Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  “Before I knew it, he’s sucker punched me,” Orndorff said. “He made a mistake and I got up and the rest is history.”

  Orndorff, despite having an arm shriveled by nerve damage courtesy of an old wrestling injury, despite wearing sandals, despite being nearly 50 years old, had beaten Vader easily:

  Vader had showed up late for the Center Stage tapings and Orndorff started yelling at him to hurry up and do his promos. There had been previous heat between the two. Both got face to face and Orndorff begged Vader, who outweighed him by 200 pounds, to start something. Vader shoved him down with a palm blow and Orndorff came back fighting, flooring Vader and knocking him for a loop with a punch from his bad left arm. Orndorff proceeded to kick at Vader’s face with his sandaled feet until all the wrestlers broke it up. Amazingly, everyone just left Vader on the floor in a fetal position and went back to doing their thing, so when Vader recovered he walked right into Orndorff’s office and they got into another fight. After this fight was broken up, Vader was sent home with the belief that he’d instigated it, and Orndorff ended up working a match later that night with a busted up face against Barry Houston. WCW ended up firing Vader, who immediately jumped to the WWF.

  Orndorff notes, “It was one of those unfortunate things that happened. The only thing that I am thankful for is that if my body wasn’t hurt. If I didn’t have all of that nerve damage on my right, God knows I might be in jail for killing him. I am not taking anything from anybody.”

  Most fans never knew about the incident, but Vader’s locker room reputation was never the same — and neither was his career. He went from being the tough “shooter” to being a fat clown, mocked by WWF announcers just a few years later for being overweight. Wrestling wasn’t a shoot in the ring, but in the back, the boys played for keeps.

  While Vader escaped back to America and a $500,000 a year job, fellow American import Gary Albright struggled to make a living in the UWFi. As his place on the card slipped, so did his temper. Albright was a nice man with a soft voice, the kind of guy who played fantasy hockey, not a big partier. But frustration was taking its toll. Drinking and fighting in the Tokyo clubs soon followed.

  “Gary Albright and I would go to get a few beers when we were off duty at the local bars and we’d have some of the American style wrestlers join us when they happened to be in the same town,” UWFi insider Ted Pelc remembered. “Naturally, some muscle-heads from one of the military bases, people who claimed to be boxers, karateka, judoka, martial artists, what have you, would start trouble and feel that they had to test us just because we were hanging out with some ‘show’ wrestlers, despite the fact that we were just minding our own business and keeping to ourselves. None of those ‘challengers’ even came close to going the distance with them. It goes without saying, but Gary would always do just as well and I’ve never seen him break a sweat in a straight bar room brawl. It was always quick, if you blinked you generally missed the whole thing. We really didn’t get into fights, it was more like a five-year-old attempting to fight an adult.”

  Some of Gary’s aggression was also taken out on his opponents in the ring. Angry at having to put over Kiyoshi Tamura in a bout just a month after losing to Masahito Kakihara to set up a Kakihara title challenge, Albright refused to play along and let the rising star look good. At just 175 pounds, there was little Tamura could do on the mat with the 300-plus-pound NCAA All-American. The match was a mess with Albright clearly refusing to cooperate. “Break, Gary, break,” the official had to shout at one point when Albright wouldn’t let up on a hold in the ropes.

  In the end, Albright lost the match. But Tamura knew it had been a debacle, confusing for the fans, and hard on the eyes. It was to have been the greatest moment of his young career and when it was over, despite his hand being raised, he broke down in real tears.

  “Tamura was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Arnold said. “Gary wanted financial security and just didn’t get it. This is why he ended up with All Japan, but it took a while (as all things do in Japan for various political reasons).”

  By October 1995 the UWFi was nearly broke and in desperate straights. The group had no choice but to do the same thing the original UWF had done a decade before — look to New Japan Pro-Wrestling for a lifeline. Soon, with a record-breaking crowd of 67,000 watching closely inside the massive Tokyo Dome, Takada and the other UWFi wrestlers sold out.

  For years they had challenged the legitimacy of the “fake” New Japan wrestlers. But, in the end, money is the most real thing in the fantasy land of professional wrestling. New Japan had it and Takada’s crew didn’t. According to Wrestling Observer, this gave New Japan booker Riki Chōshū the power to call all the shots. And Chōshū, with a definite axe to grind against the “shooters” dating back to the infamous Maeda kick in 1987, made the UWFi wrestlers look second rate, even if doing so may not have been the best move for business. Even Takada lost his first match, submitting in embarrassing fashion by figure four leglock to Keiji “the Great Muta” Mutoh in the center of the ring: “Fans left the show with the distinct impression that the UWFi so-called shooters and style were second rate in comparison to New Japan. If this was a one shot deal, New Japan did the right thing for its status as the top company in the Japan (and the world) and its business. But with the interest and money this drew and had the potential of doing in the future, Takada needed to win the first match to give the underdog promotion credibility for a long-term feud.”

  The crowd was on fire for the matches, which mostly ended quickly and decisively in favor of the New Japan stars. Chōshū himself destroyed UWFi heel Yoji Anjo and the feud between the two groups was mostly dead on arrival. The other wrestlers became afterthoughts with only Takada himself remaining a viable competitor.

  Like Ric Flair in America, Takada’s power tower at the box office was untouchable. His rematch with Mutoh and subsequent match with Shinya Hashimoto both drew more than 60,000 fans to the Tokyo Dome, and he followed up his New Japan run with a pair of tremendous matches with Genichiro Tenryu on the independent scene. But options for Takada, it seemed, were limited. Fans were demanding one match, a bout with Rickson Gracie to settle the score.

  “It haunted Takada,” Arnold said. Finally, with the financial backing of mobster Hiromichi Momose, Pride Fighting Championship was born in 1997. With Nobuyuki Sakakibara helping on the TV end and Naoto Morishita providing some marketing hustle, the promotion lasted a decade, producing some of the best fights and fighters in MMA history. But, originally, it was a promotion created to showcase this single fight.

  There is a lot we don’t know about the financial backers behind the earliest events that would later be known as Pride FC, and given the yakuza scandal and intrigue that ultimately crippled Pride and forced its sale to Dana White and the Fertitta brothers of UFC fame, that might very well be for the best.

  But one thing we can say with relative certainty is that these backers were betting on the viability of Japan’s wrestling heroes as legitimate fighters when they put up the money for the first Tokyo Dome spectacular — or, at the very least, they were betting on the Japanese ticket-buying public’s belief in the legitimacy of their wrestling heroes. It’s possible that some among the thousands in attendance were there out of nothing more than morbid curiosity, secure in the knowledge that these professional wrestling performers were just that, performers, and would quickly be exposed by serious and rigorously trained no-holds-barred martial artists. But from the way those crowds roared, the way the cheered and chanted, it’s hard to hear anything like cynicism in that incredible din.

  No, it was with genuine adoration and a willingness to believe that the Tokyo crowd cheered Nobuhiko Takada, the first of their great wrestling heroes to enter the world of mixed martial arts. The Japanese fans had seen Takada, a veteran of countless shoot-style wrestling classics, combine his submission skills and stiff kicks with an indomitable will to win as he emerged the victor i
n performances against the likes of Keiji Mutoh and Big Van Vader. Even if those contests were not exactly on the up and up, it didn’t seem completely unreasonable to expect that at least some of those attributes might translate from the notoriously tough world of shoot-style exhibition to the even tougher world of real athletic competition.

  This is not, however, how thing played out before a live audience of 47,860. Super Vader had been scary. But Rickson Gracie — by all accounts the greatest exponent of his family’s art, distilled and honed, as it was, from the fundamentals of grappling the traveling Mitsuyo Maeda had taught his uncle Carlos decades before — was much, much scarier.

  Their October 11, 1997, bout opened with Takada coming out cautiously in a deep, defensive stance as Rickson stalked him with the strange upright posture characteristic of the Gracie family in the early days of mixed martial arts. Once the fighters tied up in the corner, it was clear that Takada was not just cautious, he was frightened: terrified of the legendary grappler’s submission skills, Takada clung to the ropes rather than risk being taken down. But that only delayed the inevitable. Once the fighters were restarted, Rickson attempted another takedown, and, after a brief scramble, dramatically slammed Takada to the canvas with a solid double-leg. The rest was academic. Gracie slipped effortlessly from side control to mount as Takada could do nothing more than hang on for dear life. Less than three minutes after the bout had begun amid the rapturous cheers of tens of thousands of puroresu fans, it ended with their hero Takada tapping out to the vastly, effortlessly superior submission fighter. Rickson by arm bar.

  It was, to say the least, an inauspicious beginning for the heroes of Japanese professional wrestling on the biggest stage in mixed martial arts. And that is without question what Pride was from its inception: the number one show in the world. While the Ultimate Fighting Championship was struggling against regulators and widespread public scorn to put on shows for a few thousand rough-and-tumble fans in out-of-the-way places like Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, Pride was almost immediately part of the Japanese sporting mainstream. How could it not be when it came out of virtually nowhere to draw an audience of nearly 50,000 to the Tokyo Dome? The public demand was enormous; the professional wrestling and sporting media simply followed the dollars.

  When the fight finally happened on October 11, 1997, Takada’s poor performance shocked fans. He had been built for years as the toughest man in professional wrestling. Where were his kicks that allegedly struck blows more powerful than a man swinging a baseball bat? Where were his vaunted submissions? Takada’s reputation died that night at the Tokyo Dome.

  Pride paid Takada $180,000 and Rickson a rumored $1 million for the fight. It could have easily been the end of the road for major league MMA in Japan. But the passionate fans of the UWF refused to let a dream die.

  Despite Takada being clearly outclassed, UWF fans were undaunted. The biggest roar from the crowd that night was for a non-combatant shown briefly on the big screen in the Dome. When the camera panned to Akira Maeda the Tokyo Dome was alive. Takada had lost and let them down, but surely Maeda could beat Rickson and restore the UWF to glory?

  “Everyone in the Big Egg knew that there were only two left. The two who still carried, at the time, what I would call an ‘Illusion of UWF.’ Masakatsu Funaki and Akira Maeda,” Japanese MMA writer Shu Hirata wrote at BoutReviewUSA.com. “The fans wanted to believe their hero could be the best in the world so they pinned their hopes on Maeda, the oldest member of the club and the most charismatic out of the three. That’s why fans went crazy when they saw Maeda’s close-up displayed on that gigantic monitor.”

  The buzz was like nothing else. Takada was always the better athlete, and was in better shape too, as a series of injuries had left Maeda unable to train and overweight. But to the fans, Maeda better represented the Budo ethos of the Japanese warrior. Unlike Takada, who had avoided Rickson for three years, Maeda wasted little time trying to put the match together and responded to the fans’ calls right away.

  Maeda tried hard to bring in Rickson to Rings for his retirement bout. He thought he had the deal wrapped up and was surprised to see an announcement that there would be a rematch with Takada instead. Maeda would finish his career against wrestling legend Alexander Karelin rather than Rickson and would never get the chance to set things right with the Gracies.

  A year to the day after Takada’s defeat, the two had a rematch, again at the famed Tokyo Dome. Again, Takada could mount little resistance. The second loss to Gracie left Takada’s reputation badly damaged. He had recovered easily from losses in the pro wrestling world — after all, many fans were able to tell themselves that if the bout had been real Takada would have surely triumphed. Now, exposed as a charlatan, his star was dimming, and Takada’s losses were soul crushing for the hardcore fans that made up Pride’s audience.

  The promotion, built on the Japanese wrestler’s popularity, was faltering as well. They attempted to rehabilitate Takada, bringing in former UFC champion Mark Coleman to put him over in a worked match. Dave Meltzer was consulted on the finish, as a purported sporting event was headlined by what was really a pro wrestling match.

  “It was what it was,” Coleman said. “I needed to support my family. They guaranteed me another fight after that and I needed that security. It was what it was. I’m going to leave it at that.”

  Many fans in America were disgusted. This was supposed to be a sport, and they didn’t understand that the promotion was the creation of pro wrestling fans with the sole purpose of promoting a pro wrestling star. To these diehards, adding in the occasional worked match muddied the waters. They didn’t want ambiguity, the kind of perpetual questions that linger over Pancrase bouts to this day. They wanted definitive answers about who the best fighters in the world were. While many fighters also disagreed with Coleman’s move, it was an era before big money existed for anyone not named Gracie. Coleman had to do what he could to survive.

  “I don’t agree with it, but I can’t fault him for it,” fellow Pride star Mark Kerr said. “It paid dividends for him. He sacrificed a little but it gained him so much. I made it perfectly clear that it was my reputation and my integrity on the line. I made it clear to them that there was no way I would ever compromise it for financial gain. It would be too hard for me to carry that to bed every night.”

  Kerr was approached about his own fight with Takada at Pride 6. “This is the way the Japanese do business,” he explained. “They pulled me aside and said, ‘Hey, Mark, we want to talk to you about something you maybe don’t understand. The Japanese fans, they love technique. They really know this sport and are familiar with it and the techniques.’ That being said to me, well, you can kind of fill in the lines. Meaning, they don’t want to see me get on top of him and pound the crap out of him. That’s what I took out of the conversation. It was a whole conversation with the promoters talking about how they appreciated technical things. And they just left it at that. I left the meeting kind of chuckling. If I needed to go out there and punch him in the face until his nose fell I would have done it. But he gave up the submission, and that was easier for me.”

  Kerr would become the company’s standard-bearer. He was considered by most to be the best fighter in the world and the Japanese fans were awed by his bodybuilder’s physique and aggressive fighting style. Unfortunately, the kind of fights that could have made Kerr a legend never seemed to transpire.

  “They marketed me to the nth degree,” Kerr said. “I did their TV, their radio, their version of Johnny Carson, their Japanese game shows. I dressed up in a sumo suit on national television. . . . I wish things had gone as originally planned. To get me to agree to go over there, they offered me what was then the ridiculous sum of $150,000 and a chance to fight Royce Gracie. I actually signed a fight poster with me and Royce Gracie and it said Pride 2. That would have been awesome and might have changed how people view me.”

  The Gracie match fell through a
nd Kerr ended up fighting a succession of uninspiring opponents like kickboxing champion Branko Cikatic and Luta Livre ace Hugo Duarte. Eventually, drug abuse got the best of him and his once fearsome fighting spirit seemed to have withered on the vine. Pride was dying without a Japanese star to replace Takada or a foreign import who could draw money, until a young fighter, fresh from the UWFi undercard was able to make his mark. Pride was built on the foundation of a Takada versus Gracie feud, and fittingly, it was Takada’s understudy Kazushi Sakuraba who made the promotion a sustainable venture, bringing hope to pro wrestling fans everywhere who were afraid that the art form simply couldn’t compete with its jiu-jitsu counterpart.

  22

  SAKU

  Professional wrestling has never seemed like a more viable and effective martial art than it did during the Pride years. When Pride Fighting Championships was a legitimate popular phenomenon in the Japan, routinely drawing television audiences in the tens of millions and reaching a level of media saturation that makes even the post–Ultimate Fighter success of the UFC seem almost culturally insignificant, there was really only one man at the center of that maelstrom.

  Kazushi Sakuraba, a former collegiate wrestling captain schooled in the submission wrestling handed down to him by his seniors in the UWFi ranks, was not just the undisputed top draw for one of the hottest wrestling or fighting promotions the world had ever seen; he transcended his sport, however briefly, to become a Japanese national icon. And everything he did, he did with a showman’s flair. From his elaborate and comic ring entrances to his often bizarre fighting techniques, nearly every movement he made on camera was in tribute to the professional wrestling stars that had captured his imagination as young fan. He would walk down the massive Pride ramp like “The Great Muta,” like a Road Warrior, like Vader, or the incomparable “Tiger Mask.” And once he’d entered the ring, the homage would continue.