Pride and Glory

The week of the event, fighters began to descend on the Tokyo Hilton, one of Japan’s most opulent hotels. It was used by Pride until company president Naoto Morishita committed suicide in one of its rooms in 2003 -- a moment when many feel Pride was almost completely taken over by the Yakuza.

Coleman: Everybody loved the Tokyo Hilton. You can ask any fighter out there what they loved most about it, and they’ll tell you: the breakfast buffet. Best breakfast buffet ever. Fighters didn’t miss it. Chefs there serving it really loved the fighters. They got to know you so well you didn’t even have to order.

Hyams: Breakfast is fascinating because the guy you’re about to fight is two tables over. Everyone in this same building together, passing each other, riding in the elevator together, in the lobby. It made for a very tense environment in the way that was ripe for theater for the whole thing. I think that was somewhat by design.

Quadros: The buffet just went on forever. It was like going off into a fantasy world. All the executives were there. It’s right next to this other place where people dined called the Royal Host. The Royal Host was like a Denny’s style restaurant, but obviously served a lot more noodles than French fries and burgers. The fighters, especially the Dutch contingency who could be a little bit loud, would go in there and terrorize these poor people running around and taking our orders.

Coleman: They have American channels over there. You got to watch a lot of CNN. You watch that pretty much non-stop. It’s a Japanese version of CNN. You’re getting to see some pretty neat stuff.

Gary Goodridge: If you can understand it, it’s great. I find Japanese television very funny.

Coleman: Gary speaks a few languages. He’s a smart guy. He comes in handy.

While Pride spared little expense with its production and accommodations, the fighters’ actual purses were largely dependent on their own sense of self-worth.

Inoue: I think I got $80,000 for the Kerr fight. They paid Sakuraba peanuts. Pride didn’t pay Sakuraba well because Takada was in charge of him. He was taking all the money. Pride would pay Takada Dojo. Sakuraba got a salary from Takada Dojo. … That’s why they ended up having a falling-out. They want nothing to do with each other now.

Burke: We flew to Tokyo and went to a very nice, very remote summer resort. It was quiet. We had the opportunity to have a resort to ourselves, run on the beach and all that fun stuff. It was a decision to get there early and that Dream Stage would pay for it.

Gary Goodridge: Royce, Wanderlei [Silva], Sakuraba -- once you’re in the upper echelon, that’s the only time you can get what you want. Other than that, you have to play their games.

Mezger: Basically, you were led to believe in a very strong way that when the contract negotiations came up, there was a good chance you wouldn’t be part of it if you refused fights.

Inoue: I believe Pride was the type of association that could take what they could get. It wasn’t an association where they treated all the fighters fairly. I was treated very differently in Pride because I was needed. I was popular in Japan. They knew I didn’t need them. They played hardball with people that needed them. Igor Vovchanchyn made peanuts -- $10,000. They’d threaten Mark Kerr, go down to where Kerr was training and make sure he was ready. Pretty much bully him around.

Kerr: The hardest thing in the world about working for a Japanese company is that you don’t know what rules you broke until you broke them. The one time I had elbow surgery, I took my own money and paid for my ticket over to Japan, paid for my hotel room, went into the ring -- this is when I was supposed to fight Enson in Nagoya -- and I let the stitches stay in my arm about a week past the point they were supposed to come out. That was so I could take off my shirt and literally show them, yes, I actually had surgery. That was the length you had to go to for the Japanese.

Hyams: You couldn’t go anywhere else and get paid the same amount. So they more or less had a monopoly on the fighters who wanted to earn anything close to six figures.

Burke: This thing was created because of the Gracies. It’s business. The Japanese knew, if they can get Royce, the man who started this whole thing, they can make 10 times more money than if they don’t. If it takes five extra hotel rooms, paying for his team’s food, $40 per diem a day instead of $15, I don’t think the Japanese cared.

Mezger: I didn’t give a sh-t. You get what you can.

Rand: The winner of the tournament got $250,000, but Royce’s number was significantly more than that. Part of it was wire transfer and part was cash.

Osborne: I know of a guy in Japan who won a quarter-million, got paid in cash and left the money in a cab when he got back home. He never would’ve seen that bag again if his brother hadn’t been friends with the cab driver.

Japan’s loose structure -- no athletic commission has any jurisdiction -- meant that promoters could organize events as they saw fit; athletes had few restrictions.

Inoue: In our contracts there was a clause that specifically stated, “We do not test for steroids.” In other words, it was like a clause that you can do steroids.

Hyams: A lot of guys started doing steroids because it would give you a lot of strength and a lot of power and you could go in there and finish a guy off really quickly. However, once the fight started going longer, suddenly steroids had a really detrimental effect on that game plan. From the way everyone described it to me, they give you that big burst of power but your heart and lungs are powering a bigger body. You get gassed quickly.

Kerr: You see the period where I was over-built because I took anabolics. But it was a short little window where I used them and that was it. After I figured out that it was a bodybuilder’s body, not a fighter’s body, you’ll see my physique change again.


Goodridge: Right before we were walking out onstage for the first round, Osamu was smoking a cigarette. I thought, “What the f-ck?” I think 90 percent of Japanese smoke.

Coleman: All of a sudden, I’m sitting in the rules meeting. I’m not waiting for something bad to go wrong, but out of nowhere, a day before the show, the president gets up and says, “The finals will be a no time limit match.” It was supposed to be a 20-minute time limit. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

Rorion Gracie: It’s part of the deal when you’re dealing with the Japanese. You get what you can before because there’s not much you can do at the time of the fight. In the moment, they can say they didn’t understand and that’s the end of that.

Mezger: Mainly, I felt like they were just disorganized. I didn’t know I was going to fight Masaaki Satake until 18 days before the fight. Their take was, “If you’re a real warrior, you’ll do it.” I go, “Really? OK. All right.”

Coleman: I could wear wrestling shoes there. As far as my speed and power, once you take the shoes away, you take a lot of that away. It just gave me so much grip that it made me so much stronger. I went into the Ohio State wrestling room once before and tried to wrestle some college guys wearing shoes while I wasn’t. It was embarrassing. I had to come back a couple of days later with shoes on just to save face.

Kerr: I probably could’ve gotten paid twice or three times the amount of money I got paid to do what I did for them. I was functioning under the assumption that pigs get fed while hogs get slaughtered. That was my mentality.

Mezger: There’s an old saying: a friend of mine told me this. He said, “If you think you made a good deal with a Japanese businessman, check all your fingers and toes. If you have them, count your relatives because somebody’s missing.” And that’s a Japanese guy telling me that.

In April ’00, Miletich posted a message to mixedmartialarts.com that claimed Sakuraba would purposely lose the fight to Gracie. It was another indication Pride may have been getting uncomfortably close with the demands of the Yakuza and their penchant for gambling.

Miletich: With Pride back in those days, there were obviously some fights that were works. A lot of people were talking about it. I was hoping that wasn’t the case.

Inoue: Knowing Sakuraba personally, he would never do that. With Takada, I’d have my doubts. But Sakuraba, there’s no way. He has a lot of integrity and honor. I don’t think he’d ever throw a fight in an MMA ring. Not Sakuraba.

Adelstein: I can’t imagine any motivation for him to lose that fight, unless it was about gambling. If you put out that Sakuraba is going to lose and it’s already been fixed and people believe that, they’re going to bet against him and bet on Gracie. And when Gracie loses, they make more if people believe Sakuraba is the weak horse. Certainly, the Yakuza would be good at facilitating such a rumor.

Mezger: You’re told, “Oh, this guy is who he is,” all that kind of stuff. But it’s not like you’re living in fear for your life or anything like that. It’s just the opposite. They were very good about treating you well. You got a really nice place, they made sure you were taken care of financially, got food, gave you every opportunity. That was nice.

Adelstein: Every time they staged an event in Tokyo or Osaka where there’s a big arena, they had to pay a certain amount of money: permission to perform in their area. It was kind of like a tax. That was the standard thing at the time.

Inoue: It had to be done. You can’t avoid it. It’s the custom. I have a gym in Saitama. If I didn’t have friends who were close to me in that group, I would have to pay monthly. It’s like protecting us from them so they don’t give us sh-t or trouble.

Adelstein: The consequences of not paying the site tax are that you may have interference with your ticket sales. Scandals about your athletes would be released to the media. It’s not always the threat of physical violence. If you’re not paying your dues and operating in their area, they’ll do something that makes life difficult for you. That can include things like telling a local magazine, this competitor is sleeping with an underage girl. Or, this guy is cheating on his wife.

Inoue: If you go to 100 people in America and ask if they have mafia acquaintances, 90 percent of them would probably say no. It’s the opposite here. Maybe 90 percent of people would say, “Oh, I know Yakuza.” I had a Yakuza guy at my house the other night. It’s not a big thing.