But the pieces to the puzzle all came together when the company announced their debut on American PPV in October 1993. Vader was meant to be the star attraction, a well-known commodity Americans could recognize and embrace. But WCW’s attorneys put an end to that dream quickly. Vader was allowed to work the shows in Japan but was prohibited from appearing on the PPV broadcasts, a significant problem for a promotion that intended the 300-pounder to be its top star.
Despite leaving Vader’s match on the cutting room floor, the PPV broadcast was a stunning success. American fans were ready for something new. Traditional wrestling had moved too far towards kids programing. Fans yearned for something a little more action packed and sports oriented, and the UWFi hoped to fill the gap. Their debut scored almost 100,000 pay-per-view buys.
In his fourth UWFi match, Vader and Takada packed the Jingu baseball stadium with a capacity crowd of more than 46,000 faithful to see their hero beat the giant American. The political implications within the wrestling business were staggering. Before the match Thesz declared the bout was to determine the real world wrestling champion. While Vader’s WCW world title was not on the line, the crowd couldn’t fail to notice the symbolism. Takada wasn’t just vanquishing Vader, he was defeating traditional pro wrestling. In a brutal match the Japanese hero and the American heel battered each other, Takada with his powerful kicks and Vader with his clubbing forearms.
“There was nothing worked about those kicks or those punches,” Vader said. “I’m not trying to insult anyone’s intelligence, it was a worked shoot. But there’s no way that man could have kicked me any harder. After those matches I couldn’t work. I couldn’t walk for two or three days.”
The match was marred by some awkward, business-exposing moments. At one point the two miscommunicated and Vader went over for a Takada hip toss a good five seconds after the Japanese star had already tried and seemingly failed to pull it off. Takada finished the fight with his trademark arm bar, causing Vader to scream out in pain despite the move never quite being applied completely. Still, the battle had a big match feel, and the crowd was ecstatic to see their champion triumph.
Success for both Pancrase and the UWFi continued into 1994. Pancrase had established three major stars in Shamrock, Funaki, and Suzuki. And with Takada, Vader, and Albright leading the way, the UWFi averaged 15,000 fans for their monthly shows. But change was coming for both groups — and it had the same name. The Gracie family was already leaving their mark on the world of wrestling.
20
UFC: No Holds Barred
While Pancrase had shown the world what a real shoot might look like, it was more of a contest than a fight. Its wrestlers considered themselves sportsmen, competing in an athletic competition. Two months after Pancrase’s launch, the Ultimate Fighting Championship made its debut in Denver, Colorado, and the product they featured was something different entirely. Conceptualized by the Gracie family, the event was closer to a street fight than a collegiate wrestling match or a judo bout. These were no-holds-barred slugfests, a test not just of the athlete but of his martial arts style.
The UFC was the product of several fertile imaginations. It took a real team effort to transport an updated version of the old Gracie Challenge from Rorion Gracie’s family scrapbooks to America’s television screens. Movie director John Milius thought of the Octagon-shaped cage. Art Davie and Campbell McClaren combined on a brilliant marketing plan to launch the promotion. And Bob Meyrowitz at Semaphore Entertainment Group had the courage to fund a risky venture that had been turned down by every other pay-per-view company in the industry.
Gracie had a clear mission in mind: spreading his family’s martial art, a judo variant they called Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. In a bold move, Rorion Gracie’s brother Royce was selected to represent the family art of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu. Royce was not considered the family’s top fighter — that honor belonged to his older brother Rickson, who was a finely sculpted and vicious alpha male. Royce was different. Skinny, quiet, and unassuming, he looked more like an accountant than a cage fighter. Barely over 170 pounds, he was the odd man out amongst a collection of burly kickboxers and gigantic sumo wrestlers. But that was exactly what Rorion wanted. If Royce Gracie won the UFC, it would clearly be because of the superiority of his martial art — the idea that he was a superior athlete would never even be considered.
Royce Gracie’s toughest challenge at the first UFC event would be Ken Shamrock. The Pancrase star had heard about the new show from his training partner Scott Bessac. Shamrock and his support team were skeptical it would be real, skeptical that it would even happen. Four days earlier he even competed in his third Pancrase fight, taking the long flight back from Japan with mentor Masakatsu Funaki in tow, waiting for word that these would actually be worked wrestling matches.
“Right up until the day of the event we were waiting for them to let us in on the secret,” Shamrock’s father and business manager Bob said. “Ken thought it was likely just a pro wrestling event in disguise. But they never did ask anyone to do a work and suddenly it was time to fight.”
After beating Pat Smith in the first round, Shamrock was sure he was on his way to victory. He figured Smith was the toughest customer in the whole competition besides Shamrock himself, a muscular kickboxer with an excess of testosterone and hard punches and kicks. He hadn’t been impressed with Gracie in the first round, and with more than 30 pounds on the smaller man, assumed he was going to steamroll him. Shamrock was confident in his abilities on the mat, in retrospect too much so.
Royce looked to take Shamrock down, but the Pancrase star easily blocked his feeble double-leg attempt. It made little difference to Gracie — he just wanted Ken on the ground and was just as happy on the bottom in the famous Gracie guard as he was on the top. Royce was a predator from the guard, waiting for a Shamrock mistake. He didn’t need to wait long.
When Shamrock grabbed hold of Gracie’s leg and went for a leglock, the Brazilian grappler pounced. Using Ken’s own momentum, Gracie landed on top of the stunned wrestler. In the scramble that followed, Royce was able to snake his arm under Shamrock’s throat. Shamrock tapped the mat — three times, as the announcers famously pointed out.
Unfortunately, the referee appeared to have missed Shamrock’s concession. As officials looked to restart the fight, Ken’s sense of fair play overrode his desire to win. Royce whispered in Ken’s ear, “You know you tapped.” Ken was a man of honor. “I tapped the mat and the referee didn’t see it. He was going to let it go, but I tapped the mat. I’m not going to lie. Otherwise the referee was going to let it go. He let go of his hold already. It wouldn’t be fair for me to say, ‘Keep going.’ He’d already let go of the hold.”
Ken had no answer for Royce’s gi or his strategy. He was used to the Pancrase style. In Japan, you could afford to be patient on the mat. If you made a mistake, the ropes were there to save you, forcing a break in the action. It was a style that worked very well — in Pancrase.
Shamrock explained, “There was definitely a different strategy, because when I was first fighting in the UFC, there were no time limits and no rules. If you made a mistake, it could be a long and serious problem. There were no rounds to save you. No referees to save you. You didn’t want to be on the ground because they could kick you in the head, kick you when you were down. It was pretty much anything goes. There was a big-time difference in strategy going into the fight. Pancrase was, in the standup, open hand palm strikes. . . . In the UFC it was closed fist, bare knuckle. And no rules. It was a huge difference from Pancrase where you could grab a rope and escape and start over again standing up. But you lost points when you did that. You lost five points and the fight’s over. That’s a whole lot of chances to escape out of a submission hold. It was a lot more strategic and you had to be a lot more skilled in your submission game. The UFC was less skilled, but a lot more dangerous than Pancrase.”
The Gracie win prope
lled the show into the mainstream. If Shamrock had triumphed it might have been dismissed as a toughman clone. Gracie prevailing opened people’s minds to what fighting really is.
“When I fought Shamrock,” Royce Gracie said, “everyone said, ‘Wow, look at this little guy beat this big muscular guy. Can you believe this?’ I showed that Gracie Jiu-Jitsu can really work. If I can beat Ken Shamrock, anyone can with the right skills.”
“Our intention was to create a conflict of styles,” Royce’s brother Rickson explains. “Because it was our belief that jiu-jitsu was superior. When my brother dominated so many other styles it really shocked the martial arts world.”
Some of Shamrock’s fellow Pancrase standouts loved the idea of the UFC. Bas Rutten wasn’t sure what to think at first, afraid that the lack of referee intervention could lead to serious harm. “Then I saw the first UFC in Holland on an illegal tape and a friend of ours, Gerard Gordeau, was fighting and he kicked a sumo in the face,” Rutten recalls. “Teeth go flying out and I say, ‘Okay. This is good stuff.’ It was wild, man.”
Dave Meltzer, editor of Wrestling Observer newsletter, says not everyone in the organization was as pleased as Rutten with what they saw that night. Funaki and the Pancrase leadership disliked the UFC, considering the bare-knuckle spectacle barbaric: “UFC and Pancrase were very different. Pancrase was considered by its combatants as a civilized ‘game,’ which was physically far harder, particularly on the joints, because it was submission experts constantly ripping on the body, than the less skilled UFC brawls. . . . UFC was considered more unruly and brutal, like a legalized street fight. At first, Funaki hated UFC, even though he was in Ken Shamrock’s corner for his early matches. Shamrock even waved a Pancrase flag at early UFC events.”
Pancrase wasn’t the only promotion struggling with the Gracies. Desperate to capitalize on the family’s sudden prominence, the UWFi was looking to sign Royce for a match with their headliner Nobuhiko Takada. When Royce rejected their offer, they turned to his brother Rickson instead. Business had been at record highs in 1993 and 1994, but hard times were ahead. The promotion had taken a step back towards traditional professional wrestling when they signed Vader and claims to legitimacy had been further exposed by Pancrase, UFC, and Satoru Sayama’s Vale Tudo Japan 1994, an organization that swooped in and signed Rickson for a no-holds-barred tournament.
Sayama had disappeared from the scene back in 1984 when the original UWF fell apart. He spent the bulk of his time creating “shooting,” a new sport he was trying valiantly to get off the ground, but one that had completely flown under the radar in Japan. Although he is commonly credited with forming Shooto, an early Japanese MMA promotion that existed years before Pancrase, Sayama was mostly creating training centers and developing a new sport. The few early events he did promote looked more like shootboxing, a combination of kickboxing and throws, certainly nothing like modern MMA. The fighters in actual combat wore padded gear, including head protection. Events would also include grappling demonstrations, but the actual amateur contests seemed more focused on standing exchanges than ground work.
“His version of Shooto was all about conceptually creating a gym system for shooting,” Japanese wrestling expert Zach Arnold said. “It was more or less an extension of the UWF, the same techniques taught to the newcomer wrestlers in the dojos when the guys in New Japan would often shoot on each other during training sessions to show who was tougher.”
MMA website Sherdog’s Japan correspondent Tony Loiseleur says this “proto Shooto” didn’t hold any professional events until 1989. Even then, he says, they were a far cry from what fans would come to expect in a post-Gracie world.
“The first few years of Shooto competition consisted exclusively of amateur events, held with the intent of giving professional wrestlers and martial artists experience in real prizefighting, since at that time, none of these guys in Japan had much experience in fighting real cross–martial arts free fights,” Loiseleur said. “As such, Sayama and the Japan Pro Shooting crew’s concept of real free fighting at the time was quite rudimentary, and that’s what you’re seeing in the protective gear and otherwise awkward looking Shoot-style wrestling matches. It wasn’t until the introduction of BJJ and vale tudo that things started to evolve more toward the look and feel of modern MMA.”
Signing Rickson Gracie was a huge coup for Sayama. When he decimated the competition, beating three opponents in just over six minutes combined, Rickson became priority one for the UWFi office duo of Yoji Anjo and Yuki Miyato. The UWFi offered what some insiders say was the single biggest two-match money guarantee in wrestling history, a deal that would have him split a pair of matches with Takada, but the proud Brazilian balked. His uncle George had turned to professional wrestling in Brazil, capitalizing on the family name, and Rickson’s father, Helio, and the rest of the family had essentially disowned him. Rickson wanted nothing to do with pro wrestling, so Miyato came up with another plan to take advantage of the Gracie name.
After failing to sign Rickson to a pro wrestling match, he sent one of his toughest guys, midcarder Yoji Anjo, to challenge Rickson to a fight on December 7, 1994 — Pearl Harbor Day. They expected that Rickson would decline the impromptu fight, or that Anjo would beat him, and that they would return to Japan with a public relations victory. Gracie had other plans.
At home with his family, he got the call that a Japanese wrestler was at his Los Angeles dojo with the media in tow. While UWFi official Ted Pelc says Anjo intended to stay in Los Angeles for two weeks getting acclimated and into shape before challenging Gracie, the media’s presence escalated things. “Jet lagged, right after Anjo gets off the plane, the press takes him on the bus and they go directly to Gracie’s dojo,” Pelc said. Worse still, the company didn’t get any of the publicity footage they wanted. “When the fight took place, Gracie shut the cameras out. The only photos available are after the fight.”
Anjo called Rickson a coward in front of his entire family and his students, and it was on. Asked if he needed time to get ready, Rickson replied, “I was born ready, motherfucker.” Gracie brutalized Anjo. Witnesses say Gracie got the mount position and rained down punch after punch on the helpless wrestler’s face. The Japanese papers ran pictures of Anjo looking like he had been in a gang initiation, his face turned to hamburger by Gracie’s vicious assault.
Anjo had brought the press along with him to record what he expected to be a triumph. “[He] followed the media rather than taking control of the situation as originally planned,” Pelc said. “A regrettable mistake, but it happened.”
“Anjo got embarrassed by Rickson,” Arnold said. “It haunted Takada until the end of UWF-Inter because fans kept asking, when is this guy going to defend UWF-Inter’s honor?”
For his part, Gracie thought the man he was facing was actually Takada himself. And as the senior man, Japanese culture dictated that Takada should have stepped in to challenge Rickson where his protégé had failed. Instead, the promotion continued forward as if nothing had happened. Takada took the UWFi title back from Vader in April 1995, freeing the WCW star to lose his WCW title to Hulk Hogan. The American star had been handcuffed by wrestling politics — he couldn’t do a clean job in WCW for fear that it would hurt the UWFi’s cache with hardcore fans. Those fans truly believed the UWFi champion stood head and shoulders above everyone else in the industry. Losing to a “fake” wrestler like Hogan, so synonymous in Japan with Inoki and his promotion, would have been disastrous.
struggles with shamrock
Funaki was also having trouble with his top gaijin, Shamrock, whose attention was focused like a laser on Royce Gracie and the UFC. Shamrock’s loss in the first event had spooked Funaki and the other Pancrase leaders. Ken had lost badly and it had hurt the promotion — their top fighter being dismantled by Gracie made Pancrase look weak.
The promotion wasn’t going to tell Ken he couldn’t do the UFC events, but before he left he had to do s
omething to make the group look strong.
Said Lion’s Den trainer Scott Bessac, “Ken told me a lot, but it was mostly on the personal tip. . . . I know the fight with Suzuki, where he hurt Ken’s knee — that was a work. And the one where Funaki submitted Ken in a couple of minutes with a rear naked choke? That was because Ken was about to go back to the UFC.”
The first job Bessac describes was in January 1994 for Minoru Suzuki, prior to the UFC’s second event. Shamrock faked a knee injury for the Japanese press; ironically a misplaced Vernon White kick actually prevented him from competing, breaking his arm just a few weeks later.
The second work Bessac describes came just a week before the third UFC, a much-hyped tournament with Ken and Royce in opposite brackets, Ken did another job, this time a loss to Funaki in just 2:30. Again, it ended up being for naught. Gracie had to leave the competition early after a grueling fight with Kimo, and Shamrock pulled out in despair.
With Shamrock’s attention elsewhere, the promotion turned its energies to other fighters. Rutten was a Funaki favorite and the company had high hopes for the charismatic Dutchman. He was a bundle of energy, attacking life with the same infectious joy he took into the ring. Rutten had lost to Shamrock early in his career and got a second chance, a shot at Ken’s King of Pancrase title, in March 1995. Funaki, intent on building his new star, looked to have Shamrock drop the title in a worked match.
“Ken was like, ‘No way, I’m not losing to Bas.’ Bas and Ken got along fine,” Bessac said. “But that was a no go.”
With Shamrock refusing to cooperate, Funaki concentrated on helping Rutten take the title from Ken the hard way. It was to no avail. Shamrock caught Rutten in a knee bar just a minute into the fight. Captured beautifully on video, it is an amazing snapshot that incapsulates an era.
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