologist and takes a number of months! You just don’t say, ‘well, the levels were coming down, down.’ Well, maybe he was tapering off so that when he showed up at the fight and they collected a urine sample that his T/E ratio would be under 6 to 1. That’s probably what he was talking about, they’re coming down and down. Well, of course that was likely, you know, a conscious effort to avoid testing positive.”
The bottom line is that we’re currently on a course where someone is going to have to end up getting crippled, paralyzed, or killed before a majority of media & fans generate any sort of public reaction of outrage to what is going on right now.
For the UFC, it’s easy to brush aside questions from writers about the uncomfortable claims Rampage made during his Fighters Only interview. Dana can go into his hyperbolic ‘we’re the most regulated sport on Earth’ routine and try to blast so much noise that you just give up caring.
Don’t fall for steroid fatigue syndrome. The stakes are much higher here in regards to drug usage in Mixed Martial Arts. As Victor said, there’s a big difference between hitting a baseball out of the park because you’re using growth hormone and concussing someone into oblivion during a cage fight because you have 15 extra pounds of muscle.
Right now, there are MMA fighters who are currently in the shadows in regards to their testosterone usage and they don’t think they will get outed. Recent history says that, eventually, loose lips sink ships and they will be outed. That’s the nature of today’s media cycle. No one is invincible.
UFC is the powerhouse in the sport right now and they are the ones that could dramatically clean up the doping mess in the sport if they wanted to do so. They also have a pretty good incentive to do so — Fox. UFC’s programming is all over Fox’s media properties. Zuffa wants to be mainstream and being mainstream comes with some responsibilities & roadblocks.
And if the doping problem isn’t cleaned up in Mixed Martial Arts? Eventually, as Dr. Margaret Goodman has predicted on the record, the Feds will step in. If UFC doesn’t think this is a possibility, then Dana should give his new friend Vince McMahon a phone call and ask him what happened when the Feds went after him over Dr. George Zahorian.
Topics: Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 17 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Miro Mijatovic: The yakuza’s contract to kill him & PRIDE’s execution
By Zach Arnold | March 4, 2012
Transcript of Dan Herbertson interview with Miro Mijatovic for Spike TV’s MMA Uncensored Live
- Miro Mijatovic: Fedor, Mirko, and PRIDE yakuza’s loaded pistols
- Miro Mijatovic on the yakuza ownership war of PRIDE in November 2003
- Beginner’s searchable guide on cast of characters involved in PRIDE scandal
“I’m not going after the top (yakuza) boss because that’s not my battle. So, the compromise solution, in the classic Japanese way, was brokered by the police. There was still an outstanding contract on my life from Yamaguchi-gumi. My criminal complaint was still oustanding and the target had become not Ishizaka but the top boss of Yamaguchi-gumi. So, there was a lot of nervousness in the air, as you could imagine, between all sides. The police… brokering a deal is probably the wrong way to describe but they put together a deal where PRIDE was going to be taken off TV, which meant that they were going to be effectively destroyed which was, for me, you know… only justice for what they’ve done to my life. On the other hand, both sides would enter into what would be a non-aggressive pact. In other words, Yamaguchi-gumi would, you know… pull down all their, uh, contracts and also all aggressive, you know, um… efforts towards me and I’d also get out of the fight game. That was part of my sort of agreement. And, also, I’d shut up for a certain period of time. There was no, um, time limit put on there, there’s no contract out there but of course my life had been a mess for three years. I’ve been running around hiding and I was ready to re-start my life, so for me having PRIDE pulled off Fuji TV and having Yamaguchi-gumi pull away their aggressive sort of actions towards me seemed like a pretty good deal. And, so, that’s what happened and I basically got out of the fight game and stayed out of the fight game and, you know, PRIDE was eventually sold to UFC and that’s how it’s been for since 2007.
“Shukan Gendai had, the problem with Shukan Gendai was that it confused the issue with the arrests of various people. (Seiya) Kawamata came out in Shukan Gendai. While for me it was very convenient because I was working with the Tokyo police and the NPA, which is the Japanese FBI, it was very convenient for me and for my own safety for there to be a lot of confusion as to who was investigating what. So, Kawamata was working with the Kanagawa police and he only started to speak to Shukan Gendai once the Kanagawa police basically said ‘we’re not going to take your case forward any more.” The reason why was, number one, he wasn’t a credible witness. Number two, at that stage I was suing Kawamata in civil court for the $2M that he owed me so that obviously I wasn’t too happy with Kawamata and I wasn’t certainly going to support what Kawamata was up to in the internal battle between two yakuza groups. So, I was working with the Tokyo police and the NPA. Kawamata and his Shukan Gendai articles were a total distraction, but for me a welcome distraction because they put a lot of the focus onto him. People thought that it was Kawamata but, you know, in the background everyone knew that Kawamata was a total joke and the reason he went public was that the Kanagawa police closed the books on his investigation. His background was that he actually was a, a fairly minor member of one of the other major Yamaguchi-gumi groups called Yamaken-gumi. So, you could imagine how much credibility his evidence is going to have in front of prosecutors in a court of law when he starts complaining about being threatened. At the end of the day, he was one of them. So, my evidence was crucial for the Kanagawa police. I wasn’t cooperating with them because I refused to cooperate with Kawamata’s criminal complaint. I wanted to run my own with the Tokyo police. So, what was written in the Shukan Gendai articles in terms of what Kawamata said… you know, look, I wasn’t there when Kawamata was threatened but am I surprised that he was threatened? No, you know, I received similar threats from the same groups of people. And I know Kawamata, as soon as he received those threats, jumped on a plane adn took off. So, for most of November & December, he wasn’t even here and obviously of course on the 1st of January (2004) he took off and wasn’t seen again.
“Shukan Gendai was helpful for me in terms of taking the focus away from me and from what I was doing but, at the end of the day, it didn’t move the needle. I mean, in terms of I think a lot of people believe that PRIDE was pulled from Fuji TV because of the influence of Shukan Gendai… that’s not true. Shukan Gendai is owned by Kodansha. That’s the same group that owns TBS. Fuji is a much bigger media organization than TBS and Kodansha and, you know, it’s media. They’re all in it, right? Whether it’s Fuji TV or TBS, they’re all up to their necks in yakuza deal(ing)s, so it’s not a great surprise to anyone who reads articles that there’s connections between the yakuza and TV station producers. So, you know, yes it was… how can I say, it was a surprising thing to put out there in public. Did it have any impact on Fuji TV’s decision to pull PRIDE off TV? I would say zero because, you know, that’s water off a duck’s back. What had the influence was when (Toshiro) Igari and the NPA and the Tokyo police turned up to [Fuji TV] and said, “take [PRIDE] off TV.’ It was an instruction that was given, as I think Igari wrote in his book or his final book, so… that’s the real reason why [PRIDE] came off TV.
“There’s a belief in Japan that there’s still a market for the fighting business. You know, personally I believe that the damage that was done to the major brands, K-1, PRIDE, the pro-wrestling brands, also the new sort of regulations against the yakuza make it almost impossible for any of the old players to do anything serious in the industry. So, if people think that they can bring back the days when you had, you know, fighting in prime time TV slots, it’s not going to happen with the current batch of has-beens that are still hanging around the industry or with, you know, the usual cast of scumbags who hang around the industry and have been around the industry for the last five-to-six years.”
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Yakuza, Zach Arnold | 10 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Five questions the media should ask about UFC testosterone story
By Zach Arnold | March 2, 2012
“Just when they think they’ve got the answers, I change the questions.”
If you don’t know what I’m referring to in regards to Rampage Jackson admitting that he used testosterone in order to ‘heal’ in time to fight at UFC Japan, read this:
With Dana White issuing the standard, boilerplate Zuffa PR response to the controversy surrounding Rampage Jackson’s interviews with Fighter’s Only magazine in which he admits to using Testosterone Replacement Therapy to fight on last weekend’s UFC Japan show at Saitama Super Arena, I felt it was time to recalibrate the discussion that has evolved from the initial surprise towards Rampage’s comments.
The initial reaction, unfortunately and predictably, broke down into certain stages:
- Fighters (and their agents) who got mad that Rampage brought up the topic and believe that all steroids/growth hormone should be approved for usage. While still a minority in terms of willing to publicly state their case, it is a strong minority in the business.
- Fans who think the whole sport is dirty, that it’s a lost cause to try to clean things up, and that Rampage using TRT is not a big deal.
- Fans & fighters who are appalled by what is happening but say little about what to do on changing the current climate and end up moving onto the next shiny story.
- Fans who go into bunker mode for the UFC and get upset at anyone who raises substantive questions that could bring negative attention to a problem that needs to be addressed in a swift manner.
The end result of this chorus of reactions is that it always muddies the real issues at hand and shortens the news cycle of a story that demands more than a few hours of your attention.
So, for the purposes of our fellow MMA media & sports writers who read Rampage’s interview and aren’t sure what to say or what to pursue in regards to writing on the topic, here’s a list of five questions that everyone should be asking about in regards to the comments Rampage Jackson made during his Fighter’s Only interview.
Who is the “UFC doctor” in question and why would a fighter want to use a “UFC doctor” instead of an independent doctor?
Rampage made the claim that his doctor: a) works for the UFC and b) that this doctor tells the UFC everything.
…a lot of fights when I am injured I don’t tell anybody but the UFC knew this time because my doctor works for the UFC.
Then note what Rampage said before he made this admission:
I really wanted to fight for the Japanese fans and so I went to see the doctor and he told me not to fight.
So, Rampage made the claim that his doctor ‘works for the UFC’ and had told him not to fight on the Japan card because of an injured knee. This is critical because it leads to the second question that needs to be asked.
Why would a “UFC doctor” tell Rampage to go see an ‘age management doctor’ for a knee injury as opposed to a doctor to get surgery?
Rampage said that this doctor told him not to fight in Japan. Then, a few comments later, Rampage made this claim:
I almost pulled out but then I went to see the doctor and he told me to talk to an age-management doctor.
So, wait a second — Rampage says his doctor, who he claims works for the UFC, initially told him he shouldn’t be fighting on the Japan card… but then this doctor in question supposedly turns around and tells Rampage to go to an ‘age-management‘ doctor instead of a sports medicine doctor to get the knee surgically fixed & cleaned up?
Testosterone… it’s not like that’s been mentioned before on a big scale in MMA besides TRT usage, right?
So, back to the original questions — what “UFC doctor” could Rampage be talking about? We’ll never know the true answer unless Rampage or UFC comes clean.
Since Rampage nor the UFC are stating who the “UFC doctor” in question is, nobody can make a positive ID here. The only “UFC doctor” that is often mentioned in MMA articles is Dr. Jeff Davidson, the ER doctor that works for the UFC.
Remember Matt Hamill fighting with his staph infection wound? In the article we wrote about this incident, Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports said that Dr. Davidson was one of three doctors who gave Hamill the green flag to fight. When Anthony Johnson missed weight for his fight last January in Brazil, Johnson’s camp said that it was ‘UFC doctor Jeff Davidson’ who instructed Johnson to take fluids after a horribly botched weight cut.
There’s no connection there in those two instances to establish that Rampage’s ‘UFC doctor’ is Dr. Davidson. I would be remiss in ignoring the highest profile mention that Dr. Davidson has had in the media in the last couple of years. You might remember Chael Sonnen and his run-in with the California State Athletic Commission over his usage of testosterone, right, in the name of TRT & hypogonadism?
It was Sonnen, during testimony to the California State Athletic Commission, that name-dropped Dr. Davidson.
In addition, Sonnen said he’d previously disclosed his testosterone therapy to Dr. Jeff Davidson, who was present alongside Dr. Furness and, at one point, physically handled his paperwork. Sonnen said he believed Dr. Davidson — who he said had been present during the fighter’s past bouts in Nevada and England and had allegedly passed the fighter’s medical information onto California in 2009 to obtain his exemption — to be a CSAC doctor.
Sonnen said Dr. Davidson had also e-mailed him directly prior to his August contest to tell him he’d been “approved” to fight with the exemption still in place.
Marc Ratner, the UFC’s Vice-President of Regulatory Affairs, who was in attendance at the hearing, confirmed to the Times later that Dr. Davidson is an independent contractor hired by the promotion to assist in the medical licensing process for some events. Dr. Davidson is not a CSAC official.
ESPN:
Marc Ratner, head of regulatory affairs for UFC, previously told ESPN.com that, until Sonnen tested positive following his fifth-round loss to Silva in Oakland, Calif., Ratner had “no knowledge whatsoever” of Sonnen’s hormone therapy or a subsequent therapeutic use exemption. Ratner said if Sonnen fought in London against Demian Maia in 2009 while under the treatment of testosterone — a bout that was regulated by the UFC, which hired an independent drug-testing facility to monitor fighters — he would have known.
UFC-hired physician Jeff Davidson said in December that he learned of Sonnen’s treatments before UFC 104 in Los Angeles — Sonnen’s bout following the fight in London.
Both Sonnen and Czarnecki said they spoke with Davidson about the treatments as early as 2008. It’s unclear if anyone in the UFC was aware of Sonnen’s treatment before Davidson in advance of UFC 104, where Sonnen defeated Yushin Okami. Czarnecki also said no one outside of Davidson inquired about Sonnen’s treatments, and he was never contacted by “any state athletic commission.”
According to Davidson’s signed affidavit, the former NSAC-licensed physician told Sonnen to “make sure everyone involved with the August 2010 event was aware of his condition and approved of the course of treatment he was undergoing in advance of UFC 117.”
In regards to Rampage, who ‘tested his levels’ of testosterone for TRT usage? Was this person associated with the UFC or approved by Zuffa?
The timing certainly was interesting for this development to arise given that we didn’t have a commission like New Jersey evaluating what was going on here. What did Dr. Davidson know (if anything) about Rampage’s testosterone usage, his blood work, and the testing of the levels and/or Therapeutic Use Exemption?
The reason these questions matter is because Rampage upped the ante here by saying his ‘doctor works for UFC’ and that this doctor, instead of having Rampage go get knee surgery, allegedly sent him to an ‘age-management doctor’ instead which led to the testosterone prescription and usage. This is a serious safety issue right here.
In retrospect, it’s eerie to see how much of what Sonnen said during his CSAC testimony and in post-testimony interviews has become relevant in today’s climate. More and more fighters are starting to get outed for testosterone usage and Chael himself said that many more fighters will hide their usage now because of what he’s gone through. When you have more and more UFC events happening around the world and not in areas where there are notable Athletic Commissions, you end up with situations like the one Rampage has admitted to in his Fighter’s Only interview.
As Nate Quarry glibly stated on Spike TV last night, he’d sure as hell rather be fighting a guy who is smoking marijuana than someone who rapidly gains 15 pounds of muscle & can use it to inflict more damage upon an opponent.
Who ‘cleared’ Rampage with his knee issues given that he was such a physical wreck?
We know fighters get hurt badly in training. In pro sports, how many times have you heard reports about athletes not necessarily trusting team doctors on an initial diagnosis and end up going to an independent doctor for a second opinion on an injury? The trust factor is huge.
Would it have been in Rampage’s best interests to not fight on the Japan card and to have gotten surgery? From the comments he made during his interview, his answer would be no. From the perspective of an event promoter, losing Rampage from the semi-main event of the UFC Japan card would have been a royal pain in the ass. That’s why Rampage’s admission that his doctor ‘works for the UFC’ is a critical & important part to that Fighter’s Only interview.
It’s also the part of the story that seemingly the MMA media is entirely not focusing on here.
Who ‘regulated’ the UFC Japan show?
Did the UFC ‘regulate’ themselves or did they use a World Anti-Doping Agency body like the Japan Anti-Doping Agency (Play True Japan) help administer the drug testing of fighters at UFC Japan?
Who’s handling the UFC’s Therapeutic Use Exemeptions and bloodwork testing on shows where there aren’t athletic commissions?
Remember what Rampage said during his interview about testosterone usage amongst fighters?
So I spoke to the UFC and they were like ‘yeah, a lot of fighters are probably doing it but not telling anyone.’ Me, I keep it real, I am not doing anything wrong. Its legal and I am not abusing it and I am not going over certain levels.
Oh, Rampage, you were keeping it real all right… a lot more real than you probably wish you were when you did this interview.
The online comment reaction to Rampage on ESPN over the interview has been swift & brutal. Here’s a perfect example that illustrates the credibility problem testosterone users in MMA are facing from the general public. I’d rather know everything than know nothing when it comes to this subject matter, but it doesn’t make it any more palatable for my tastes.
I warned everyone last year about The Oncoming Train Wreck in Combat Sports with the proliferation of testosterone usage. A year later, the questions I asked in 2011 are being asked in 2012.
Making the situation even more curious is the fact that Nate Marquardt claims he was using TRT while fighting for the promotion last November in Germany when he fought top UFC Middleweight contender Yushin Okami. UFC ran their own drug testing program in Germany because there’s no commission oversight. Therefore, what did UFC doctors know about Marquardt’s TRT program and how far up the chain of command did that knowledge go? Josh Gross, ESPN MMA writer, tried to get comment from Dr. Jeff Davidson, UFC’s lead doctor, and Davidson reportedly would not talk on the record. No surprise.
With more & more fighters being outed as testosterone users & UFC running more international shows, there’s going to be a breaking point where big sports media will start digging deeper into this matter. Rampage just happened to address the elephant already in the room in a much more raw & colorful manner than we could have imagined.
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 16 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Miro Mijatovic: Fedor, Mirko, and PRIDE yakuza’s loaded pistols
By Zach Arnold | March 1, 2012
Transcript of Dan Herbertson interview with Miro Mijatovic for Spike TV’s MMA Uncensored Live
- Miro Mijatovic on the yakuza ownership war of PRIDE in November 2003
- Beginner’s searchable guide on cast of characters involved in PRIDE scandal
“As we took Mirko from K-1 into PRIDE, PRIDE for the first time made it onto normal [broadcast] TV on Fuji TV. The reason was PRIDE had been building up a good level of success in terms of having a very good live event and a very good showing of fans, a lot of hardcore fans but they hadn’t been able to make the jump from a hardcore fan base into national television. By bringing Mirko, who back in March 2003 (Saitama Super Arena) knocked out Bob Sapp and became the biggest property in the fight industry, Mirko was able to drag DSE or PRIDE onto national TV which is actually what happened. That’s why, you know, and you had the fights with Herring & Vovchanchyn and at that stage whe you got to the finals in November w/ Mirko/Nogueira, PRIDE had become a very significant competitor to the natural power base of K-1.
“So, as we were approaching New Year’s Eve which is the #1 ratings on Japanese television, also traditionally the big night for fight events as well… K-1 had traditionally been doing the Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye event which was a mixture of K-1 fights & Mixed Martial Arts fights on New Year’s Eve with TBS (Tokyo Broadcasting System). PRIDE and Fuji TV were undecided in November as to whether they were going to do an event on New Year’s Eve and go head-to-head with K-1.
“I suppose the big cause of all the problems or one of the big causes was that Nippon TV, which is a much bigger TV station than TBS, decided that they wanted to get into the fight game in a big way and that meant challenging TBS & K-1’s dominance in the sport. Now, they didn’t have a way to get in there because PRIDE was exclusive to Fuji. K-1 was very close to Fuji and TBS although because of the relationship with PRIDE and Fuji TV, you know, growing K-1 had become much less important to Fuji TV and in the beginning of November (2003), Nippon TV approached (Seiya) Kawamata who eventually did a deal with and myself to do an event on New Year’s Eve. Now, that was all based around ensuring that Mirko Cro Cop was headlining the event. I’d spoken to Mirko leading up to the November fight and immediately afterwards and I said, ‘Look, it’s in our interests to have three strong promotions and the more strong promotions there are, the better it is for the fighters. Obviously, your fight money goes up.’ Mirko agreed to fight because it was quite traditional for him to fight a pro-wrestler on New Year’s Eve. It wasn’t that tough a fight, he was going to get good money. Nippon TV offered Kawamata a contract for three years, 600 million yen for the first event on that night and off we went.
“So, we announced the first fight in the beginning of November which was Mirko versus (Yoshihiro) Takayama and we started to put an event together. We had less than 60 days to put an event on. We had zero fighters contracted. We had nothing except a contract to go out and do the fight. So, off we went and ran around and collected fighters.
“So, in the middle of November, Fuji TV and PRIDE decided that they were going to do an event as well on New Year’s Eve. That’s when the fun and games started. Fun and games being obviously they realized that with a fledgling promotion like Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye was, if they could destroy our main event which was Takayama and Cro Cop, the show would probably start to fall apart. So, towards the end of November, Mirko started to receive visits from a guy called Ken Imai (former right-hand man of K-1 Godfather Kazuyoshi Ishii), who worked closely with (Nobuyuki) Sakakibara and finally Mirko was paid $300,000 to fake a back injury and pull out of the event, which he eventually did in the middle of December. That was a pretty aggressive move as far as I concerned, since they had interfered with my relations with Mirko. I obviously knew a lot about what all the fighters were getting paid all over PRIDE and I knew that Fedor was fighting for around $10,000 a fight and was being totally ripped off by his manager at the time Pokogin (Russian Top Team) and also PRIDE as well. So, I shot off to Saint Petersburg and sat down with Vadim Finkelchtein, Apy Echteld, Fedor and his brother and after the course of two days we did a deal and I signed Fedor on a one-year contract for four fights at almost 20 times the money he was getting paid at the time. So, it wasn’t a difficult deal for Fedor to accept. When I came back to Japan and announced that Fedor was fighting on Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye, PRIDE reacted furiously. Sakakibara hit the airwaves and said he was going to sue me, he was going to sue Fedor, he was going to do this, do that, and the other. What he actually did was not go for legal actions because he had no legal rights to sue anybody. What he did was he started sending yakuza around so I started to get visits to my office from various yakuza dudes, you know, calls late into the night to arrange meetings to talk to these guys and things escalated from there.
“As the time got closer and closer, the threats started to get ratcheted up and eventually from around about the 20th of December, death threats started to happen. Kawamata was threatened when he came back to Japan for a press conference. They grabbed him, according to him, threatened to kill him. He, of course, reacted to that by jumping on the next plane out of the country again and … the threats started to come to me. In the next 10 days leading up from the 20th of December through the actual event itself, things got very, very hot. People, guys were turning up into my house, you know, 2 AM, 3 AM, big groups, three or four guys. I don’t know who they were but they certainly weren’t friends of mine, you know, and I took other measures. I moved my family away from where we were living and started to stay myself into hotels and other places as the event got closer and closer. The pressure kept on escalating right up to the actual night of the event in Kobe on the 31st. At that stage, you know… threats are threats and the fight industry’s full of guys who think they’re alpha males. People make a lot of threats in the heat of the moment. It’s just part of the game but when those guys have guns and have a history of carrying out threats, things are a little bit more nervous. What happened was we put on the event on the 31st… despite all the interruptions from PRIDE and some local yakuza groups in Kobe, the event went off fine. Fine means we had 40,000 people attend the event so we were actually the best-attended event on that specific night. We beat PRIDE and K-1 in terms of the paid attendance. Unfortunately, due to the absolute mess of not being able to announce fights in the lead up to the actual event itself… for example, whether Fedor was fighting or not, no one knew until the 31st because the promoter Kawamata had said, ‘he’s not going to fight’ due to the pressure he got from the yakuza. I was saying ‘he’s fighting’ and so you had mixed messages out to the audience. The result was and it wasn’t only that fight, all the other fighters we tried to put on we couldn’t make announces so the ratings results was horrible. We ended up with 4% ratings, the lowest ratings on the night, and the event just crumbled afterwards.
“New Year’s Eve, on New Year’s Eve the event goes on. New Year’s day, Kawamata again disappears. No one’s there. Fighters want to get paid. We had some cash at the time that Kawamata hadn’t grabbed and we were able to pay the Russian fighters and a few others. I dealt with a lot of people who remained unpaid. I was trying to handle arrangements as fighters were leaving the two days afterwards and then on the 3rd of January (2004), much to my great surprise, Sakakibara, Ishizaka, and four yakuza guys turn up to the hotel where I was staying, the Okura hotel in Kobe, and I was… how can you put it, shepherded into a meeting room and we had some pretty difficult discussions… discussions were pretty simple. I was told I had to sign over my rights to Fedor or I wasn’t going to leave Kobe alive. So, we had… a pretty difficult afternoon of discussions and negotiations. I was fairly confident they weren’t going to shoot me in the Okura hotel, that’s a bit difficult to deal with getting a body out of, especially a body of my size, out of the walls so I felt I had a bit of room to push back on and eventually I was able to… because they knew where I lived, they knew were my family as in Tokyo, I was able to then have the discussions moved to Tokyo which was on the 4th and the 5th and we sat in, you know, the same group of guys, we sat down and continued those discussions and eventually I agreed to sign my rights to Fedor across to PRIDE for zero value.
“I’ve seen guns before and these weren’t toy guns. They were loaded pistols and they… when they talked, number one first they show you that they’re armed, they’re dressed in suits but they showed you that they’re holstered and they’re armed. Eventually when I’m pushing back on what they were asking to do, one of the guys pulled out his gun, put it on the table… and we continued to talk and when I continued to push back, he picked the gun up and aimed it to my head and said, ‘You know what’s going to happen if you don’t sign?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, look, we’re in a hotel, it’s going to be pretty messy, so I understand that if you guys want me dead I’ll be dead and I’m sure you’re not going to shoot me here in the meeting room in the hotel. So, let’s continue talking.’ As long as I recognized the fact that there was a credible threat, the guys realized that they didn’t need to go any further than that at that stage. It was a very credible threat.”
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Yakuza, Zach Arnold | 5 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Miro Mijatovic: The PRIDE yakuza ownership war in Nov. 2003
By Zach Arnold | March 1, 2012
Transcript of Spike TV interview by Dan Herbertson for MMA Uncensored
“I originally got involved in the fight game by being introduced by the Croatian Soccer Federation to a Croatian fighter who in 2002 was pretty big and that was Mirko Cro Cop, so my original involvement was to act as Mirko Cro Cop’s manager in, at that time, he was in K-1 so that’s where I started in about 2002 I think it was.
“The first time PRIDE had ever done a massive event, massive being Tokyo Dome, was in November of 2003 which had a double headline of (Wanderlei) Silva vs. Rampage (Jackson) and also Cro Cop vs. (Antonio Rodrigo) Nogueira for the interim heavyweight title.
“At the backstage, behind the scenes of that particular event, I was personally… usually there was plenty of yakuza around as customers of the shows, the guys that were picking up the ring side seats for 100,000Y, you know, a lot of those guys were yakuza and obviously customers of the event. The first time I’d actually seen that there was catually something going on behind the scenes was at that specific event where there was probably, I’d say, between 100-to-200 armed yakuza guys from two different groups basically looking like they were setting up battle lines and ready to start open warfare.
“The warfare was basically between two groups — one group was behind (Hiromichi) Momose, which is the guy that used to sit at PRIDE events with the black cap with “Young at Heart” stitched on it. So many people who watched PRIDE events would know who that is; and also the new owner or the owner who had taken over from (Naoto) Morishita who had, uh, let’s say died earlier in January of 2003. The new owner was a guy called Ishizaka (Kim Dok Soo) and his Osaka-based crew were having a major dispute with Momose’s crew and it came pretty close to shots being fired at that specific event. So, it was a pretty um… dangerous scene behind the scenes…
“80,000 people in Tokyo Dome and all the way behind including change rooms and the rest of it… you know, things had already gotten pretty hot by November of 2003. So, there was a battle for which yakuza group was actually going to take control of PRIDE.”
How the feud came to a conclusion
“That had started with Morishita’s death and it continued for the whole year and it culminated at that November event and what happened was that Ishizaka and his group basically had the numbers to take control or take full control of PRIDE. And from that time forward, you’d find that Momose does not play as much of a… you know how can I say, a prominent position at PRIDE events. Until that event, you’d see Momse sitting at ringside very regularly. Following the November 2003 event, you’ll find that you don’t see him much at all and he was pushed out.
“Look, the official… Naoto Morishita… he was the guy who basically resurrected or was the creator of the PRIDE concept. The original PRIDE events were run by KRS which was a company which was funnily event funded by a combination of Momose & Ishizaka, you know, who years later were to have a final war at that November 2003 event. The events were a massive financial failure and KRS basically was bleeding money.
“Morishita came in and was able to change around the dynamic or the cost of the events and built the PRIDE sort of brand as people began to know it. As we started, as we got into let’s say 2000 to 2003, Morishita was clean. He was a clean guy. He didn’t come from a yakuza background and neither were the shares in the company Dream Stage Entertainment owned by yakuza at those times. However, there was a reasonable level of funding for his shows coming from those groups and obviously in Japan when you do live events the yakuza have the rights, each of the yakuza in each local region, have what they call the rights to charge you a fee for putting on events within their territory. The best way to describe it in English is protection money. You know, if you don’t pay the guys, they will look to cause problems at the events.”
The end of Morishita’s reign of power and his death
“So, Morishita… because PRIDE was a product in 2001, 2002 which was not nationally televised, it was on Japanese PPV (SkyPerfecTV)… it generally was not a group that was making a lot of money. So, a lot of the income flow came from both yakuza supporting the events through straight-out loans or buying large chunks of the expensive tickets and the reason why they did that was 1) they liked fighting 2) there was a lot of money to be made on gambling on, you know, MMA fights in Japan at that specific time. So, for them, it was an interesting below-the-radar type event which produced reasonable money, reasonable cash and good ways to also wash (launder) money.
“So, Morishita was in debt or should I say Dream Strage Entertainment was into debt with guys like Ishizaka, not so much to Momose in the later days… and Morishita’s death in the Tokyo Hilton was pronounced a suicide by the police. But you also have to remember that the police… aren’t always that interested into going too deep into investigations of… yakuza-tainted, you know, deaths, it’s not really what they’re interested in especially if you don’t have a victim, let’s say victim who’s really pushing it. In this particular case, it’s pretty much standard yakuza operational-wise if they’re going to take someone out, they don’t just, you know, walk down the street and shoot them although they do that every day as well… but the smarter guys always operate on the basis of a suicide, connecting it to a sexual issue.
“For example, supposedly Morishita was with his mistress who also disappeared at that time. Reason why they do that is the wife doesn’t tend to make a lot of noise to the police about investigations, so once there’s a sexual [angle] to the scandal involved… there’s no one pushing hard to discover the facts, the wife doesn’t want to know. She’s angry that she’s found out that her husband’s having an affair or a supposed affair, so things get hushed up.
“So, the official finding was suicide. I’ve stayed in the Hilton myself in Tokyo many, many times and there’s not a lot of ways and a lot of places you can hang yourself from in those rooms. So… how it all happened… you know, as I said, the official cause remains a suicide. How that could have practically happened is a very different story and is a story that’s never really been told.
“What did happen was in usually these sorts of cases if you follow the money trail, Morishita’s shares (in DSE) which would have normally gone to his next of kin, in other words of his wife, ended up in the hands of Ishizaka and his front man Sakakibara.”
Influencing fight outcomes vs. match fixing in PRIDE
“When we say controlling fights, I suppose there’s a whole scope of what you can say controlling a fight is. I mean, at one end of the spectrum it’s basically fixing fights. At the other end of the spectrum which is what PRIDE did on a regular basis which was controlling or trying to influence the outcome of fights, whether that was through referees like (Yuji) Shimada doing his usual bits and pieces to make fights go the way the promoter wanted them to wherever it was, matchmaking fights where you knew the favored fighter was going to win which is not really any great mystery… Doing things like giving one fighter three or four months notice of the fight he’s going to have and the opponent gets to know a week or 10 days before or he’s actually baited-and-switched which was actually a very common occurrence in PRIDE.
“For example, Mirko Cro Cop may be fighting or for example was set to fight Heath Herring at one of his first debut fights. Poor ‘ol Heath thought he was fighting a wrestler and trained for fighting a wrestler for three months. 10 days before the fight, they switched it and said you’re fighting Mirko Cro Cop. Mirko actually had four months to prepare for the fight, Heath had 10 days, which was good for us because I was managing Mirko so no problem for me but tough luck for Heath and that was a very, very common way of influencing the fights.
“In terms of actually matchmaking the events… yes, the [yakuza] were involved. There were fights (that) they wanted to see but remember even these yakuza guys … so there were fights that those guys wanted to see and they also knew that big headline fights would also carry a lot of betting, just like in the US model…
“You know, gambling here is illegal… it has to be said which is why it’s one of the yakuza’s main forms of business, whether it’s in Sumo where there’s been a lot of scandals or whether it’s been in the fight industry and, you know, the meaning of yakuza actually comes from gambler in Japanese. That’s where the original business was, so, you know, 200 years later they haven’t given up on their main business. Gambling still remains one of their main lines of business.”
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 7 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Rampage Jackson admits TRT usage, claims his doctor works for UFC
By Zach Arnold | February 29, 2012
On April 9th in Sacramento, the California State Athletic Commission (Department of Consumer Affairs) will hold a hearing regarding proposed changes to Athletic Commission regulation that would allow Therapeutic Use Exemptions. What the final outcome will be, nobody is sure. Currently, public comments (e-mails, letters, etc.) are being accepted. You can send your feedback on the matter to the CSAC by finding out the appropriate information here.
Theoretically, one of the allowances of a TUE for MMA fighters could come in the form of TRT (Testosterone Replacement Therapy). I’m disgusted that athletic commissions allow TRT usage amongst fighters in the first place. I’ve long based this position on two factors:
1. Dr. David Black, the man involved in drug testing for both the NFL & WWE, once famously said on 60 Minutes that testosterone is the base chemical of steroids.
2. Two major factors that can lead to needing the use of testosterone amongst fighters/wrestlers is extreme weight cutting or steroid abuse that damages the endocrine system and thus leads to getting a doctor’s prescription for testosterone.
I will not make a blanket statement claiming that all TRT users in MMA previously used or currently abuse steroids. So, don’t put words in my mouth on that front. What I will definitely say is that when you have guys who are extremely muscular and put it to physical use in a cage, that’s an issue that has to be addressed.
We know the names of fighters who have been discussed in the media in relation to TRT. Chael Sonnen. Nate Marquardt. Dan Henderson. And now, you can add Rampage Jackson to the list. More on this below.
Keith Kizer came out last year during the Nate Marquardt incident and tried to make the case for how Nevada’s TUE for TRT usage works. Color me unconvinced. I believe that if you are not currently or actively fighting/training and you need to use testosterone legally, so be it. Once you are active or training again, there should be no allowance for TRT usage under any circumstances. This is fight sport, not tennis. As Victor Conte appropriately stated last year during an interview with Eddie Goldman, MMA is the hurt game. Using testosterone in a hurt game changes how much physical punishment you can inflict on an opponent. This isn’t about running faster. This is about concussing someone in the head as hard as possible during a fight.
Nevermind the fact that all the products being pushed by Big Pharma for “Low T” are being pushed to people in their late 40s or early 50s… look at what age range we are talking about for fighters wanting a TUE to use testosterone. The 18-40 year old demographic. That demographic is great for UFC to attract for a TV viewership but I don’t consider it the right demographic for active fighters to be allowed to use testosterone. Not a chance.
There are people reading this who may be using TRT but aren’t active fighters and, let me assure you, I am not attacking you. You aren’t in a cage trying to physically hurt or cripple someone.
I’m not here to push the issue of doping as one of winning or losing. This is all about safety, in my opinion. The more doping you have in the sport, the more you push the clean athletes out of it and increase the risk of fighters getting seriously hurt or even killed.
Which is why this new Rampage Jackson interview in Fighter’s Only magazine is devastating on many fronts. It’s a terrible public relations situation for UFC. It brings sunlight to an issue that desperately needs to be addressed by grown-ups and not political hacks. This goes right to the core of fighter safety.
I will blockquote some of Rampage’s comments here during the Fighter’s Only interview — but I’ve also made some screen captures in case the interview goes offline.
Screen captures: One | Two | Three
Elbow’s hurt, shoulder’s fucked up, wrist’s fucked up, both my knees fucked up, ankle problems. I fucked my jaw up before I fought Wanderlei and after a while its like man, I am training hard for these fights and I’ve got these injuries and at the back of my mind I’m thinking ‘I just want to retire.’
I never had surgery in my life. But I hurt this knee back in college, I hurt it before I fought Rashad and so I knew it was the same injury… a lot of fights when I am injured I don’t tell anybody but the UFC knew this time because my doctor works for the UFC. Its good that the UFC knew because they look after you, they take care of you even if its just in training. Pride didn’t do that.
I almost pulled out but then I went to see the doctor and he told me to talk to an age-management doctor. So I went and talked to them and they tested me and said my testosterone was low; they prescribed me testosterone, to bring my testosterone levels back up to levels where I can be like… so that I am the same as young people, like when I was 25, and it would help build my knee up. I hurt my knee like a month ago and I only did three shots of testosterone but it put a lot of weight on me, a lot of muscle on me but it healed me knee up good enough to where I could fight.
It was hard for me to train, it takes time to heal, I couldn’t do certain things, but this was my first time ever using testosterone. I took what the doctor prescribed to me and I went to the pharmacy… I gave myself small doses and that shit immediately changed me, that’s why I am saying now I am not going to retire. I am not gonna retire no time soon, its just unfortunate that I got this injury.
So, by this point of the interview, Rampage states his claim that he has a doctor ‘who works for the UFC’ but is smart enough to not name them in the interview… although I’m sure the guessing game online will start right about… now. Then, Rampage claims his ‘UFC doctor’ directed him to someone else and that person ended up writing up a prescription to get testosterone.
So, Rampage already has stepped into it deep here by saying his doctor supposedly works for the UFC and that this connection led him to getting approved for a testosterone prescription. Then he drops this bombshell:
So I spoke to the UFC and they were like ‘yeah, a lot of fighters are probably doing it but not telling anyone.’ Me, I keep it real, I am not doing anything wrong. Its legal and I am not abusing it and I am not going over certain levels. From what I learned about it, when I got tested my levels my levels were really low and the doctor was telling me that athletes can burn testosterone.
This, right here, is Rampage claiming that UFC, as he puts it, ‘probably’ knows that ‘a lot’ of fighters are using testosterone. Chael Sonnen did warn everyone that fighters using testosterone would keep it on the down low after his suspension.
Let’s try to look at it from another point of view here. Imagine if an football player, one of high name ID, came out and said, “Yeah, my doctor, he works for the league and they pushed me to an age-management guy to get testosterone. The league also knows that guys are using testosterone but the users don’t talk about it.” A lot of fans will say, ‘drug usage hasn’t impacted the popularity of pro-football.’ They would be right. It also doesn’t make the situation any less dangerous and acceptable, either. It should be noted that a few years ago, the Pittsburgh Steelers faced this kind of situation a couple of years ago as reported by ESPN concerning Dr. Richard Rydze. The difference here is that the ESPN report notes the claim that the doctor was accused of being a buyer of HGH & testosterone.
As you might expect, the public reaction to Rampage’s interview has not exactly been very positive. Dr. Margaret Goodman of the Voluntary Anti-Doping Association issued this response to our request for comment:
It is difficult to know where to begin after reading the article on testosterone use by Quinton “Rampage” Jackson before his last fight in Japan.
- He was obviously unfit to fight due to his knee injury. So who cleared him? How could he be placed at risk?
- If what Rampage says is correct, he was given permission to fight on TRT by whom? Was this someone in the UFC?
- Who knew about it and when? What about the dangers of testosterone use, let alone the risk to the person’s opponent? What happened to fair, clean fights?
- The UFC continues to state they want a clean sport. Rampage’s statements, if true, certainly provide some contrast in the current discussion about what’s acceptable and what isn’t.
- Therapeutic Use Exemptions must be taken seriously. As is done by WADA, they take a great deal of time and expertise to determine if warranted. An athlete can’t simply say he’s been injured, is tired, or everyone is using, to get a TUE for testosterone.
If Rampage’s comments are factual, how can the public have a comfort level that UFC fights are fair when certain athletes are allowed to use certain substances and others are dropped or suspended from the organization for use? How can the organization make these determinations when certain substances should be allowed? It isn’t fair, it isn’t thorough, and it seems arbitrary.
I think MMA is a great sport. However, it cannot excel and maintain its image as a great sport with an inherently flawed PED program. Fox, Showtime and its executives should care about their public image when certain athletes are given an unfair advantage or disadvantage.
I hope Rampage’s comments are not true. If they are, there is considerable amount of explaining that needs to be done regarding his allegations as this might affect the organization’s future licensure in the US.
Bottom line, irrespective of where the UFC holds fights, whether there is a commission overseeing the bouts or not, they should run, not walk to an organization that can oversee and develop a proper PED testing program. This can only be done via an independent third party that conducts random unannounced testing year-round.
Margaret Goodman MD
VADA President and Founder
www.VADA-testing.org
Rampage just opened a big can of worms here. How should we look at him after this interview with Fighter’s Only?
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 55 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
A miserable Winter for non-UFC Japanese MMA power brokers
By Zach Arnold | February 29, 2012
It’s been a miserable two weeks, and frankly full Winter, for the (formerly) major power brokers in the Japanese MMA scene.
First, Spike TV aired edited portions of an interview with former Fedor Emelianenko & Mirko Cro Cop agent Miro Mijatovic about the yakuza scandal that destroyed PRIDE.
(Read our primer here for a full summary of the key players in the story.)
The segment was watched by over 500,000 viewers on Spike TV and shocked people in certain Japanese circles. You won’t hear about that much at all, though, because no one is publicly willing to talking about it. A source described the still-taboo topic as ‘too hot to handle’ — even five years after the death of PRIDE. Dan Herbertson, who conducted the video interview with Miro, posted the following on Twitter:
I e-mailed the producers at Spike to get the Miro & PRIDE segments fixed and hopefully get the [GeoBlock] removed. I know that quite a few members of the media in Japan have seen the MMA Uncensored segment now but no one will comment. Spike [is] aware of the issue with the Miro & PRIDE videos and are already working to restore them. Yakuza hackers maybe?
Spike TV’s MMA Uncensored program site posted three separate clips of their extended interview with Miro. There is still general disbelief about the claims made during the interview despite the fact that none of the accused parties ever filed defamation lawsuits or criminal complaints in Japan against the accusers.
Second, take a look at this DMCA complaint that was filed, resulting in this boilerplate notice. Take one look at who sent out the claim.
I will eventually view all of the audio/video of the extended interview and will make every effort possible to transcribe what was said. I’m not about to exit quietly on this front.
Speaking of exiting quietly, have you heard anything about DREAM these days? Since the New Year’s Eve event at Saitama Super Arena headlined by Fedor Emelianenko vs. Satoshi Ishii, it has been practically silent on the DREAM front outside of some web site updates & the DREAM Twitter account greeting the UFC Japan Twitter account. With Shinya Aoki booked in Bellator & both Tatsuya Kawajiri and Lenne Hardt booked for One FC, the Real Entertainment roster of fighters now resembles more of a booking agency than a singular promotional entity. It’s safe to say that DREAM is currently in hibernation. PR/front man Sasahara says that DREAM will release an event schedule in the next week or two, but that doesn’t change the long-term facts on the ground. What cards do they have in the hole to do anything substantive?
I can’t wait for people online to start up the “Fedor is a promotional killer” talk.
This was not what I think the natives had in mind in 2012 when UFC Japan arrived at Saitama Super Arena and basically splattered the remains of the old players who want to make a come back into the scene.
I can personally assure you that the old cast of characters that got pushed to the sideline for various reasons all want back in the Japanese fight game. The problem is that they either are blocked off from getting back on broadcast television or they have made such powerful enemies that they are (temporarily) on the run. I couldn’t write a better ending to this script if I had made one up.
As for any reported attempts to sabotage Spike for the interview with Miro — quite revealing that old wounds never really heal.
Game on.
(I talked about the Spike TV/PRIDE segment during my 40-minute radio interview with Jack Encarnacao on Sherdog Rewind last Sunday night. During the interview, I revealed a decade-old secret that few people knew about in regards to the NYE 2003 MMA wars in Japan.)
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 20 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
UFC Japan: A wonderful show & a pyrrhic victory?
By Zach Arnold | February 26, 2012
One of the best events in the history of the organization? Might be prisoner of the moment talk, but the afterglow from UFC Japan 2012 is pretty damn strong.
The post-show headlines in Japanese media outlets (ranked by emphasis):
- Takanori Gomi’s big win.
- Kid Yamamoto’s devastating loss & career crisis.
- Yoshihiro Akiyama loses to Jake Shields. Will he stay in UFC?
- Rampage struggles.
It should be noted that Japanese media coverage of the event was exclusively sports media & not entertainment media. This is different trend/protocol from what kinds of media attended PRIDE & K-1 events. There were some rather notable Japanese sports media outlets that were, in fact, silent or barely acknowledged the show. Politics…
The card UFC booked for this event was solid on paper for a traditional UFC show. I believed that. I also believed that the UFC should have tailored the card more for traditional Japanese tastes. The ending result for UFC Japan 2012 is that the card the promotion booked outperformed all of our expectations, both in terms of fight quality and at the live gate. Ben Henderson vs. Frankie Edgar was everything… and then some. Five rounds of pure guts & glory.
You can debate the merits about how the live gate was accomplished (how many paid vs. papered, who bought what tickets, so on and so forth). What you can’t argue is that this was a crowd that wanted to be at the show and watch it at a very early time of the morning. The fans at Saitama Super Arena were smart, polite, and well-timed in expression their reaction to the right spots. In classic fashion, some fans right on camera started chanting “USA! USA!” It was as perfect symbolism as you could get in capturing the spirit of the fight fans that I have loved for so long in Japan.
The configuration used by UFC at Saitama Super Arena was called ‘main arena – center stage.’ Capacity around 22,000. DREAM often uses this configuration but their audiences are smaller than UFC.
Reality vs. symbolism
UFC’s show at Saitama Super Arena all but neutered the image of DREAM in Japan. Not only did they draw a more vibrant audience, they did it right on the home turf. DREAM is a shell of PRIDE but I can’t imagine right now that they are very happy with the way things played out here. On a symbolic front, UFC raised their flag and no one took it off the flag pole.
UFC Japan proved that you could produce a show with great quality but also results that can be damaging long-term for advancement in the country. This was a fight card that featured a little bit of everything. Between the FX broadcast and the US PPV telecast, you had six hours to digest 11-12 fights. Nothing could be better.
However, to say that there wasn’t damage done would be an understatement. This is where business comes into play.
The losses by Kid Yamamoto, Yushin Okami, Yoshihiro Akiyama, and Rampage Jackson all represented different kinds of symbolism. The cumulative effect is that today’s UFC Japan show felt more like the last gasp of PRIDE & K-1’s spirit more than anything else.
There was Kid Yamamoto, a man who drew 30 million viewers on network television after fighting Masato on NYE on broadcast TV, fighting early on the card and getting a nice but not entirely robust reaction from the fans. Watching him lose to Vaughan Lee in the fashion that he did was gutting. Yamamoto later told the press that he got too cute and made a mistake by laying on top of Lee when he should have stayed standing up. Nonetheless, the loss was brutal to watch and the fans were stunned. It was pure agony. Yamamoto was a symbol of one of the big draws Japan produced many years ago. Now, his career is effectively crippled.
Yushin Okami, the closest Japanese title contender in the UFC, lost to Tim Boetsch in shell-shocking fashion. After two rounds of domination, Boetsch put it all together in the early part of round three and finished Okami. This loss really hurt because Okami had been wanting to show himself in a big way on his home soil. Instead, the man who won in other countries lost on his own turf. In a real-sport sense, Okami was the most important Japanese fighter on the card. He was never popular in Japan and mostly an unknown, which makes this loss even more excruciating.
Yoshihiro Akiyama, who was the biggest Japanese name on the UFC Japan card, was never fully embraced by the fans. At the weigh-ins, he got a mixed response. At Saitama Super Arena, he was cheered but the reaction was not uproarious (only in spots). He fought Jake Shields and lost by decision, something that you would expect to happen. Akiyama was by far the most important name UFC had on the roster in order to try to secure a broadcast television deal. He came into his fight against Shields on a losing streak and didn’t manage to stop it from continuing. After the show, Dana White talked about Akiyama needing to sit down with management as to whether or not his Zuffa tenure should continue.
Rampage Jackson, who missed weight by six pounds for his fight against Ryan Bader, claimed that he injured his knee and was told that he probably shouldn’t have fought on the UFC Japan card. That doesn’t change the fact that Rampage begged to fight on the Japan show instead of the UFC Chicago broadcast on Fox. Rampage’s gas tank was on empty by the time the fight with Bader was over. He looked terrible in front of the fans that he wanted to fight in front of the most. It was a depressing outcome.
The score card
The audience at UFC Japan was definitely sympathetic to the ghost of PRIDE past, but they did treat the event like a sporting event more than an entertainment spectacle like the NYE MMA events.
Hatsu Hioki, when disciplined, housed Bart Palaszewski. He admitted after the fight that he needs more experience against higher-level competition before he gets a title shot with Jose Aldo. Dana White agrees with him. Hioki is now the rising Japanese star under the Zuffa banner. The question is whether or not he will become a big star in Japan if he gains success from fights that take place on foreign soil. Without a strong broadcast television deal, it’s difficult for the fans to see his future fights unless they have WOWOW.
Takanori Gomi had a near-career-death experience with Eiji Mitsuoka and yet managed to get the win. The screeching from female fans during Gomi’s difficult spots in the fight was a little disconcerting. He got exactly the pop you would expect after the win. However, he’s not winning a title in the UFC no matter how much lip service is performed.
The overall mentality of the fans coming out of the UFC Japan event is of two mindsets.
First, the Japanese fans love the fact that UFC came to them with a show. Japanese fight fans are very loyal & passionate & smart. However, they expect the best talent in the world to come to them. They aren’t going to go out and search for it outside of Japan. If you are the best in the world, you go to Japan and prove it. Call it selfish if you want, but this mentality has existed for decades in the country. This is why so many fighters love going to Japan and respect the country so much. Demanding, but excellent fans.
Second, there’s reality that will set in soon. The UFC is the major leagues of MMA and Japan doesn’t even have an equivalent or rival to the UFC. At this point, DREAM isn’t even in the ball game. The best sports comparison I can make is Major League Baseball to Japanese professional baseball. MLB is king, but Japan still produces great talent like Yu Darvish that MLB covets. MLB has games in Japan but it doesn’t mean that it has any effect on whether or not Japanese baseball is hot or if it tanks. That’s the predicament right now for the MMA landscape in Japan.
This was a great show for the UFC. They should be proud for what they accomplished. However, what’s good for UFC isn’t going to trickle down to the Japanese MMA scene. I got called out on this on Saturday night.
“JMMA isn’t getting any worse.”
“Unable to evolve and accept something new?”
UFC is not Japanese MMA. That’s the point. The UFC is the UFC. It’s like the Miami Heat going to Spokane, Washington to play in front of fans of Gonzaga’s college basketball team. Apples to oranges.
If there is one aspect to UFC’s success that you hope trickles down into the Japanese scene, it’s that we get fresh blood on the management side. The scene needs new players who can put capital into a promotion and start running shows again on an active & big scale. The problem is that the only players around now are still the same cockroaches who scorched the territory in the first place. They’re not leaving, either, by the way. If you’ve got a lot of money and want to get into MMA, why on earth do you want to get into a business with so many black money sleazebags who will immediately try to destroy you and threaten your family? If you’re rich and want fun, there’s a million other things you can do with your life.
The best scenario right now for the Japanese MMA scene is on a smaller level with Shooto, Pancrase, DEEP, and other promotions creating young talent that can go overseas to compete. However, this doesn’t address the huge power vacuum for MMA on a national scale in the country. As long as the police are telling TV executives to stay away from anyone in the fight business that’s connected to the gangs, it’s very difficult to see progress any time soon.
This isn’t about the Japanese fans ‘evolving’ and accepting UFC as their own product. I’m sure there will be new UFC fans in Japan who watch the product and like it but will want their own major league of MMA. Who can blame them? Nothing the UFC does in Japan can address this problem because UFC isn’t a Japanese promotion. They’re not going to run shows like PRIDE did every other month in the country.
The irony here for UFC is that they really need a strong national player to pop up in Japan to help create new stars that have mass market appeal in Japan. Now that the legends are fading away, new names need to be developed. The problem is that as long as DREAM or other promoters continue to flail around, guys like Hatsu Hioki won’t become household names in Japan. UFC needs a Japanese promotion to build up Japanese stars. Without this development in the coming years, UFC will come back to Japan with mostly gaijin vs. gaijin fights and the shelf life for that will result in smaller & smaller returns on investment.
The challenges ahead for UFC
Sponsorship and television.
First, sponsorship. Other than a couple of random signs on the cage, there was not a Japanese sponsorship presence at the UFC event. Consider that Dentsu & Softbank are working with UFC and this becomes an even more concerning item of interest. They are big boys who can normally bring sponsors to the table but couldn’t this time around. It’s very difficult to attract sponsors without a major broadcast television deal, but even DREAM is able to recruit lower-level sponsors like HEIWA. When PRIDE lost their Fuji TV deal, their sponsorship money ran dry fast. When K-1 struggled towards the end, they had bizarre sponsorship deals for Fashion TV. In other words, the blue chip sponsorship demand in Japan has vanished. It will take a lot of hard work in order to convince companies to sponsor anything fight-related in the country because of a) the yakuza/police wars and b) the mindset that it’s not a good return on investment to sponsor a fight promoter now.
On the broadcast television front, UFC did some good things but they also suffered some very bad luck. The show looked great. The fans were A+ all the way. The fight quality was rock solid. However, UFC is still not a Japanese company. They are a gaijin-heavy operation. Their aces are gaijins. Even with Kid Yamamoto & Takanori Gomi on the card, Dentsu couldn’t help UFC muster any sort of great TV deal. UFC Japan is on TV Tokyo from 3:15 to 4:45 AM JST w/ the sponsors being Don Quijote & UFC Undisputed 3. Ouch.
UFC needed the Japanese fighters to show up strong in order to have a remote chance of making it onto television with a solid deal. It didn’t happen. UFC needed to be able to show that they could attract blue-chip Japanese sponsors in order to convince TV suits that they might be palatable to make a deal with. That didn’t happen, either. Dentsu & Softbank are great muscle to have in your corner, so if they can’t come through for you then it’s hard to see what the path is for UFC to make it onto broadcast television in Japan in a substantive manner.
Remember, UFC was able to get onto broadcast television in Mexico and Brazil. Brazil is a great market for them because so many people watch the fights. In Japan, the door is closed and even a great showing at UFC Japan didn’t likely open the door very much. A lot of the reasons as to why they can’t advance business-wise in the country are not their fault & we shouldn’t blame them. Many of the problems created are due to the culture of corruption that has rotted the core of acceptability for MMA with respectable television & business leaders in the country.
Bottom line
Great show. Great fans. Good for UFC’s business. No impact on improving the dilapidated & corrupt MMA business on a large scale in the country. Many challenges ahead for UFC in the years to come to make the inroads to be a consistently major player in the country… but they accomplished a lot more with the Saitama Super Arena show than could have been expected.
Topics: DREAM, Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, UFC, Zach Arnold | 73 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
UFC Japan 2012 card at Saitama Super Arena: Hallmark, historic event
By Zach Arnold | February 25, 2012
Event & venue: UFC Japan 2012 (US air time – Saturday, February 25th, Japan show time – Sunday, February 26th at 10 AM at Saitama Super Arena)
TV: PPV (sold show series w/ Dentsu)
Dark matches
- Featherweights: Issei Tamura defeated Tiequan Zhang in R2 in 32 seconds by KO.
- Bantamweights: Chris Cariaso defeated Takeya Mizugaki after 3R by unanimous decision.
- Middleweights: Riki Fukuda defeated Steve Cantwell after 3R by unanimous decision.
- Bantamweights: Vaughan Lee defeated Kid Yamamoto in R1 in 4’29 by submission.
- Lightweights: Takanori Gomi defeated Eiji Mitsuoka in R2 in 2’21 by TKO.
Main card
- Lightweights: Anthony Pettis defeated Joe Lauzon in R1 in 81 seconds by KO.
- Featherweights: Hatsu Hioki defeated Bart Palaszewski after 3R by unanimous decision.
- Middleweights: Tim Boetsch defeated Yushin Okami in R3 in 54 seconds by TKO.
- Welterweights: Jake Shields defeated Yoshihiro Akiyama after 3R by unanimous decision.
- Heavyweights: Mark Hunt defeated Cheick Kongo in R1 in 2’11 by TKO.
- Light Heavyweights: Ryan Bader defeated Rampage Jackson after 3R by unanimous decision.
- UFC Lightweight title match: Ben Henderson defeated Frankie Edgar after 5R by unanimous decision to win the title.
Continue reading this article here…
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, UFC, Zach Arnold | 122 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Mike Fagan: The fifth anniversary of PRIDE 33
By Zach Arnold | February 24, 2012
Mike Fagan hosts the Untethered MMA Podcast every Thursday at FightFansRadio.com. He also occasionally writes for Vice.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @ItsMikeFagan.
On Saturday, the UFC returns to Japan for the first time since 200, and this will mark the organization’s first show in Japan since parent-company Zuffa bought the floundering company from Semaphore Entertainment Group. For newer fans, this may look like another step in the UFC’s efforts to expand into international markets.
(Over the last 5 years the UFC has put on shows in England, Ireland, Germany, Australia, and Brazil. You can add Sweden to that list in April.)
There’s a larger significance for long-time fans of the sport. While the UFC currently has a stranglehold on major-league MMA, it was only five years ago when that title was in dispute.
Between 1997 and 2007, PRIDE ruled the MMA world from Tokyo. The company stockpiled the best fighting talent that money could buy, and complemented that talent with over-the-top, pro-wrestling-style theatrics. At the turn of the millennium, the UFC was struggling to stay afloat, putting on shows in Indian casinos and trying to fight a cultural stigma spurred by John McCain. Meanwhile, PRIDE was packing 40,000+ into the Saitama Super Arena to watch Fedor Emelianenko and Mirko “Cro Cop” and Wanderlei Silva and all the other legendary names that long-time fans look back on with sepia-colored glasses.
PRIDE began to crumble in 2006. Japanese fight magazine Shukan Gendai uncovered published stories implicating PRIDE as a front for the yakuza, Japan’s answer to the mafia. By the spring of 2007, the company completely collapsed. The UFC bought the assets (what essentially amounted to the PRIDE brand name and tape library), and, after a brief attempt to run the company separately (think Strikeforce present day), stuck Gorilla Monsoon’s proverbial fork in the carcass.
The UFC’s return to Japan falls on an interesting date. You see, PRIDE held their final show, PRIDE 33*, five years ago today. (Event pictures here.)
The card, on paper, seemed to be plagued by schizophrenic matchmaking. Brazilian wunderkind Mauricio “Shogun” Rua would fight current heavyweight monster Alistair Overeem despite having beat him clean less than two years ago in the semifinal of PRIDE’s middleweight (205 lb.) tournament. Lightweight champ Takanori Gomi squared off with UFC welterweight castoff Nick Diaz, in a non-title affair. And Wanderlei Silva, the only middleweight champ PRIDE had known, would battle Dan Henderson for his title. Silva had won a decision over Henderson back at PRIDE 12, but the rematch was an interesting choice as Henderson was the reigning welterweight (183 lb.) champ and Kazuo Misaki, then-number one contender and a man Henderson had split two fights with in 2006, fought another questionable fight against Frank Trigg on the undercard.
And yet, it is hard to find a serious fight fan who doesn’t rank PRIDE 33 among their top five shows of all time.
Joachim “Hellboy” Hansen and Jason Ireland opened the show with an entertaining lightweight scrap. Trigg, whose career had mostly been written off following multiple rear-naked choke losses to Matt Hughes and Georges St. Pierre in the UFC, followed with an upset decision victory over Misaki. James Lee surprised Travis Wiuff with a wild haymaker early before finishing with a guillotine choke 39 seconds into the bout.
Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou then stepped into the ring against Antonio Rogerio Nogueira, the twin brother of former PRIDE heavyweight champ Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira. Sokoudjou had all of three professional bouts, and was listed as a 10-1 underdog (or worse) by the bookmakers. As the bell rang, Josh Barnett, on color commentary, commented that Nogueira had just been named as Brazil’s Olympic representative for boxing. Twenty seconds and a winging left hook later, “Lil’ Nog” found himself staring at the rafters. As far as I know, this is still the biggest betting upset in MMA history, though Matt Serra challenged the shock factor when he TKO’d Georges St. Pierre just six weeks later.
In the wake of the upset, Hayato “Mach” Sakurai and Sergei Kharitonov made easy work of overmatched opponents Mac Danzig and Mike Russow, respectively.
Mauricio “Shogun” Rua’s knockout of Alistair Overeem is packed with poetry. It would be Overeem’s last fight at 205 lb. before moving up to heavyweight full time, and it perfectly encapsulated his career to that point. In the opening minutes of the bout, Overeem proved he had the size, skill, and athleticism to hang with the man most considered as the number one fighter in the weight class. But his cardio failed him — Overeem is always quick to point out the massive cut he needed to undertake to make weight — and a diving right hand put his lights out before the bout had reached four minutes. Overeem has only lost a single bout since, and is scheduled to fight Junior dos Santos for the UFC heavyweight title sometime in the late spring.
“Shogun’s” career has been much more rocky. He wound up in the UFC, dropping his debut to Forrest Griffin. Multiple knee surgeries kept him out of action for 15 months. He returned to TKO an aging Mark Coleman in the most unimpressive of fashions. He earned a title shot after helping stamp out Chuck Liddell’s career. After a controversial decision loss, “Shogun” knocked out Lyoto Machida in an immediate rematch to win the light heavyweight crown. He dropped the title in his first defense to Jon Jones, the new 23-year-old wunderkind who would go on to complete the greatest individual year in mixed martial arts history. Rua would go on to avenge his loss to Forrest Griffin before putting on the Fight of 2011 against Dan Henderson in November.
It was the co-main event at PRIDE 33 between Takanori Gomi and Nick Diaz that took home Fight of the Year honors in 2007, and elevated a very good card to an all-time great. Gomi had amassed a 13-1 record over the past 3 years and was the reigning PRIDE lightweight champ (though this was, for whatever reason, a non-title affair). He was paired with Diaz, a 23-year-old kid with 20 fights under his belt, including a 6-4 record in the UFC. Most infamous for a post-fight hospital brawl with Joe Riggs, PRIDE saw Diaz as a way to promote their organization’s superiority to the UFC.
And for the first few minutes of the bout, that objective looked like it would come to fruition. Gomi secured a takedown and pounded Diaz from top position before the referee stood the fighters up. At the two-minute mark, Gomi landed a dynamite right that put Diaz back on the mat. Diaz managed enough defense to survive Gomi’s follow up onslaught. By the end of the round, Gomi struggled to keep his hands in front of his face, allowing Diaz to pepper him with jabs and straight rights as the bell rang.
Gomi returned with some life in the second, continuing to land wild power shots to Diaz’s face. That face had become a smorgasbord of abrasion and bruises and sweat and swelling. A cut under the right eye forced the referee to ask for advice from the ringside doctor, who allowed the bout to continue. Gomi, fueled by some mix of compassion and exhaustion, visibly pleaded with the referee to put a halt to the contest after the restart. His wish was denied, prodding Gomi to shoot for a takedown. As the two fell toward the mat, Diaz brought his right leg over Gomi’s left shoulder and under his chin. With his ankle secured around the neck, he trapped Gomi in with his left leg and pulled down on the head, forcing Gomi to tap.
It’s largely regarded as one of the top ten fights of all time, and is often used as a primer for newer fans to the sport. Unfortunately, Diaz’s win is not recognized by the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Diaz tested positive for marijuana, and the athletic commission, taking the position that marijuana is a “performance-enhancing drug,” declared the bout a no contest.
If Gomi and Diaz represent the climax of our story, then Wanderlei Silva and Dan Henderson provide a satisfying resolution. The fight was even through two rounds. Midway through the third, Henderson lands a spinning backfist that briefly wobbles the champ. Moments later, Silva is knocked unconscious by a perfectly placed left hook. It was an historic moment: Henderson became the first, and thus far only, man to hold major titles in two weight classes simultaneously.
The results may have been exciting, but they provided the final nails to PRIDE’s coffin. Gomi and Misaki took huge shots to their profiles in Japan. Henderson’s knockout gave Silva, one of the biggest draws in the company, his third loss in five fights and second knockout loss in a row. The man who delivered the first, Mirko Filipovic, had already migrated to the UFC. So had Silva’s foil Quinton “Rampage” Jackson. A month later, the UFC would announce their purchase.
*My apologies for the David Foster Wallace, but I know this will cause a mild ruckus. PRIDE 33 was the organization’s penultimate show. It was also held in the United States. When the organization’s demise became a full-blown reality, PRIDE officials scrambled to put on one final show (aptly titled “Kamikaze”) to be held in Japan. That show was headlined by Jeff Monson and Kazuyuki Fujita. If you recognize those names, I hope you appreciate my point. If you don’t recognize those names, well, I hope you appreciate my point.
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 7 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |
Open discussion: MMA Uncensored Live (Spike) on PRIDE scandal
By Zach Arnold | February 23, 2012
TV: Spike (11 PM EST/PST), MMA Uncensored Live web site
The show is hosted by Mike Straka (@mikestraka). Reportedly, a big topic on the debut show will be the implosion of PRIDE, given that it’s been almost five years since UFC did the asset sale agreement with Sakakibara.
I’m told that the show will cover the scandal in-depth on a heavy level, which would mean the first time a major US media outlet is discussing the ultimate taboo of the Japanese fight industry (the yakuza).
I haven’t seen the show, so I can’t comment on how the story is portrayed until I watch the show. However, if you’re a new visitor and want some reading material to review the background on the implosion of PRIDE, here are some key words to search:
- The yakuza: Organized crime syndicates in Japan. Recently, politicians & police have ramped up the war against the black suits and the suits in turn are threatening to turn Japan “into Mexico.” Major players: Yamaguchi-gumi (largest umbrella group w/ heavy roots in Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe, moving towards Kanto area), kudo-kai (sub-group known to have relations with fight industry in the past), kokusui-kai (smaller Kanto-based group), Inagawa-kai (Kanto-based top rival to Yamaguchi, they’ve been dealing with a turf war with Yamaguchi). Rikidozan, the Godfather of Japanese pro-wrestling after the Reconstruction period post-World War II in Japan, was heavily involved in the Underworld.
- Shukan Gendai: This is the weekly magazine that published a series of negative articles about PRIDE in 2006 that caused the public firestorm in regards to creating the yakuza scandal.
- Tadashi Tanaka: Scandal writer who took a lot of heat for his articles but ultimately won the battle.
- Seiya Kawamata: Kawamata was the major focus of the Gendai articles. He’s an admitted yakuza fixer on behalf of K-1 boss Kazuyoshi Ishii. K-1 & PRIDE initially worked together with Antonio Inoki but ended up being blood rivals. Kawamata is a big talker and still is around, but under the radar. Kawamata was the man who managed Inoki’s 2003 New Year’s Eve MMA show at Kobe Wing Stadium. It flopped horribly on Nippon TV.
- Kunio Kiyohara: Kiyohara was the producer at Fuji TV who was heavily involved in the matchmaking & production of PRIDE. PRIDE was his baby. Kiyohara’s father had pull with Sankei Shimbun. When the police started investigating & interrogating Fuji TV employees, Kiyohara was a focus during the PRIDE scandal.
- Miro Mijatovic: Was one of the big three agents during the PRIDE days. He managed Fedor & Mirko Cro Cop in Japan. He managed Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe’s deals. A heavy hitter in the hotel business & investing world. He would soon get sabotaged after Fedor worked Inoki’s 2003 NYE event instead of the PRIDE show on Fuji TV. It was Mijatovic who went after troublemakers when violence allegedly started breaking out. After Kawamata filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Nippon TV over the NYE deal, Miro successfully got a court lien on any winnings Kawamata got in court against NTV. Miro was deemed to be of good character by Tokyo District Court. It’s rare enough to see any court battles in the fight industry rampant with corruption & yakuza… and even rarer that a foreigner took the fight to big players. After the Inoki NYE show, he would end up losing both Fedor & Mirko due to various power plays.
- Toshiro Igari: Famous anti-yakuza lawyer who worked with Miro to go after the bad guys. In fact, Miro’s case was featured in one of Igari’s publications. Igari took on many big fish but may have taken on too big of a one when Sumo was imploding due to various scandals. Igari was a TV personality and vocally stood up against corruption. Before his last book would be published by Kodansha (the same publishing house that produces Shukan Gendai), he was found dead in the Philippines. Few people believe it was suicide, as the yakuza has a way of blurring the lines in regards to making murders look like suicides. Igari got the last laugh from the grave when his biggest book to date was published after his death. This article at The Economist succinctly characterizes Mr. Igari’s end.
- Ken Imai: Ken Imai was Kazuyoshi Ishii’s former right-hand man who left K-1 when all hell broke loose due to a corporate tax evasion scandal. Imai ended up being Nobuyuki Sakakibara’s point man. He pulled Mirko Cro Cop away from Miro and got him into PRIDE. Mirko was supposed to fight on the Inoki NYE show but ended up pulling out due to what he claimed was a back injury. Mirko left Miro and went with Imai just days after the Inoki NYE event. Imai was heavily involved in the business side of K-1 & foreign shows.
- Nobuyuki Sakakibara: The front man for PRIDE. Huge ego. Big talker. Plenty to say. Background was from the Nagoya Fuji TV affiliate, Tokai TV.
- Sotaro Shinoda: Sakakibara’s right-hand man. He, along with Kato (the boss of DREAM) worked with Sakakibara & Kiyohara to put together the PRIDE coalition.
- Mr. Ishizaka aka Kim Dok Soo: He was referred to in Shukan Gendai as the infamous “Mr. I,” the alleged shadow owner of PRIDE who is zainichi (of Korean blood). Kanagawa police put out an arrest warrant and he supposedly fled to South Korea but doesn’t know much Korean language. Think of him as a Godfather type.
- Naoto Morishita: The original front man for PRIDE. He was found dead, hanging by shower curtain in a hotel room. Sakakibara took over after his death.
- Hiromichi Momose: The original Godfather of PRIDE, the man in the ball cap & dark glasses w/ body guards. He was Nobuhiko Takada’s backer when UWF-International collapsed due to money troubles & image damage after an interpromotional series in 1995-1996 with New Japan Pro-Wrestling. Momose, though an entity called KRS, backed the first PRIDE events with Takada vs. Rickson Gracie. Eventually, the company backing PRIDE would be Dream Stage Entertainment. Momose was a classmate in his younger days with Tatsuo Kawamura, the veteran entertainment power broker who has been the power source for Antonio Inoki for many years. Momose is now dead.
- Ed Fishman: Friend of Dick Clark, the man from Malibu who made a name for himself in Las Vegas & Atlantic City through gaming. He was supposedly approached by Sakakibara, after PRIDE lost its Fuji TV deal, for a loan. Ed wanted to buy PRIDE. He promoted two PRIDE events at the Thomas & Mack Center in Vegas. During this time frame, UFC was negotiating with Sakakibara and got the PRIDE assets despite the two PRIDE Vegas events doing decent business.
- Jamie Pollack: UFC point man who moved to Japan after the PRIDE asset sale deal to try to run PRIDE under Zuffa leadership. He encountered nothing but hostility and found himself back in the States in short order. His name is historically important because Zuffa eventually closed down the PRIDE offices with signs telling employees to clean out their desks immediately. This unfairly/fairly played right into the Japanese media stereotype that UFC was never serious about running PRIDE and that the evil gaijin had killed the home promotion.
Topics: Japan, Media, MMA, PRIDE, Zach Arnold | 27 Comments » | Permalink | Trackback |