In 1987, New Japan brought Riki Chōshū back into the fold. A former Olympic wrestler for South Korea, Chōshū had ridden his amazing charisma and go-go-go style of wrestling to great success. He had shocked everyone when he left New Japan for Giant Baba’s All Japan Pro Wrestling in 1984, leading to Baba’s best year of the decade at the gate. But Baba was set on his own Olympian, “Jumbo” Tsuruta, as his heir and top wrestler. Chōshū had run into a glass ceiling just like he had in New Japan. He wanted a fresh start in a comfortable old home.
Chōshū’s return sparked public interest in New Japan; it sparked anger in Maeda. Now the young wrestler was another step removed from the top spot as Chōshū assumed his role as heir apparent. This boiling tempest of ego and testosterone exploded on November 19, 1987, with a kick heard around the world. As Chōshū held Osamu Kido in a scorpion deathlock, both hands busy applying the hold, Maeda entered the ring. Instead of delivering a safe kick to break the hold, Maeda unleashed a full force kick from Chōshū’s blindside right to the face. The tough Chōshū staggered but refused to go down. The “tough” Maeda bailed out of the ring. But not even Chōshū could ignore a broken orbital bone for long. As Dave Meltzer explained, New Japan was stuck between a rock and a hard place: “New Japan was faced with one major predicament. What Maeda did was shoot a kick in the same style worked kicks were regularly thrown in. To make a big deal about it publicly would be basically a public admittance wrestling was a work . . . To ignore it would be even worse for business, because anarchy could take over.”
New Japan attempted to punish Maeda with a suspension, followed by paying penance with a tour of Mexico. Maeda, who treasured realism, hated nothing more than the flamboyant Mexican style of wrestling and refused. He had his own plans and a vision of what Japanese wrestling could become.
UWF Reborn
With financial backers in tow, Maeda restarted the UWF in May of 1988. This time the Japanese public was ready for it. Fans had grown accustomed to the style on television and understood the submissions wrestlers used in the ring. And Maeda’s hype had worked. According to reporter Alex Marvez, many Japanese fans believed the second UWF was real: “The public in Japan believes UWF matches are 100 percent legitimate. They are, and they’re not. UWF wrestlers are told to protect themselves at all times, because keeping the public convinced the style is legitimate is more important than someone getting a broken nose for putting their guard down. Wrestlers are also told not to sell any holds unless they really hurt. One UWF wrestler described the style as 75 percent shooting. [Nobuhiko] Takada even places a piece of paper with a prayer written on it in his trunks before his matches.”
Maeda’s success was like nothing the sport of wrestling had ever seen before. The first show at Korakuen Hall sold out in just 15 minutes. By 1989 they were breaking wrestling attendance records starting with a sellout of Budokan Hall as well as an overflowing crowd at three closed circuit television venues to watch Maeda submit Takada, who had become his archrival. In November 1989, more than 50,000 packed the Tokyo Dome to watch Maeda take on Willie Wilhelm. The opponent was just incidental. The crowd was there for Maeda in a mixed match they believed to be a shoot. They had sold out ringside tickets in just five minutes. By the end of the first day tickets had gone on sale, more than 40,000 had been sold. The final gate numbers of $2.9 million set a Japanese record and more than doubled the best live gate in U.S. wrestling history.
A huge part of the credit for the promotion’s success has to go to Maeda, who despite his fearsome reputation was actually very giving. Perhaps because he had so much trouble getting to the top spot, he was very generous once he was there. His predecessors like Inoki, Baba, and Tsuruta almost never allowed their shoulders to be pinned to the mat. It would have been easy for Maeda to demand to win every match too. Instead, he realized losing would only help boost interest in the shows.
He was knocked out by rising star Takada in 1988, leading to a huge box office return for a 1989 match in Tokyo. He lost additional matches to Takada and Yoshiaki Fujiwara in 1990. But by then, like the first UWF, internal problems were tearing the company apart. President Shinji Jin and the leading wrestlers had different ideas about where the future lay.
Jin wanted some of the UWF’s top talent to work together with Super World Sports, a traditional pro wrestling company that was owned by Hachiro Tanaka. As owner of a major Japanese company, Tanaka had been an important sponsor of the UWF just a year prior. But Maeda was aghast at the idea, refusing to take a step backwards and do a show with “fake” wrestlers.
The battle escalated when Maeda demanded access to the company books and was suspended for his public comments about the SWS deal. When the wrestlers supported Maeda, Jin fired everyone and declared the company closed and the Tokyo Dome show scheduled for December 29, 1990, was canceled.
In 1991 each of the promotion’s top stars created their own vanity promotion. Maeda started Rings, a promotion so closely associated with his own star power that the television network would only agree to pay for their shows if Maeda appeared in each. Takada formed the UWF International, working a flashier and more popular style with traditional pro wrestling stalwarts like Big Van Vader (Leon White). But the most memorable spin-off group came from the unheralded Yoshiaki Fujiwara.
Fujiwara took three young prospects with him: Masakatsu Funaki, Minoru Suzuki, and Ken Shamrock. When he tried to follow Jin’s lead with a series of appearances on more traditional pro wrestling shows, the three quit. No longer constrained by their elders, they went forward with a truly revolutionary idea. On September 21, 1993, the first legitimate wrestling promotion in Japan’s history was born. Pancrase brought back real wrestling after decades of show and spectacle.
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THE NEXT LEVEL: The Shoot-style Revolution
The UWF was dead. In the wake of its destruction came three promotions that would make a tremendous impact on professional wrestling. Nobuhiko Takada, long the Robin to Akira Maeda’s Batman, finally took the lead role in the UWF International. The group was an instant success. Taking a more over-the-top approach than that employed by the UWF, Takada and his compatriots amped up the pro wrestling theatrics and created a hybrid style that was realistic while also being comfortable for traditional pro wrestling fans. Antonio Inoki’s newest American star, Big Van Vader, was recruited to play Takada’s top rival, and the group immediately became one of the hottest promotions in the world.
Maeda went the opposite direction with Rings, wanting to avoid the specter of pro wrestling entirely. Almost no one associated with the wrestling business had anything to do with Rings. He used sambo specialist Chris Doleman to recruit fighters out of Europe and made strong connections in Russia where he found one of the most amazing pure workers the world of wrestling had ever seen — submission specialist Volk Han. Rings bouts looked more legitimate, even compared to the revolutionary UWF matches. On the undercard they often were real contests, but in the main events, it was an illusion. In reality the bouts looked less smoothly choreographed because the competitors, besides Maeda, weren’t experienced pro wrestlers. Their awkwardness was sometimes mistaken for being more “real,” when fans were actually just watching poorly performed matches.
The smallest of the three UWF offshoots was Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi. Yoshiaki Fujiwara, the top pupil of Karl Gotch, was the headliner, but at the age of 42 was well past his prime. Fujiwara had been an undercard wrestler for most of his New Japan Pro-Wrestling career and just didn’t have the charisma needed to carry a promotion on his back. While Takada took most of the UWF’s roster of wrestlers, Fujiwara did manage to score several significant coups. Masakatsu Funaki, once thought to be the strongest prospect in the entire industry, was the biggest. But with him came Minoru Suzuki, a collegiate wrestling standout who was an Olympic alternate in 1984, and rising American star Ken “Wayne” Shamrock.
Megane Super Optical, an eyeglasses chain that a
lso supported the more traditional SWS wrestling outfit, backed Fujiwara, who even sent his young stars to work for the SWS and the ultra-violent W*ING promotion on several occasions. Fujiwara was from the old school. Sure he was an accomplished shooter, but in his mind real contests were for the gym. Professional wrestling was an entertainment business, and he had real doubts about how well shoots would be received by the audience. His young stars balked and soon went in their own direction, leaving Fujiwara to form their own promotion. Pancrase, a name devised by Gotch himself, was an ode to the ancient Greeks who had competed in brutal grappling contests very similar to modern mixed martial arts.
MASAKATSU FUNAKI
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While the other shoot-style promotions all claimed to be the real thing, Pancrase wanted to take things a step further than big talk and slightly more realistic work — led by Funaki, the Pancrase fighters intended to provide real shoots up and down the card. The promotion held its first card on September 21, 1993, in the beautiful Tokyo Bay NK Hall. Seven thousand fans packed the building to see a show promoted as “Hybrid Wrestling.” The rules were the same as traditional pro wrestling — making it to the ring ropes would cause the referee to break a submission hold and no closed-fist punching to the head was allowed. The difference between these bouts and the thousands that had been held in the building before Pancrase was simple — these matches were real.
The atmosphere was electric, especially when the fighters greeted the crowd prior to the bouts and revealed they’d each lost more than 10 pounds. They were lean and ripped, a product of training for competition rather than physique. After the show was over, no one in the crowd could quite believe what they had seen.
It didn’t go exactly as promoters hoped. It turns out that real fights don’t last long, especially when only one of the combatants is schooled in submission. These certainly weren’t the marathon matches shoot-style fans were used to. The six fights that night lasted a total of 13 minutes and five seconds.
The solution was simple. Experienced fighters like Funaki and Shamrock would take their time with opponents, extending the fights long enough to give the crowd their money’s worth before finishing their opponent.
Incorporating worked spots into their bouts was a double-edged sword. It was necessary to make sure the crowd got their money’s worth. After all, they were charging fans up to $135 for ringside tickets, a pretty pricey seat in 1993. But that opened up the promotion to all kinds of questions. The fighters were mostly pro wrestlers, so the fans were naturally skeptical. Seeing “spots” they were familiar with from the UWF and other “worked shoots” made them even more suspicious.
Former King of Pancrase Bas Rutten explained, “With Pancrase there was always that suspicion. Because you had the other organization Rings that was 90 percent fake. And Pancrase had the same rules and Funaki and Suzuki had come from pro wrestling. So there were always those questions. Some of the fights I would think, ‘That looks a little too good.’ But it was always between two of the Japanese guys. I said from the get go, there was no way on earth that I would do this. If they are going to ask me to work a fight it won’t happen. I will do it in pro wrestling where everyone knows it’s fake. But never when it is supposed to be real.”
While still refusing publicly to talk much about what happened behind closed doors in Pancrase, top stars like Shamrock confirmed that they did their best to make the shows more entertaining by allowing less talented fighters to survive more than a few minutes in the ring with them. It was a shadowy world, one where even the participants didn’t always know what was real and what was fake.
“It’s hard to say. You don’t always know what’s going on there behind the scenes,” Shamrock admits. “I know you go out there and do your best to win, but a lot of times guys came in there and didn’t have any experience whatsoever. You didn’t want to go out there and just destroy them. You want to go out there and maybe give some encouragement to try harder next time. . . . I can’t really talk about those things because of agreements and things that were set down by the organization. I can’t really comment on that. I went into the UFC trying to be the best. I wanted people to recognize me as the best and I did accomplish that. Set my mind to do it and I did the same thing in Pancrase. I wanted to be the best there and I did that also.”
Former Pancrase fighter Scott Bessac, a behind-the-scenes confidant of Shamrock, was privy to many of the promotion’s secrets. “A lot of the fans who knew what was going on would say it was rigged. So, of course all the fighters would say, ‘It’s not rigged.’ But the bottom line is it was mostly shoots but they had works. It would be a fight up until the predetermined ending. And you knew what time it would be. There were works. That’s just the way it was. They would come to you personally and ask for a work and you’d get paid a little bit more.”
The World’s Most Dangerous Man
The early Pancrase standout was Ken Shamrock, a rags-to-riches success story who had come from nothing to become a star in Japan. Shamrock was trouble walking as a kid. Born Ken Kilpatrick in Savannah, Georgia, he knew nothing but violence. Growing up in a primarily African American neighborhood, the youngest of three Kilpatrick boys remembers little from his childhood except constant fights and struggle. He left home early, just 10 the first time he ran away, escaping a disciplinarian stepfather.
No one could handle Ken. He was exiled from his own home, spent time in Juvenile Hall, and brawled his way out of group and foster homes. He was on a path to prison or an early grave when at age 14 he first met Bob Shamrock. Shamrock had worked with hundreds of angry young men and had the perfect remedy, combining two things Ken had been sorely lacking in his life — high expectations and love. It didn’t hurt that to Ken, Shamrock’s ranch looked like paradise on Earth.
“Ken’s eyes got really big. Because he had never seen any place like this and this was my home, his new home,” Ken’s adopted father Bob Shamrock remembered. “We had a big house, well-decorated with antique furniture. We had a swimming pool. I think it was a lot different than the other group homes he had been in.”
Bob Shamrock believed strongly that young people could find redemption in his home. He pushed the kids in his home to find an area they enjoyed and excel. With Ken it was athletics — he ended up as a standout football player and wrestler at local Lassen High School.
“If the kid was an artist, we’d send him to the local community college for lessons. If he liked music we’d give him a guitar and encourage him that way. We had a grand piano and my wife Dee Dee and I both sang and played,” Bob said. “But Ken was like a lot of the boys. He was a fighter. And we had outlets for those kids too. We had a rule that allowed kids to fight — but it had to be in the ring with boxing gloves on. And I had to be there. Ken was the house champion, in both boxing and wrestling.”
After high school Shamrock drifted. He was an undersized nose guard at Shasta Community College, but school just wasn’t for him. He was bouncing, stripping, and competing in toughman contests when he eventually found his way into pro wrestling, working as Vinnie Torrelli for South Atlantic Pro Wrestling. Performing at National Guard Armories all over the Southeast, Shamrock was just learning his trade when his friend Dean Malenko suggested he audition for an opportunity with the new UWF, a wrestling promotion that needed tough guys just like him.
After a tryout in Florida, Shamrock made his way to Japan, where he joined other aspiring wrestlers in the UWF’s dojo. His initial tryout was a disaster. Suzuki made him tap to a knee bar and Funaki choked him out, twisted his ankle, and caught him in an arm bar in rapid succession. Shamrock may have felt bigger and stronger than either of the Japanese, but he didn’t have the tools to win. When it was all over he was dejected, expecting to be sent home. Instead, impressed by his raw tools and heart, the promotion offered him a place in their training program.
As a “young boy,” he served the older f
ighters by cooking, cleaning, and running errands. He was also learning how to fight — and not just in the ring. Professional wrestling dojos in Japan were notoriously brutal places, filled with mental and physical abuse. But for Shamrock, that was just par for the course.
Bas Rutten recalls, “They would beat the crap out of the young guys. They would hold a kid down and turn his face black with a marker. Or twist his ears with rubber bands to make sure he had cauliflower ears. That was just part of the game. The young boys. They had to do everything, cook, wash the laundry, clean the gym. And they become angry. And the idea is to use that anger to motivate them in their training. It all has a purpose.”
KEN SHAMROCK WITH HIS 1996 NWA BELT
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Shamrock weathered all of that to become a submission expert. Under the watchful eye of Funaki, already an established shooter, and sometimes Gotch himself, Shamrock learned the basics of hooking. “[Gotch would] sit in the office, drink wine, and occasionally he would come out there and work us until we couldn’t walk anymore,” Shamrock remembers. It was grueling, but by the time it was all over, Shamrock had learned how to make men squeal in pain.
By the time Funaki told him they were breaking free from Fujiwara to attempt to do what hadn’t been done in a century, Shamrock was ready. Not only was he ready to compete, he was busy building his own team of fighters to compete with the Japanese stars already signed up to fight. In 1992, back in California, he started the Lion’s Den, which was designed both to help Shamrock prepare for fights and to train new fighters for Pancrase.
“We started training, Ken and I, in his garage, at a local racquetball court, at his dad’s house on the living room floor. Anywhere we could because there was no place to train like that. There wasn’t even a sport yet. We did that for awhile before Ken finally decided he wanted to open up a dojo. We opened it up on Cherokee Road in Lodi,” Bessac said. “It was basically Ken just beating the hell out of us. He had gotten trained by the Japanese in submissions and they worked him hard. They destroyed him over there, with submissions until he was black and blue. That’s the only way he knew how to pass it on so that’s what he did to me. So that’s what I did to everybody else. When Vernon White came in that’s what he did with Vernon. So that’s what Vernon did to everyone else. It all rolled downhill.”
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