Nippon Joho: Aftermath of PRIDE GP
Wardrobe Malfunction
Stephen Martinez Jun 27, 2005
The Jacket Mistake
Kazuhiro Nakamura is probably one of the best light heavyweight fighters from Japan right now. He’s being fighting in PRIDE for a while and until last Sunday he was doing very well. Still I thought he lacked experience both mentally and under his belt as an MMA fighter to take in bigger challenges. Guess I was right because Nakamura was basically rushed to fight Wanderlei Silva and paid dearly for his inexperience.
Nakamura had being talking about fight Silva with judo gi for long
time. Now this makes you wonder why he would do such a thing with
his mentor Hidehiko Yoshida failing two times before against Silva
while using the gi. I don’t really like the gi inside MMA
competition because it serves like a double-edge sword. It can be
used in your favor but also against you.
Nakamura took this fight against Silva very serious. Proof of this was Nakamura’s training trip to Brazil to learn from Ruas Vale Tudo and Nova Uniao some secrets to improve his game. Back to Sunday we see Nakamura approaching the ring wearing his judo uniform. Nothing new here until the referee calls both fighters to the middle of the ring.
With all these questions the match started. To Nakamura’s credit he hung with Silva, trading punches with the champion. While I don’t think this is the right strategy to fight Silva when you’re not a top striker I found myself giving Nakamura new respect because he choose to trade instead of look for the takedown.
After some minutes, however, Nakamura made a rookie mistake. In case you missed that, I said Nakamura did in fact make a rookie mistake by trying to take the jacket off in the middle of the fight with Silva right in front charging. Now fans can bring the argument about courtesy. “Why Silva didn’t wait?” or “Silva is a dirty fighter because he punched Nakamura right at the moment he took off the jacket!” Probably all these arguments could be valid, but there is something many people are missing here.
This is not a tea party or a walk in the park with the champion. You are in the middle of a fight and fighters need to protect themselves at all time. Maybe Silva looked like a cheap fighter when he charged forward to punch Nakamura at the same moment he was dealing with the jacket, but under the same line there is nothing in the official rules that say Silva needs to wait or give that kind of courtesy.
Probably many fans won’t agree with me but what next? Fighters asking Silva for toilet break in the middle of the round? Or please Silva let me talk with that girl in the third row checking me?
You can’t do that kind of mistake with top fighters in the middle of the ring. Nakamura’s skills were there at all times but his concentration was somewhere else and for this he paid with a TKO loss at hands of the champion.
The Chute Boxe Dilemma
OK, finally the tournament answered many questions and we have our four finalists heading back to Saitama in August 28. All remaining fighters did their best to beat opponents in order to move into the finals, but now we have the Chute Boxe problem at hand.
When this tournament starts I was very happy to see each and every fighter selected inside the ring. I thought they all deserved to be there (except for one exception). The very first thing to strike me was to see teammates fighting in the same tournament. In this case we had two Chute Boxe fighters and two Brazilian Top Team fighters in the same ring. Right at this moment I thought this would bring problems in the future.
Now forward to last weekend’s result. We have the BTT representative Ricardo Arona, the dark horse of the event Alistair Overeem and two Chute Boxe fighters in Shogun Rua and Wanderlei Silva in the semifinals in August. The ball is now in DSE/PRIDE’s park to play with the matches and come up with the most exciting matches between these four.
Still the question remains, will DSE let Chute Boxe eliminate themselves in the semifinals to avoid an all Chute Boxe finals or will they play with lady luck and put both Chute Boxe fighters in different brackets and pray at least one gets eliminated to avoid the teammates finals?
My first thought is to place Silva and Shogun in the same bracket in order to eliminate one Chute Boxe fighter. This leaves Alistair and Arona in the side struggling to beat each other. Still a question sounds in the back of my head, “Could Silva and Shogun put an exciting match?” My answer is yes — if they were not in the same team.
I highly doubt these two will go 100 percent over each other if they meet despite what both Shogun and Silva told the Japanese and Brazilian media about being professionals. They train together and treat each other like brothers. Hard to imagine Silva trying to decapitate Shogun with soccer kicks or Shogun flying to punish Silva.
After giving some more thought and talking with some friends I realized the best course of action for DSE to inject action into the semifinals is to place Ricardo Arona to face Shogun Rua and Alistair Overeem to face Wanderlei Silva. With this PRIDE gets two perfect angles they can sell to the audience and regular fans in order to sell the tournament finals.
In Arona-Shogun we get another classic match-up between Chute Boxe and BTT. Shogun gets to avenge his big brother’s and teammate Rodrigo Nogueira's defeat to Arona, plus it’s another chapter in the ongoing war between teams that I believe Chute Boxe leads now.
The other bracket would feature the current champion Wanderlei Silva facing the dark horse of the event Alistair Overeem. With Alistair’s total domination of both Igor Vovchanchyn and Vitor Belfort on his way to the semifinals PRIDE can play the “young Dutch fighter’s amazing display could place the current champion in serious danger” angle for the fans.
OK, this is it for this special edition of Nippon Joho. Hope all Sherdog.com fans like the upcoming picture galleries from the PRIDE GP Round Two that I gladly took on Sunday. Also make sure to stay tuned with upcoming reports from the Japanese scene courtesy of the evil twin-brothers and myself.
Kazuhiro Nakamura is probably one of the best light heavyweight fighters from Japan right now. He’s being fighting in PRIDE for a while and until last Sunday he was doing very well. Still I thought he lacked experience both mentally and under his belt as an MMA fighter to take in bigger challenges. Guess I was right because Nakamura was basically rushed to fight Wanderlei Silva and paid dearly for his inexperience.
Advertisement
Nakamura took this fight against Silva very serious. Proof of this was Nakamura’s training trip to Brazil to learn from Ruas Vale Tudo and Nova Uniao some secrets to improve his game. Back to Sunday we see Nakamura approaching the ring wearing his judo uniform. Nothing new here until the referee calls both fighters to the middle of the ring.
Nakamura wore a modified version of the jacket without sleeves.
Right at this moment I ask myself, “What kind of strategy is this?
Probably Nakamura wants to prove he’s still a judo fighter after
all.”
With all these questions the match started. To Nakamura’s credit he hung with Silva, trading punches with the champion. While I don’t think this is the right strategy to fight Silva when you’re not a top striker I found myself giving Nakamura new respect because he choose to trade instead of look for the takedown.
After some minutes, however, Nakamura made a rookie mistake. In case you missed that, I said Nakamura did in fact make a rookie mistake by trying to take the jacket off in the middle of the fight with Silva right in front charging. Now fans can bring the argument about courtesy. “Why Silva didn’t wait?” or “Silva is a dirty fighter because he punched Nakamura right at the moment he took off the jacket!” Probably all these arguments could be valid, but there is something many people are missing here.
This is not a tea party or a walk in the park with the champion. You are in the middle of a fight and fighters need to protect themselves at all time. Maybe Silva looked like a cheap fighter when he charged forward to punch Nakamura at the same moment he was dealing with the jacket, but under the same line there is nothing in the official rules that say Silva needs to wait or give that kind of courtesy.
Probably many fans won’t agree with me but what next? Fighters asking Silva for toilet break in the middle of the round? Or please Silva let me talk with that girl in the third row checking me?
You can’t do that kind of mistake with top fighters in the middle of the ring. Nakamura’s skills were there at all times but his concentration was somewhere else and for this he paid with a TKO loss at hands of the champion.
The Chute Boxe Dilemma
OK, finally the tournament answered many questions and we have our four finalists heading back to Saitama in August 28. All remaining fighters did their best to beat opponents in order to move into the finals, but now we have the Chute Boxe problem at hand.
When this tournament starts I was very happy to see each and every fighter selected inside the ring. I thought they all deserved to be there (except for one exception). The very first thing to strike me was to see teammates fighting in the same tournament. In this case we had two Chute Boxe fighters and two Brazilian Top Team fighters in the same ring. Right at this moment I thought this would bring problems in the future.
Now forward to last weekend’s result. We have the BTT representative Ricardo Arona, the dark horse of the event Alistair Overeem and two Chute Boxe fighters in Shogun Rua and Wanderlei Silva in the semifinals in August. The ball is now in DSE/PRIDE’s park to play with the matches and come up with the most exciting matches between these four.
Still the question remains, will DSE let Chute Boxe eliminate themselves in the semifinals to avoid an all Chute Boxe finals or will they play with lady luck and put both Chute Boxe fighters in different brackets and pray at least one gets eliminated to avoid the teammates finals?
My first thought is to place Silva and Shogun in the same bracket in order to eliminate one Chute Boxe fighter. This leaves Alistair and Arona in the side struggling to beat each other. Still a question sounds in the back of my head, “Could Silva and Shogun put an exciting match?” My answer is yes — if they were not in the same team.
I highly doubt these two will go 100 percent over each other if they meet despite what both Shogun and Silva told the Japanese and Brazilian media about being professionals. They train together and treat each other like brothers. Hard to imagine Silva trying to decapitate Shogun with soccer kicks or Shogun flying to punish Silva.
After giving some more thought and talking with some friends I realized the best course of action for DSE to inject action into the semifinals is to place Ricardo Arona to face Shogun Rua and Alistair Overeem to face Wanderlei Silva. With this PRIDE gets two perfect angles they can sell to the audience and regular fans in order to sell the tournament finals.
In Arona-Shogun we get another classic match-up between Chute Boxe and BTT. Shogun gets to avenge his big brother’s and teammate Rodrigo Nogueira's defeat to Arona, plus it’s another chapter in the ongoing war between teams that I believe Chute Boxe leads now.
The other bracket would feature the current champion Wanderlei Silva facing the dark horse of the event Alistair Overeem. With Alistair’s total domination of both Igor Vovchanchyn and Vitor Belfort on his way to the semifinals PRIDE can play the “young Dutch fighter’s amazing display could place the current champion in serious danger” angle for the fans.
OK, this is it for this special edition of Nippon Joho. Hope all Sherdog.com fans like the upcoming picture galleries from the PRIDE GP Round Two that I gladly took on Sunday. Also make sure to stay tuned with upcoming reports from the Japanese scene courtesy of the evil twin-brothers and myself.
