Even as he was building his own training program, Shamrock hadn’t lost focus on Pancrase. He beat Funaki in the main event of the first show in September 1993 and became the promotion’s first world champion in 1994, winning a tournament to crown the “King of Pancrase.” He was also playing a key roll behind the scenes. Shamrock was the official North American talent scout and booker, bringing in fighters he thought were ready for the big show. Jason DeLucia, Guy Mezger, and his adopted brother Frank Shamrock all became top Pancrase fighters under Ken’s leadership.
“In Pancrase, I had eight of my fighters in the top 10 at one point,” Ken Shamrock remembers. “I was the world champion and Masakatsu Funaki was the top contender. All of the rest were Lion’s Den fighters or guys I brought in.”
El Guapo Emerges
The Americans, of course, weren’t Pancrase’s only foreign imports. Like Maeda’s Rings, the promotion found plenty of talent in Europe as well, most prominently Bas Rutten, a charismatic Dutch kickboxer with a sculpted physique and great stage presence. Rutten, whose sledgehammer kicks and aggressive style made him stand out in an organization that mostly featured slick ground fighters, was a pet project of Pancrase’s promoters.
“[Rings fighter] Chris Doleman was the one who discovered me,” Rutten said. “He was watching a martial arts show, one of these comedy shows you might see on YouTube. I would do backflips and a cartwheel. My opponent would grab my foot and flip me back in a somersault. It all looked really cool. And Chris Doleman said, ‘Man, genetically you’ve got something. Maybe you should come to our gym and train with us.’”
“It was called free fight. Rings might not have been real, but the training was of course. I got so blown up the first night I called my wife on the way home and said, ‘I am pulling the car over. I am going to take a nap right here.’ I was done,” Rutten remembered. “I couldn’t eat for a couple of days, I could only drink liquid. Because my throat was all messed up because I thought I could tough out chokes. Obviously I couldn’t. My wife was laughing. She said, ‘So that’s it.’ I said, ‘No, that’s not it. I’ll be back and within three or four months I’ll tap everyone there.’ So I started working and training hard.”
For all his standup prowess, Rutten had limited skills on the ground. Funaki and Suzuki did their best to teach him the basics, and it was rumored they encouraged some of the other Japanese fighters to put Bas over to help build him up as a star. But according to Rutten, they never asked him to lose a fight.
“Suzuki was always very nice to me, but he was a little shy. So was Funaki. Once you broke the ice with Funaki he was a really good guy,” Rutten said. “They actually, after my second fight, invited me to have dinner with the both of them. I thought that was going to be it. Because Chris Doleman had told me, ‘Bas, they’re probably going to ask you to work the fights.’ I was totally prepared to say ‘F-U.’ We went to dinner and we ate and had a good time. They gave me a book from Fujiwara about submissions. And I said, ‘Man, you are actually trying to make me stronger.’ They laughed and that was it. So when I walked to get in the cab, I turned around and said, ‘I thought you guys were going to ask me to throw a fight.’ And Funaki told me right to my face, ‘I would never ask you a thing like that.’”
Rutten is adamant that he didn’t work any bouts for the promotion. He wasn’t opposed to doing pro wrestling, and would actually try it later in his career. But losing a bout marketed as a real fight wasn’t pro wrestling — it was throwing a fight. Many of Rutten’s training partners worked for Maeda and put over the Rings star and some of the other Japanese fighters regularly. Discussions of their time in Japan created tension among the fighters from different promotions.
“I hated those guys in Rings who would claim they were a champion,” Rutten admitted. “The worst part was, they would come to the gym and I’d say, ‘How did you do?’ And they’d say, ‘Well I lost. But you know, Bas, they made me lose.’ Okay. But when they came back and said, ‘I won,’ it wasn’t the same story. They never said, ‘Oh, they just let me win.’ I hated that. I never wanted to look in the mirror and think, ‘You know what? You’re a fake.’”
The Darker Side of Pancrase
While Rutten may not have engaged in any chicanery, it was all around him. In the early days, multiple fights were worked, often with the intention of creating a new star. Sometimes the fighter who benefited from a work wasn’t even involved in the decision-making. One case in point was Lion’s Den fighter Jason DeLucia. The Pancrase newcomer shocked fans at Amagasaki Gym, making Funaki tap out to a knee bar in just over a minute. Pancrase had a new rising star to go along with Funaki, Suzuki, and Shamrock.
“From what I understand,” DeLucia said, “he was supposed to carry me three rope escapes into the match and miscalculated his distance upon the first rope escape [and had to tap] — it happens. The promoters were very unhappy, needless to say.”
For Pancrase fighters, matches like that were just part of the business. It was taboo to discuss, even among friends later in the evening at the wrestler’s bar of choice, the Gas Panic in the Roppongi district of Tokyo.
“None of us ever said, ‘Hey, Jason, was that a work? You submitted Funaki in like one minute. I think that was a work, dude.’ It was between you and them,” Bessac said. “We never talked about it, but you knew what the deal was.”
It was commonplace for established fighters in Pancrase to make opponents look good. Without new stars, the matches would quickly grow stale, so it was important for Pancrase to create the kind of stars who could draw fans to the arena. Sometimes that meant the fighting arts gave way to the fight business.
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“When fight companies are small there is work, it is necessary. For example, in those days a fighter like Matt Hume would not be able to fight Bas Rutten unless it was worked or they didn’t care about Bas losing,” DeLucia said. “Because if they fought, Matt could go to the ground game, mount, and pound Rutten out in a UFC-style fight. It’s just a fact that Matt was schooled as a wrestler and Bas as a Thai boxer. So that’s why you never saw Bas fight Matt Hume or Todd Bjornethun. It’s a matter of securing business objectives.”
Hume agrees. Now a respected fight trainer, Hume was involved in one of Pancrase’s most obvious works, a match with Ken Shamrock that included amazing pro wrestling–style suplexes and grappling exchanges a little too smooth to be real. Like most Pancrase veterans, he will only talk about worked fights in the broadest of terms.
“There were pros and cons with the Pancrase organization and fighting in Japan, but overall, it was a good experience and helped shape me into the successful fighter and coach that I would later become. The entire experience in Japan is incomparable to anywhere else in the world. The events have the best organization and showmanship and the fans are the best. Jason DeLucia is correct about many of the fights in Pancrase not being on the level. I can only speak for the time I was there, however,” says Hume.
Funaki was Pancrase’s mastermind, carefully moving the pieces to create contenders and the most interesting matchups. Often he chose himself to take the fall. He was, by all accounts, the most skilled grappler in the promotion. He could have beaten most of Pancrase’s neophyte fighters in a legitimate contest — but he was also the best known and most popular wrestler in the promotion. A win over Funaki was a star maker, and as one of the owners of the company he had a lot invested in making new stars, leading to some questionable results.
Sometimes business considerations meant losing to fighters he should have (and could have) beaten like Jason DeLucia, Yuki Kondo, and Rutten. Funaki’s wrestling pedigree, good looks, and personal charisma allowed him to lose without losing his fan base. Funaki had a pro wrestling mentality and he didn’t think twice about throwing fights. He was also a good worker, able to convincingly build up a handful of fighters that could main-event cards without
raising many eyebrows or casting suspicion on the legitimacy of the matches.
Pancrase stood alone as the premiere mixed martial arts league in the world for only two months. In November 1993 the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) joined the brawl, running their first show in McNichols Arena in Denver, Colorado. Shamrock was a breakthrough star there as well, but the style of fighting couldn’t have been more different. The UFC was a collection of bar brawlers and traditional martial artists. Many were out of shape and, frankly, embarrassing. The fighting in Pancrase was more technical, the fighters in superb condition, and the presentation more professional.
But the rules, created with sport in mind and to minimize unchecked aggression and violence, favored a certain type of fighter. The gentleman’s agreement, in which Pancrase fighters agreed to further restrict the rules and not allow any striking on the ground, led to very interesting and dynamic mat work and also helped extend the length of fights that might have ended very quickly if striking on the ground was allowed. The fighters also wore mandatory boots, complete with shin padding, to lessen the impact of kicks. All this combined to favor grappling experts like the Japanese. Rutten doesn’t believe that was a coincidence.
“In my third fight, when Funaki took me in a toehold, ow-wee. I couldn’t wear shoes,” Rutten said. “My ankle was swollen so badly. I didn’t even know what a toehold was at that time. That was the whole reason for the boots, let’s face it. The Japanese guys were very good on the ground. And they were less good with striking. So what did they do? They said, ‘Let’s not wear gloves, let’s open our hands. It’s good for grappling and chokes but not much good for anything else. And we’ll wear shin protection so the impact of the kicks will be a lot less.’ Plus the shoes were perfect for leglocks. Everything was adapted for their fighting style.”
UWFi
While Pancrase was a hot ticket in Tokyo, no promotion was hotter than Nobuhiko Takada’s Union of Wrestling Forces International (UWFi). The promotion started slowly, in smaller arenas throughout Japan, building to a December 1991 show in front of 11,000 at Sumo Hall in Tokyo. Taking a page from Inoki’s book, the top two bouts featured UWFi wrestlers taking on American boxers. It was an idea that was just as successful for Takada as it had been for Inoki — in other words, it was an unmitigated disaster.
In the semi–main event Billy Scott went to a 10-round decision with boxer James Warring. Scott struggled to take Warring down, but the boxer was scared enough of the ground game that he never really opened up. It was a monotonous affair, with dozens of rope breaks halting any action in its tracks.
In the main event Takada took on former heavyweight champion Trevor Berbick. The match, scheduled for 10 rounds, didn’t make it out of the first. Berbick had held the promotion up for more money at the last minute and Takada went out to teach him a lesson. When the first leg kick landed, Berbick’s eyes grew wide. Historian Mike Lorefice says the boxer felt misled by the rules, unaware that leg kicks were allowed:
This wasn’t intended to be comedy, but I can’t think of many funnier matches. Berbick just had no idea what he was getting himself into and came off as one of the great wusses of all-time. Takada started with a low kick and Berbick complained it was below the belt. Takada threw another and Berbick stopped fighting altogether, complaining to everyone. . . . In any case, Takada kept throwing low kicks because they were really rattling Berbick, who was totally clueless to why the ref wasn’t warning Takada or deducting points for these “illegal” tactics. Berbick told Takada “no more” and pointed to his knee, but Takada kicked it again and again anyway. Finally, Takada kicked Berbick in the knee when he was in the corner and Berbick said, “What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this?” and hopped out of the ring never to return. Outside, he swore up a storm claiming Takada changed the rules. I don’t know how to rate this, but it gets huge marks for perverse entertainment.
By 1992, UWFi was hitting its stride. With Takada in the main event, the company built to a major show at the Yokohama Arena in May. Fourteen thousand people saw Takada lose for the first time in company history, demolished by 300-pound former University of Nebraska All-American Gary Albright.
The doughy Albright, exactly the kind of legitimate wrestler who would have never stood a chance in the body conscious American professional wrestling scene, had been built as a monster. A legitimate amateur, Albright executed picture perfect suplexes, often tossing the smaller Japanese several feet in the air across the ring. He was undefeated in the UWFi when he met Takada in a rematch that September to crown the promotion’s first ever world champion.
Takada beat Albright by arm bar, winning a world title belt that looked somewhat dainty compared to the monstrosities carried around by champions in other wrestling promotions. What it lacked in bulk, the belt more than made up for in legitimacy. It had been the belt Lou Thesz wore in the 1950s, and the great champion himself presented the title to Takada in the middle of the ring.
Thesz told Pro Wrestling Torch in a 1993 interview, “The UWFi people knew I have a reasonable amount of credibility over there as you can imagine because I beat their champ. . . . They asked me if I would come over and assist them in getting away from the choreographed tumbling that they have over in this country and also in Japan. . . . I said, ‘Sure, I’d like to participate, but I want to come over and talk about and know what we’re doing before we get into this thing.’ I made a trip over and talked with them and we had a meeting of the minds.”
Thesz was just one of the wrestling legends the group used to bolster their legitimacy. Billy Robinson and Danny Hodge, both noted shooters themselves, were UWFi commissioners and their names still carried great weight in Japanese wrestling. It was important to the promotion, despite doing what were obviously worked matches, to present a legitimate face to the public.
“Anybody they used in their promotion was a shooter,” UWFi wrestler Mark Fleming said. “Iron Sheik, he was a shooter even though he was old and beat up. Gary Albright. Dan Severn. Dennis Koslowski, an Olympic silver medalist. Billy Robinson, who they brought over to help train us. We had to go to that dojo every day man, and we trained there five hours a day. . . . Lou said, ‘Go out there, pummel with them, tie them up and throw them.’ He said, ‘Hurt the sons of bitches. Hurt them, man.’ I’d go out there and throw them but them guys were good. They were smaller but tough guys. And very dedicated.”
In 1993, Albright was replaced as Takada’s top foil by traditional pro wrestling superstar Big Van Vader. Vader had been a star in Inoki’s New Japan and was one of the top heels for Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling in America. He was the world champion for WCW and still signed to New Japan when he agreed to an eight-match deal with the UWFi. Thesz, alongside one of the UWFi’s leading power brokers, wrestler Yoji Anjo, was instrumental in getting Vader to sign the dotted line. At the time it was one of the biggest per appearance deals in wrestling history — the American super heavyweight would take home $200,000 for his eight matches with a $50,000 signing bonus, and an unprecedented $31,250 a match, as well as legal support to escape his deal with Inoki.
Vader was the first big-name foreigner who came into the UWFi without legitimate credentials. A former football player at the University of Colorado, Vader was big, quick, and strong, but he had no martial arts or amateur wrestling training. To the crowd, it didn’t matter. Vader hit hard, developing a well deserved reputation in WCW for taking advantage of the enhancement talent (men known in the business as “jobbers”), who he tossed around like 220-pound sacks of potatoes. He once actually paralyzed wrestler Joe Thurman with a hard power-bomb. Former manager Harley Race may have put it best: “Personality-wise, he was a big asshole.”
Personality aside, Vader’s style, the same style that made him one of the most hated wrestlers on the American scene amongst his coworkers, was a perfect fit for the UWFi. He could beat on the young Japanese wrestlers as hard as he possibly could, and they would sim
ply smile and come back for more. It was supposed to be as close to legitimate as you could get. His Japanese employers wanted it stiff and his opponents would dish it out as well as they took it, making Vader’s propensity to draw blood and cause bruises nothing out of the ordinary.
“You could bust their mouth open,” Fleming remembered. “And after it was all over with they didn’t care. They shook your hand, bowed, they didn’t care.”
With Vader in the lead heel role, the UWFi graduated from smaller buildings to some of Japan’s biggest arenas. Two of his first three events sold out Budokan Hall. The arena seated 16,500 for wrestling, each seat with perfect sight lines. It was a venue created for judo at the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, but is probably best known in the West for concert appearances by the Beatles, KISS, and Cheap Trick.
The Budokan shows followed the exact same pattern the promotion had used the previous year with Albright. Vader dominated the younger wrestlers and even Takada’s contemporary Kazuo Yamazaki, building to a match with Takada himself. Buoyed by the immediate success with the Vader-led sellouts, the UWFi took the next step in their plan for world domination. Many had questioned the Vader signing — the company had been doing well without him and his high-cost contract sent shockwaves through a dressing room already obsessed with who was being paid what.
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