Shooters

by Jonathan Snowden

  Freed from the hassle of his pro debut, Sakuraba was able to direct his attention back to the dojo, where he soon found himself sparring not just Takada and Anjo, but some notable foreigners too. Dan Severn, former Olympic team alternate and future UFC tournament and Superfight champion, failed to make much of an impression, however. Sakuraba acknowledges that Severn was “really good at using his weight and at throwing,” but beyond that, he has nothing but a kind of amused derision towards Severn’s skills. “I didn’t get the feeling that he was really strong. He didn’t know the ground game. I was a beginner, but I thought, ‘If it’s submissions, then I’m better.’” That verdict won’t surprise anyone who later watched Severn steamroll his way into the finals of the UFC 4 tournament only to fall victim to a Royce Gracie triangle choke. But Sakuraba’s harshest words are reserved for Severn’s striking, which he calls “half-assed and weak.” Sakuraba says, “I actually laughed. He faced off against the heavy bag, windmilling bitchslaps at it. I think he was aiming for palm strikes, but from what I saw, they were girly slaps.” Sakuraba isn’t talking about the kind of jarring palm strikes that would become the hallmark of the Pancrase organization, used with stunning force and precision by the likes of Bas Rutten, among others. “It wasn’t with the hard part in the palm,” Sakuraba takes pains to specify, “but with just his fingers really cutely tapping the heavy bag. ‘Pechi pechi pechi pechi . . .’ Whenever Severn was training striking, the gym was always filled with that insubstantial little hitting sound. But maybe Severn was aiming to do that, who knows. His opponent wouldn’t expect him to come flying in with windmilling bitchslaps. Maybe he had it all planned out.” Severn might have been brought in to square off against the top names in the UWFi ring, but for Sakuraba, what happened in the ring was insubstantial. What happened in the dojo is what counted, and in the dojo, as far as Sakuraba was concerned, Severn simply didn’t measure up.

  Sakuraba’s slightly strange lack of interest in his own early professional matches melted away entirely when, to his surprise, Nobuhiko Takada announced that the UWFi wrestlers would be participating in a series of challenge matches against the brightest stars of New Japan Pro-Wrestling. Sakuraba’s cynicism about his own nascent career melted away in a rush of childlike enthusiasm: “NJPW, the one I had been watching all through my childhood, that one? Whoa, I’m going to be able to fight a guy I’ve seen on TV?! Yes, I’ll do it, I’ll go.” Sakuraba was elated. But those around him who understood the business a little better — Masahiko Kakihara, Hiromitsu Kanehara, and Kiyoshi Tamura, among them — could see the writing on the wall. “Ehh, the only happy one is me?” Sakuraba asked. “I couldn’t read the signs of the situation at all.” UWFi was at death’s door, but it was not about to go quietly into that good night.

  The October 9, 1995, Tokyo Dome NJPW vs. UWFi event headlined by a clash between Keiji Mutoh and Nobuhiko Takada drew a monstrous crowd of 67,000 and yielded the highest gate in the history of Japanese professional wrestling. Sakuraba found himself opening the show, paired with Kanehara in a tag team bout against Tokimitsu Ishizawa and Yuji Nagata, acquaintances from Sakuraba’s collegiate and even high school wrestling days. This was Sakuraba’s position throughout the massive NJPW vs. UWFi feud: at or near the bottom of the card, but being exposed to the biggest crowds imaginable, and “already thinking about how to please the audience while fighting.” Further, “in that way,” despite his lowly position in the grand scheme of that legendary feud, “the challenges against NJPW made for good homework.” On top of that, Sakuraba had a brief conversation with Riki Chōshūin the bathroom, which, for him, made it all worthwhile.

  Shoot Style’s Lingering Death

  By the end of 1996, UWFi closed its doors for good. In its wake came Kingdom, made up mostly of UWFi refugees, it was a now largely forgotten shoot-style promotion that, to say the very least, failed to reach the dizzying heights the UWFi enjoyed. “Thinking back on it,” Sakuraba wrote more than a decade later, “I have no idea what the hell kind of organization Kingdom was.” He was not alone. The earliest shows, which falsely advertised Nobuhiko Takada, drew well enough at Yoyogi National Gymnasium, but soon Kingdom was confined to the much more modest Korakuen Hall for its particular brand of shoot-style, a style that was quickly fading as audiences became more exposed to the real thing. Takada, who could tell which way the wind was blowing, was already making preparations for a potentially huge money match with Rickson Gracie. Money was tight; pay was cut in half; and the workload for the few wrestlers left on the roster doubled. The Kingdom years, Sakuraba writes, were “proof of entropy.”

  KAZUSHI SAKURABA WITH NOBUHIKO TAKADA IN HIS CORNER

  © WREALANO@AOL.COM

  But even as the product in the ring suffered and drifted into irrelevance, Sakuraba again took refuge in the dojo. A new friend of Kanehara’s had started turning up to train: Enson Inoue, a Hawaiian-born, Japanese-American, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt, a Shooto and vale tudo Japan veteran. “Enson’s BJJ system was completely different from what we were doing,” Sakuraba writes. “Our whole thing was to get the takedown and get on top. Working like this, we could see the opponent’s movements and start to understand how they fight. Sparring with Enson, I really came to understand, ‘Ahh, this is the way BJJ guys move.’” Unlike his usual sparring partners, who would do their all to secure the top position and grind their opponent down, Inoue was a different animal entirely: “If I’d shoot, he’d at first try to stuff the takedown but if it didn’t immediately work, he would just accept the bottom. And from there he’d work for an arm bar or a triangle.” This early experience with the strategy and tactics of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu would prove invaluable to Sakuraba as he embarked on his mixed martial arts career, which, much to his surprise, was just around the corner.

  Shoot-style was clearly dying. Takada understood this, and brought top coaches, including Barcelona Olympian Takumi Adachi, into the well-appointed Kingdom dojo to help ready him for the transition to mixed martial arts. Kanehara understood this too and decided that the only way to bolster interest in their fading promotion was to prove that their wrestlers were, without question, legitimate fighters, capable of handling themselves against the no-holds-barred upstarts, and what better opportunity than the upcoming UFC Ultimate Japan event in Yokohama Arena? Yoji Anjo was chosen as the first Kingdom representative. After Kanehara withdrew with an injury, Sakuraba was chosen as the second. Unfortunately, nobody told Sakuraba anything about his role in any of this until the evening of December 17, 1997, when he emerged on the wrong side of a two-day bender. Ultimate Japan was scheduled for December 21. To make matters worse, it was a heavyweight tournament, and despite the bogus figure of 203 pounds Sakuraba presented in order to compete that night, he was no heavyweight. His opponent, Marcus “Conan” Silveira, a 243-pound Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt under Carlson Gracie, most assuredly was. This was not an opponent to be taken lightly, in any sense of the word. “The pro wrestling world was in the midst of the ‘Rickson Shock’ after the October Pride 1 event just some weeks earlier,” Sakuraba reminds us. “It was the era where just saying the name ‘Gracie’ had people pooping their pants.” But Sakuraba, as we’ve already seen, is a man more comfortable in that situation than most.

  The other side of the tournament bracket saw the brawler Tank Abbott best Yoji Anjo by decision. “If I lose next,” Sakuraba thought, “Kingdom is over.” This anxiety didn’t stop him from attempting to take the massive BJJ expert to the ground almost immediately, as Sakuraba shot in for Silveira’s ankle off of a feinted punch. Sakuraba’s first few attempts fell short, and Silveira let his hands go. “Conan’s punches hit the hardest part of my head,” Sakuraba remembers, “so it didn’t hurt at all. If he punches like this, there’s no way I’m going to get KO’d. I was a little relieved.” Still, though, no takedown, despite Sakuraba’s best efforts. Until: “I got a great hold on Conan’s leg. If I get him down from here, I can finish him and win.
That is, it was my big chance. But, at that instant, I felt a huge crash into my internal organs. Bam! Owww. Who the hell, who came in and hit me? Going for the shoot, I realized that I had been blown off by someone else that had shot in on me. The perpetrator’s name was John McCarthy.”

  There are few people in mixed martial arts with a track record as reliable as Big John McCarthy’s. In a sport where virtually every referee’s call is scrutinized and hotly debated by media and fans alike, the list of calls John McCarthy has clearly blown is short indeed. But he blew this call. Sakuraba wasn’t out, nor was he necessarily in any real danger. He’d dropped low to secure the takedown just as Silveira’s blows fell upon him but you can see, even now, how McCarthy could have had the impression that Sakuraba needed out, and fast.

  “In the replay, plain as day, Sakuraba took the punch and then dropped levels for a single-leg takedown,” McCarthy wrote in his autobiography Let’s Get It On. “There was no debate at all. I turned to commentator Jeff Blatnick and said, ‘I screwed up.’”

  “There was no way I could accept the decision,” the famously easygoing Sakuraba says. “Directed by Kanehara, I took the mic and screamed, ‘I didn’t lose.’ And then everyone from Kingdom came into the Octagon.” Their nearly 30-minute sit-in was effective: it was decided that yes, McCarthy’s decision had been an error, and since Tank Abbott had broken his hand during his bout with Anjo, Silveira and Sakuraba would fight again later that night, this time for the tournament title. At this point, fatigue became a legitimate concern for Sakuraba and his camp, as he had stayed up until 3 a.m. the night before playing Pokémon. Seriously. “Don’t worry about it,” Kanehara said. “Your fighting spirit!” Laughing, “I really don’t think this is gonna be good” is all Sakuraba could manage in reply.

  But it was good: Sakuraba finished the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt by arm bar in only three minutes and 45 seconds, which was never, ever supposed to happen. A professional wrestler beating a BJJ black belt at his own game? Only weeks after Rickson Gracie embarrassed the great Nobuhiko Takada in front of tens of thousands at the Tokyo Dome? Inconceivable. As the Kingdom contingent poured into the Octagon and raised Sakuraba onto their shoulders, the martial arts world had quite simply been turned on its head in a reversal on par with the shock first felt when the unheralded Gracie family proved the merits of their art at the inaugural UFC. In response to a magazine headline that appeared in the wake of the Takada disaster, “Japanese Pro-Wrestlers Are Weak,” Sakuraba turned the tables: “In fact, professional wrestling is strong,” he said to the delight of the many who had always wanted this to be true but had come to fear that it quite simply was not.

  Professional wrestling was indeed strong — here was incontrovertible evidence — but it was also broke. Sakuraba was understandably growing tired of Kingdom’s inability to pay their wrestlers properly, or even at all, and followed Naoki Sano and Daijiro Matsui to Nobuhiko Takada’s newly formed Takada Dojo, to make the best of the new opportunities available to them in the world of kakutougi, the fighting arts, leaving behind the fading world of puroresu. Here, the new directions in training that Sakuraba had experienced only by chance in his UWFi and Kingdom days could be actively pursued. He could seek out fighters like Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, whose unique blend of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and judo gave Sakuraba fits. “Every day at Takada Dojo was perfect training,” he says. “Even sparring with the members that had joined the classes was great training for me.” Released from the demands of regular pro wrestling appearances, the members of Takada Dojo were free to travel for training too: Sakuraba recounts an early trip to Marcus Ruas’s Beverly Hills Jiu-Jitsu Club, where unfortunately Sakuraba found the attitudes of Ruas’s students — though not of Ruas himself — to be disappointingly overbearing and condescending, at least until he was able to prove himself in sparring. “I don’t really know,” he says, trying to find the right words to describe the personalities there, “kind of self-important or proud. Some guys would even just come up to me like, ‘So, here’s what jiu-jitsu’s about’ . . . The guy that came to me trying to tell me what jiu-jitsu was about, when we’d spar, I’d tap him out and he would bow ridiculously deeply and thank me in Japanese.” Eventually, Sakuraba managed to earn the respect of his new training partners, but it didn’t come easy. “I threw one guy with seoi nage [shoulder throw],” he says. “That guy was a representative of America in Greco-Roman wrestling. After that moment, everyone looked at me like they were seeing ‘the mystery of the Orient.’ His initial reception might not have been what he’d hoped, but unlike the rigid senpai/kouhai training environment he’d come up in at home, at Ruas’s gym, respect could be earned quickly through performance.

  And performance, of course, was never a problem for Kazushi Sakuraba. Indeed, the performances Sakuraba would soon put on in the Pride ring have become the stuff of legend. First, there was the veteran Vernon “Tiger” White, who Sakuraba bested by arm bar after a grueling 30-minute bout. “What a pain in the ass,” Sakuraba says. “Tiresome.” Then Carlos Newton, the elegant young grappler with whom Sakuraba would trade hold after hold in one of the finest submission battles in the history of the sport. “A great fight,” Sakuraba says simply, and there can be no argument to the contrary.

  Newton recalls a young fighter who was clearly going places: “When I was in Japan and sitting at the same table as Sakuraba, seeing the way the other Japanese around him conducted themselves around him, I knew they had a lot of respect and reverence for the guy. His attitude very much typifies the great Japanese fighters — soft spoken, but carrying a very big stick. He had a very intuitive way about him in the ring. He wasn’t all over the place and scrappy like some of the other Japanese fighters. He had very good composure.”

  An uninspiring draw against Allan Goes was followed by a winning effort against Vitor Belfort, handing the young standout only his second career loss. “The first time I used face-stomping,” Sakuraba recalls fondly. “It was Kanehara’s idea.” Dynamic submission wins over Luta Livre stylist Ebenezer Fontes Braga and the journeyman Anthony Macias — a fight most notable for Sakuraba’s famous Mongolian Chop (“Maybe I was playing too much,” he concedes) — set the stage for the the confrontations that would define Sakuraba’s career.

  “Gracie Hunter”

  Sakuraba’s feud with the Gracie family — which would earn him the nickname “Gracie Hunter,” cement his status as one of the sport’s true greats, and make him the brightest star in both Japanese mixed martial arts and professional wrestling — didn’t begin the way he wanted it to. Sakuraba didn’t get the Gracie he wanted, at least not right away. He wanted to fight Renzo. “Renzo’s a great guy,” he says. “He’s got a good personality and he’s got good technique. He really has the heart of a warrior.” The two would eventually meet in a classic at Pride 10 that would not be decided until Renzo, unwilling to quit but unable to continue with a spectacularly broken arm, had to be saved from himself.

  But instead of the respected and beloved Renzo, Sakuraba’s first encounter with the Gracies was with Royler, who Sakuraba takes pains to belittle. “I didn’t want to fight the little guy,” he insists, saying he had no time for this “tiny pup” of the Gracie clan, whose “selfishness” in first demanding the fight and then insisting on special rules and considerations is symptomatic of “the comedic selfishness of the whole family (excluding Renzo).” Such was his disdain for Royler that even as the fight seemed well in hand, with Royler showing little ability to contend with anything Sakuraba had to offer, there wasn’t so much as a shred of pity: “I ended up wanting to bully the weak.” He remembers “bending his tiny little arm” in a Kimura, telling one of the ringside judges, “If I go for it, his arm is gonna break.” The referee stopped the fight. Royler was incensed, insisting, quite rightly, that he’d never tapped. But Sakuraba would have none of it: “What could he do to escape from that? No matter how much you proclaim, ‘I didn’t tap,’ the fact is Royler didn’t have a single
good thing going for him. Whatever is said, I won the fight.”

  To Sakuraba’s disappointment, the fight failed to turn Royler into “a respectable and proper person.” His hope from the beginning was that a win over Royler would bring about a match against older brother Rickson, a chance to avenge Nobuhiko Takada’s two decisive losses to the great champion of the Gracie family. But it would never come to pass. “I have a slight feeling like he ducked me, but I personally don’t have any interest in Rickson anymore,” Sakuraba said only a few months after the Royler fight. It had already become clear that a bout with Rickson would never come to pass. “He’s a quitter. And I think rather than fighting an old guy, fighting someone younger and with energy makes for a more interesting fight.”

  And that was always Sakuraba’s primary objective, even if it came at the expense of a winning game plan. “Even in the case where I lose,” he says, “I want them to think, ‘Sakuraba’s fight was really interesting.’ I want to give the fans an interesting fight that makes a lasting impression on them. That’s the kind of fighter I’m aiming at being.” The show is everything. Professional wrestling and mixed martial arts aren’t identical, in his mind, but are much more closely related than pure sports fans might like to admit. “It’s like, the different schools of karate,” he explains. “It’s all karate, but each of the different schools has different rules. It’s like that.”

  Judged against those standards, his fight against Guy Mezger in opening stage of the Pride Grand Prix was a complete disaster. First of all, Sakuraba had no interest fighting against a field of significantly larger competitors. Given his track record, fans could be forgiven for thinking that Sakuraba was unconcerned with the size of his opposition, but that’s not the case. “There was an unnecessarily big weight difference among all the competitors,” he admits. “In a GP with people all around my weight, it would be no problem, but with this kind of weight difference, it’s asking too goddamn much.” The bigger, stronger Mezger took the fight on only two weeks notice, and had been clearly contracted to fight only one 15-minute round, at which time a decision was to be rendered. When the often questionable Pride judges declared that single, tepid round a draw and ordered the fight to continue, Mezger’s cornerman Ken Shamrock balked and ordered his fighter to leave the ring and take the forfeit loss.