MMA Thread

[EmpireWF]

Shields out till February after testing positive for something.

[EmpireWF]

Meltzer:

--Jon Jones has said he is willing to coach Ultimate Fighter next season if asked, but will not do so against Daniel Cormier, saying Cormier doesn't have a big enough name, and he's not going to help him get one off of him.

[EmpireWF]

Kaz Misaki is retiring next month.

[Epidemik]

[EmpireWF]

Ref at Legacy FC last night gets put into an armbar by a wobbly fighter lol

[LiquidLarry2GhostWF]

[Kuzzy Powers]

[JimLeavy59]

Can't wait for Rory Macdonald vs BJ Penn

[EmpireWF]

Saw this on the underground...

pick the welterweight

[JimLeavy59]

[Warner2BruceTD]

This Matt Brown/Mike Swick twitter war is about as exciting as you would imagine it would be.

[SuperKevin]

I get so many weird MMA organizations on my TV here. The other day I watched BAMMA and yesterday I watched Phil Baroni beat the hell out of some guy in the Phillipines

[Warner2BruceTD]

Davey Boy Smith Jr., under real name Harry Smith, in his first actual grappling competition last week, won the No Gi superheavyweight beginners division at a NAGA (North American Grappling Association) tournament in Lakeland, FL. There was some question as to where he should be placed because Beginners is to team six months to two years of training and Smith started training under Billy Robinson a lot more than two years ago. Smith was representing the Gracie Tampa Gym, which is the gym owned by Dave Bautista. Low Ki was his corner man.

[Liquidrob]

Mirko is back!

[Warner2BruceTD]

Good Meltzer piece about VOLK HAN

Almost nobody would recognize the name Magomedkhan Amanulayevich Gamzatkhanov, but more than a decade after he left pro wrestling, the greatest actual Russian pro wrestler of the last century, without a shaved head and sickles on his boots, and spending no time doing Anti-American promos, had his retirement match.

Volk Han had a 90s dream match on 12/16 in Yokohama, at the age of 51, going to a 15:00 draw with All Japan Triple Crown champion Masakatsu Funaki in the main event of a RINGS Outsiders show, before a sellout crowd of 4,680 fans at Bunka Gym.

The two went back-and-forth exchanging submission attempts until time ran out. Han looked slow moving on the mat and his leg submissions looked sloppy. The match ended in a 2-2 tie with each getting two rope escapes. Funaki had Han in a submission hold when time expired. He looked the same facially, obviously older, and had a gut on him. After the match, a number of former RINGS stars including Masayuki Naruse, Yoshihisa Yamamoto, Akira Maeda (his biggest career rival). The Han merchandise in the building sold well.

During the 90s, Han was the top foreign star for RINGS, which did a combination of both worked and shoot matches as a popular promotion in Japan. Han rarely did shoot matches until the last days of the promotion when it transformed into all shoots because the popularity of groups like Pride had pretty much rendered the art of worked shoots to be obsolete. Funaki was the top star with Pancrase, a shoot promotion populated mostly by people who came with Funaki from Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi. Funaki was the rising star in the old UWF promotion when it folded and then split into three different groups, RINGS, UWFI and PWFG.

It was the main event of a 28-match otherwise shoot show. Outsiders in a very different atmosphere from anything like it in Japan. Maeda promotes it, and shows have a reputation for being dangerous, since the fighters are heavily tattooed up and many are enforcers for the Yakuza and it’s kind of who is the baddest of the guys. Security at these shows is tight, unlike anything else in Japan because fan violence is non-existent. The scanned fans with metal detectors coming in, which is unheard of for Japanese sporting events. There was one instance of a fighter throwing a number of late punches at his opponent, then continuing to yell at the beaten opponent until members of the losers gang attacked him.

After the match, Han introduced his 13-year-old son, who he’s trying to get into fighting or wrestling in Japan as Jamal Han, who is 6-1 ½ and 202 pounds already.

Han said he’s been training him in sambo and judo and said he would like for him to debut in Japan in about three years. Maeda, said he would be doing RINGS revival shows in the U.K. and Australia in 2013.

Han, a Hall of Fame candidate, had 76 matches, some shoot and most worked, with the RINGS organization from 1992 through 2000. His MMA rules matches were most interesting, because even though he had a background as a Russian champion in Sambo, he was 38 when he had his first MMA match, and was just before his 40th birthday when he held arguably the best MMA heavyweight of that era, Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, to a decision in his last match in Japan.

But it was in pro wrestling where he shined as a submission specialist and one of the most popular and respected foreign stars of the past 25 years.

His working ability was so good that to this day, many MMA fans see his pro wrestling matches and believe they feature some of the most masterful ground fighting techniques anywhere. U.S. “Official MMA” records, that list him with a career record of 21-8, include more than half of those matches being his pro wrestling matches.

Volk Han, which is the Russian equivalent to Wolf Khan (his first name when growing up was shortened to Khan, and Wolf was his sports nickname), signed with RINGS when the original UWF broke up in 1991. He quickly became the top foreign star and had a several year long rivalry with Akira Maeda. Maeda was the superstar of the promotion who almost always won, like a prime Hulk Hogan, or an Antonio Inoki or a Bruno Sammartino. Han was his Karl Gotch, the one guy who Inoki respected so much that for credibility sake, he would lose to.

Han made his pro debut on December 7, 1991, being brought in as the World sambo champion to be the latest foreigner with a world title in a combat sport to be fed to Maeda, who beat him via submission before a near sellout crowd of 10,250 fans. But he got over so big that after a few more shows, a rematch was held on April 3, 1992, where Han became the first person in RINGS to beat Maeda via submission before a sellout of 5,480 fans at the Sun Plaza Arena in Hiroshima. This led to a third match, which Maeda won via KnockOut on October 29, 1992, before 8,100 fans in Nagoya.

In 1993, when Maeda was out of action due to a knee injury, Han was put in the position of having to carry the company, headlining every major show for months. He sold out Osaka’s Furitsu Gym (now the Bodymaker Colosseum) beating Willie Williams, an aging karate star best known for a mixed match with Antonio Inoki a generation earlier. His battle with sambo champion Chris Dolman of The Netherlands drew 11,500 fans to the Yokohama Arena.

When Maeda returned, the usual RINGS big show would have Han win via submission in the semifinal and Maeda win the main event. This led to the 1994 Battle Dimension tournament, where they were the top two seeds and both won all the way to the finals before Han beat Maeda via submission on January 25, 1994, before 13,526 fans at Budokan Hall.

Their next meeting on September 22, 1995, which Maeda won via submission, drew a sellout of 6,380 fans in Sapporo.

His role in the 1995 Battle Dimension tournament was to give credibility to Yoshihisa Yamamoto as the rising star, as Yamamoto shocked everyone beating him by submission in the tournament semifinals. It was the first time Han had lost to a Japanese pro wrestler besides Maeda. This set up Maeda beating Yamamoto in the finals.

In 1996, Han was best remembered for his classic matches with Kosaka (who he beat three times during the year) and Tamura, all of which he won, which were among the best in the history of the promotion. The Battle Dimension tournament final that year on January 22, 1997, before 11,800 at Budokan Hall, saw Han beat Tamura via submission.

He followed by beating Maeda via submission on April 22, 1997, but then lost to Yamamoto and Tamura in succession later in the year. What was notable about both of those matches is that they were the main events and Maeda’s matches were second from the top. At the Battle Dimension tournament that year, he put over his protege Mikhail Ilioukhine to set up Ilioukhine for his championship match that he lost to Tamura.

While Maeda beat Han for third place at Budokan Hall, yet another rematch between the two in 1998 sold out in Osaka with Han gaining the nod. This set up Kosaka finally getting his win over Han that year. But for the most part, by this point the group was losing popularity, particularly after constant knee injuries took down the performance of Maeda, who eventually had to retire. Without Maeda, the group had no flagship star. Yamamoto from the start had been groomed to be Maeda’s replacement, but he was overtaken by Tamura, who first made his name in the UWFI promotion where he was the No. 2 star behind Nobuhiko Takada. But Tamura never had the kind of name value as Maeda, and couldn’t draw consistently on his own. He was also hurt by participating in shoots, something Maeda never did. Tamura was actually a good fighter, not a great fighter, but good enough to beat two UFC champions (Maurice Smith and Pat Miletich), be the first Japanese star to beat a Gracie (Renzo) and holding Frank Shamrock to a draw during Shamrock’s prime. But at usually around 190 pounds, he was too small to shoot with heavyweights, and his position put him in the position to do that all the time. Losing in those fights took away from him at a time they were trying to work around him as the top star.

RINGS started evolving into a shoot promotion in 1999, bring in people like Randy Couture (who was UFC heavyweight champion but left the promotion over a financial dispute) and Frank Shamrock. Most of Han’s matches that year were still pro wrestling matches. RINGS always had shoot matches as part of its format, usually in the undercard. But after 1999, the percentage grew and by the next year, it was essentially an MMA promotion and not a pro wrestling promotion, although even then there were always exceptions.

He started doing shoot matches in 2000, and when Nogueira became the top heavyweight in the world, in the Battle Dimension tournament, the only person he couldn’t submit was Han. Among a generation of fans, he was their Karl Gotch, the expert shooter who did all the worked matches with the pro wrestlers, his technique in the ring was brilliant and even when he put people over, everyone believed he was the one who was the real deal.