Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  Who knew we would ever see the Mongolian chop used in a legitimate fight? And not by some marginal figure in a sideshow match, but by the best mixed martial artist of his generation, arguably the greatest in the young history of the sport? Seemingly against all odds, throwing all we’d thought we’d learned about the martial arts on its head, it turned out that the most technically adept, celebrated, and respected mixed martial artist on the planet was a professional wrestler.

  It wasn’t that Sakuraba was the first wrestler to assert himself in mixed martial arts competition. Far from it: by the time Kazushi Sakuraba appeared on the scene, we’d already seen Ken Shamrock, professional wrestler and Pancrase star, emerge from the chaos of the earliest UFC events as the promotion’s top draw and first Superfight champion before ultimately losing that latter title to another man with strong ties to the world of professional wrestling, Dan Severn. Amateur wrestling, represented by Severn, Mark Coleman, Mark Kerr, and Randy Couture, had already emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the cage. There could be no doubt of the effectiveness of the fundamentals of wrestling as martial arts techniques, or of highly trained and well-conditioned wrestlers as potentially first-rate mixed martial artists. But the ineffable Kazushi Sakuraba was something else entirely.

  The Kazushi Sakuraba story can, and has, been told many ways. But it has never been told better than by the man himself. Sakuraba has penned three volumes of autobiography, the first published in 2000 and the most recent in 2007. While none of them are likely to ever receive official English-language publication, the first and third volumes have, however, been made available in English through a user-supported online project called MMA Translations. These very readable editions, both entitled Me, reveal Sakuraba to be a charming and candid prose stylist with a dry, ironic sense of humour. The first volume charts Sakuraba’s long road to the top; the third, his seemingly even longer road to physical ruin.

  Sakuraba insists that “besides pooping and larceny, I really was a good, polite, and humble kid.” He lived a quiet life in a remote corner of rural northern Japan until a fateful day in his first year of middle school, when a Tiger Mask manga caught his eye as he walked the aisles of a small bookshop. Amazingly, this was the first time the young Sakuraba had encountered the Tiger Mask craze that saw Satoru Sayama don the guise of the manga and anime hero to the delight of children across Japan. That’s because, for children growing up in Akita prefecture, it was different: “Pro wrestling broadcasts were put on in a late-night timeslot, which made it difficult for kids to ever even see it. That’s the boonies. It sounds like I’m joking, but I only learned very recently that at that time, pro-wrestling was broadcast all over Japan during primetime, 8 p.m. on Friday evenings. But, that was for everywhere except Akita.” Because of this “painful circumstance,” Sakuraba had been completely oblivious to the world of professional wrestling. But he would quickly make up for lost time.

  A week later, Sakuraba saw the words “Pro Wresting — Tiger Mask” listed in the TV guide describing New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s horrible late-night television slot, and, after struggling to stay awake, Sakuraba was moved. “Seeing Tiger Mask for the first time as a kid had an amazing impact on my heart,” he recalls. “Jumping and flying, all of his movements were so beautiful . . . I was completely blown away. That this kind of interesting sport existed in the world.” From that moment on, Sakuraba’s focus was singular — well, almost singular: “It was at this time that I decided what I wanted to be when I grew up — a pro-wrestler (or if that was no good, a pilot).” Inspired by the example of Masakatsu Funaki, who had entered the world of professional wrestling directly upon graduation from middle school, Sakuraba announced his intention to do exactly the same. Understandably, his parents were horrified, and insisted that their son at least complete high school before even entertaining any such notion. And so, as a dutiful son, Sakuraba turned his energies towards wrestling of a slightly different kind — that is, amateur wrestling at Akita Shougyou High School — with the long-term goal of one day joining the professional ranks.

  Years later, at the height of his powers in the Pride FC ring, Sakuraba’s techniques often appeared as effortless as they were stylish. It would be easy to mistake Sakuraba for a natural. But nothing could be further from the truth. Despite his undeniable enthusiasm for wrestling, Sakuraba was completely unprepared for the athletic and technical demands of the sport. His only previous sports experience had been in basketball, a sport he hated, but hated slightly less than baseball, which had been his other option as a mandatory sport until high school. He came to the wrestling mats in passable physical condition, but immediately found that “the level of practice was quite high.” He elaborates, “For the guys that joined in the same year as me, there were kids that had become Tohoku [regional] judo champions when they were in middle school or kids that had shown superiority in their results in sports, mostly kids like that. As for kids who had voluntarily joined the wrestling department, it was just me and one other boy. The rest were all basically a group pulled in there on sports recommendations. In my first year in high school, I was ragdolled by even the tiny judo kids.”

  An inauspicious beginning for the finest mixed martial artist of his generation, to be sure. The sparring was a brutal grind, and the conditioning even harder. But Sakuraba was not just undeterred; he was elated. With visions of Tiger Mask still firmly in his mind, Sakuraba was exactly where he wanted to be, whatever the hardships. “I was doing what I loved, wrestling,” he explains. “Even when other guys around me were grumbling, I was laughing, having fun doing it.”

  All the while, his focus on the world of professional wrestling never wavered. This was the time of shoot-style splinter group UWF’s return to New Japan Pro-Wrestling, a brilliant angle that pitted feared outsiders against the familiar heroes of NJPW, the same program that would later inspire the WCW vs. nWo feud that helped vault professional wrestling to its late 1990s North American business peak. Sakuraba was completely engrossed. “I borrowed videotapes of the original UWF from my friend and watched religiously,” he recalls. “As I filled the days and hours in high school with wrestling practice, I came to really understand the flow of pro wrestling. I watched the matches on TV, and during my time off, I did nothing but read Shuukan Puroresu. I had to read every single nook and corner of every page or I wouldn’t be satisfied, so a single issue would always take me about two weeks to finish.”

  Despite being enthralled by one of the greatest angles in professional wrestling history, Sakuraba’s desire to jump to the pro ranks at the earliest opportunity, a desire that had horrified his parents only few short years before, had almost completely left him. “Where’d my dream gone of being a pro-wrestler . . . I realized that even more than being a pro-wrestler, I had come to love amateur wrestling. I wanted to do more wrestling.” To his parents’ great relief, this meant college, specifically Chuo University. Chuo was no wrestling powerhouse, but hardly a slouch: a blessing penned by Chuo alumnus and super heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestling Olympian Tomomi Tsuruta, better known in his professional days as the fearsome “Jumbo,” hung on the wrestling room wall as a concrete symbol of the opportunities available to the young men assembled on those mats, to those among them with the dedication and ability to make the most of their time there.

  Sakuraba threw himself completely into his training, and took every opportunity to spar with those senior students gracious enough to offer tips and encouragement to an enthusiastic freshman. “Losing when you spar against the really good guys is a matter of course,” Sakuraba says. “It’s not a match. Training is training. So, I never felt real humiliation in training. Of course, if I lost I’d first get pissed. But just getting pissed isn’t enough. It’s important to use the energy of that anger and put it back into training. If you lose in sparring, just get back to training and get stronger.”

  This is clearly the attitude of an athlete committed to genuine self-improvement. Japanese s
ociety, especially in athletics, was divided into a strict hierarchy made up of senior men (senpai) and junior men (kouhai). Sakuraba was battling this system as much as opponents or his own body. It was about temporarily putting aside the demands of the ego, turning off that inhibiting part of the mind that compels the weak senpai to either bully their kouhai or avoid sparring entirely for fear of embarrassment, and embrace the routine defeats that come in training as opportunities to learn. “On the other hand,” Sakuraba adds, “losing in a real match is wretched, that’s all that can be said about it.”

  The high point of Sakuraba’s competitive collegiate career came early, in the summer following his first year, when he faced Tokuya Ota, who would eventually claim the bronze medal in freestyle at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. There is no real accounting for Sakuraba, an enthusiastic but uncredentialed wrestler, taking a win over an athlete the calibre of Ota, and years later, Sakuraba can offer very little by way of explanation. “Dumbfounded,” he writes, “I found myself scoring against him, and I suddenly realized I’d won.” Sakuraba was as surprised as anyone. “It didn’t feel real to me, but I thought, ‘In the end, I trained my ass off, so that’s probably why I won.’”

  Whatever great expectations were visited upon Sakuraba in the wake of this stunning win over one of Japan’s most promising wrestlers were short-lived, however, as Ota did his homework in the wake of his loss, and discovered Sakuraba’s dark secret: “Yeah, I’m not good with throws,” Sakuraba was forced to admit once again. “I get ragdolled even in training. Shit, I hate losing.” They would face each other three more times, without Sakuraba mounting so much as a fraction of the offense that had seen him somehow emerge the victor in their first encounter.

  In the end, Sakuraba was outclassed by Ota. He was also badly outworked. The enthusiasm that had carried Sakuraba through that grueling first year of not just wrestling training itself, but the difficult life of a kouhai, had begun to flag. “The fun training had suddenly become boring,” he writes, and his willingness to put the necessary work in dropped off almost immediately. Despite temporary bursts of fanaticism, Sakuraba’s commitment to training throughout his career wasn’t always what it could or perhaps should have been. As early as his second year of high school, Sakuraba admits to figuring out which corners he could cut in training. “I’d gotten the feel for where I could cheat,” he says, and whether that took the form of lackluster burpees and pushups whenever a trainer’s back was turned, or assigning a lookout and goofing off if the coach had to step out for a meeting, Sakuraba figured out all the angles. He didn’t want to run. He didn’t want to do squats. All he wanted to do was wrestle.

  Despite this drop in interest and application, and a stormy relationship with his coach, Sakuraba was named captain of the wrestling team after his third year. Rather than reignite a fading passion for the sport, the burden of being captain only heightened his overall displeasure with his situation: the upperclassmen he’d most liked to train with had moved on; “picking on the kouhai” who remained didn’t suit him; rumors swirled that his coach had, oddly, run him down verbally to the rest of the team despite naming him captain; and training had become nothing more than a tedious grind. “The captain who fucking hated being captain” is how Sakuraba describes his agitated condition. And so he got out. Sakuraba “made up a lie” and quit, and spent a fifth, aimless year nominally fulfilling final requirements at Chuo while in fact spending as much time as possible playing pachinko and drinking, and deferring, as much as possible, any serious thoughts about his future. Think Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, only rather than Mrs. Robinson showing up and suddenly making things a lot more interesting, it was Yoshiki Takahashi.

  The Business

  A night of heavy drinking and attendant soul-searching led Sakuraba to the conclusion that all that awaited him after college were limited and decidedly unthrilling employment prospects. “I really didn’t have anything but wrestling,” he said. With his modest amateur career at an end, that could mean really only one thing. “There’s nothing I can do,” he decided, “but become a pro wrestler.” Sakuraba had become accustomed to having this idea laughed off by whomever he shared it with, but on yet another night out, emboldened once again by drink, he couldn’t help himself: “I bravely said, ‘I’m going to be a pro wrestler!’ but really I had no idea how to become one.” In an incredible stroke of luck, that night’s drinking buddy didn’t laugh, but instead told Sakuraba that he had Takahashi’s phone number, if he wanted it. “You bastard,” Sakuraba replied, “you have Takahashi’s phone number!? You shoulda said something earlier!”

  Takahashi was a name from Sakuraba’s past, a familiar figure from the high school wrestling tournaments of years gone by, though the two had never properly met. Still, it was a connection, however tenuous, to the world of professional wrestling: Takahashi was now working for Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi, one of the shoot-style groups to emerge from the disorder that followed the second UWF’s 1990 disintegration. This, Sakuraba decided, was his in. He made the call, and learned from Takahashi that he could try out whenever he felt he was ready. Both nothing and everything came out of this chance contact with Takahashi: in the end, Sakuraba never tried out for Fujiwara Gumi, but inspired by that conversation, Sakuraba rededicated himself to his middle-school dream of becoming a professional wrestler. When, only a few days later, he learned from the pages of Shuukan Puroresu that UWF International, another shoot-style group, was looking for new talent, Sakuraba enthusiastically applied, and found himself taking the entrance exam shortly after his 23rd birthday. UWF-Inter, as he most often calls it, had been very clear that they were looking for recruits no older than 22, but Sakuraba, whose application had been sent in mere days before his birthday, wasn’t going to let that technicality get in the way.

  Much to his surprise, Sakuraba was the lone candidate set to be examined by six UWFi regulars. For a young man who had gotten by since his second year of high school by dropping his knees on push-ups when the coach wasn’t looking, “This was a really awful situation. I died doing the hill dash,” he writes. “I died doing squats. I died doing push-ups. I died five or six times from this test.” But he passed and was told that if he quit school almost imediately, he would be taken on as a shindeshi — a new recruit, a disciple. To the understandable dismay of his parents, Sakuraba did exactly that, and entered the world of professional wrestling September 1, 1992, just as he’d first dreamed of that late night in Akita years before when he’d seen Tiger Mask fly through the air in an inspiring display of athleticism and physical grace. And what was Sakuraba’s first duty, after having his head ceremonially shaved as he entered the dojo? “Weed the lawn,” Hiromitsu Kanehara told him. Not an inspiring start. But the next day, Sakuraba found himself enjoying barbecue on the beach with Kanehara, Yoshihiro Takayama, and the great Nobuhiko Takada. There was still a definite senpai/kouhai dynamic at work, but this wasn’t going to be like the Chuo University wrestling team at all.

  This is not to say that life as a UWFi trainee was a walk in the park. “I was doing endless squats and push-ups,” he remembers. “As pros, we were expected to do repetitions with numbers that were virtually astronomical. I was made to do squats until my knees sounded like a skeleton laughing.” Sakuraba, true to form, thought this kind of unending, mindless repetition was “pointless.” He certainly wasn’t alone in that assessment: new recruits, and even people slightly higher up the ladder, routinely disappeared from the dojo without a trace. “Night flight is a standard part of this world,” Sakuraba tell us. When one of the UWFi regulars who had helped administer Sakuraba’s entrance exam slipped off in the middle of the night, Sakuraba felt the loss acutely. “I became completely lonely.” After only a month, he was made a special assistant to Nobuhiko Takada, which meant he sparred almost exclusively with Takada and Yoji Anjo, both of whom outweighed Sakuraba by more than 50 pounds. Against significantly bigger men with much greater knowledge of and experience with su
bmissions, Sakuraba was routinely overmatched. “It wasn’t until about two or three years had passed that I could start to not get owned,” he tells us. Worse than the sparring, though, were the meals. Sakuraba had entered the dojo at 154 pounds, which was seen as far too slight for a professional wrestler. Eating to the point of serious discomfort was understood to be part of the job. Substantial weight gain proved elusive, however, since sleep was at a premium: Sakuraba’s duties as a kouhai kept him busy cooking, cleaning, and laundering during hours that he dearly wished he could spend quietly alone, recovering from the rigours of training and the suffering of constant overeating, “always feelings close to death.”

  But the new frontiers of striking and submissions that were opened up to him each day in sparring made it all completely worthwhile. Sakuraba was so fascinated by what he was learning in the dojo for its own sake that when he was informed that he would make his professional debut August 13, 1993, at the Budokan against Steve Nelson, the news didn’t bring with it any sense of reward or relief. “When I was told, ‘You’re next, going to make your debut,’” Sakuraba remembers, “I just said, ‘Oh, really,’ or something like that.” It was, if anything, a hassle, a distraction from the sparring in the dojo that was the real reason Sakuraba cooly endured life as a UWF-Inter kouhai. “It was a pain in the ass,” he says flatly, “so I didn’t even shave.” It was “a rather emotionless pro debut fight,” and ended in a loss. (Sakuraba refers to both pro wrestling matches and mixed martial arts contests as “fights,” and at no point concedes that there was anything prearranged about the in-ring action in UWF-International or any other professional wrestling organization.)

  Nelson remembers his own opposite emotions. While Sakuraba wasn’t keen on the match, others in the company took note of his potential. “There were 17,000 people there and I was real excited. The bosses told me it was a good match and I would be back to wrestle again . . . I had no idea he would become the real deal. I was 28 and he was around 23 so I just looked at him as a new wrestler. We were both just kids. My first three matches in the UWFi were against Sakuraba. The company considered us a great match up for the fans.”