Gotta love Yoshida, he was that super stoic calm cool collected dude 24/7, but when he was cornering Sakuraba during his first fight against Royce, he became pretty wild, instructing Saku to jump in his guard and all.
Yoshida screaming his head off every time Royce was butt-scooting is one of my favorite parts of that long, looong fight.
Yoshida also managed to do well financially, his PRIDE bout against his Judo rival Naoya Ogawa was the highest paid bout in PRIDE. Something like 2 millions $ for each of them.
Ogawa was a huge pro-wrestling star in Japan, and his demands for fighting in MMA again after that trashing from Fedor were pretty extravagant.
Yoshida was also one of the guys who used the Gi to the fullest when it was still legal to wear one.
He choked Royce out via Sode guruma jime.
And in his rematch against Wanderlei Silva, he did a great job at entangling Silva's arms with his sleeves to keep him close to him.
I was a bit sad that Yoshida chose to fight his best student, Kazuhiro Nakamura, for his retirement fight as I didn't want to see either of them losing... I've always been a big supporter of both Yoshida & KazNak
member that time?
That was one of the times were I really regretted not speaking Japanese better, as I really wanted to understand why Yoshida had made this particular choice, but I couldn't read any of the interviews, and obviously they weren't translated in any other languages...
