Media MMA On Point: The Secret World Of Fixed Japanese MMA Fights

Real wrestling to Catch wrestling to fake or free wrestling to prowrestling to fake MMA to real MMA. Good summary. YEAH Shooto going real first!! Booo RINGS ...

Must say the book he uses .. uses the name Snowden .. I keep thinking of the other leaker with a similar name.
 
I wouldn't say 70% of RINGs fights were fixed. They had cards that would freely intersperse real and fixed fights and for the truly skilled performers, sometimes it was hard to tell. Generally, guys like Minoru Tanaka, Sanae Kikuta, etc. would have legit fights, especially if they were going against other up and comers. Bigger deal guys, especially older ones like Akira Maeda, were much more likely to have worked fights. Then you had guys like Tamura who had a mixture of both in the early days. Apparently, for example, one of his early matches against Yamamoto was a shoot, where he basically had to win or lose his push. The only people who could really just pull out a number for RINGs' early shoot to work ratio would be the people booking the matches, because works and shoots were that freely intermingled.
 
@JayPettryMMA
What about Tamura vs Kohsaka?

Stumbled across this a couple days ago...

It is listed on fight finder but also listed by Meltzer as a 5 star wrestling match...

What is going on?


...havent seen the "fight" yet
Screenshot_20221011-134329_Chrome.jpg
 
DUNKS said:
Volk Han’d fights were mostly fixed, but they were super entertaning.
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This is a good point. Sherdog still has clearly worked fights listed on their fight-finder. Unsure if it even matters, though. I guess for historical accuracy related to just mma.



Look at the sequence @6:52. We could clear out a lot of his FF record. Not to pick on Volk. I would only think it was lame if he claimed they were real fights, which I have never read. We could find others too, but, again, I don’t know if it matters all that much anymore.
 
panem-et-circenses said:
This is a good point. Sherdog still has clearly worked fights listed on their fight-finder. Unsure if it even matters, though. I guess for historical accuracy related to just mma.



Look at the sequence @6:52. We could clear out a lot of his FF record. Not to pick on Volk. I would only think it was lame if he claimed they were real fights, which I have never read. We could find others too, but, again, I don’t know if it matters all that much anymore.
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The majority of Han's fights were pro-wrestling. Tamura also had a lot of fights in RINGS that were pro-wrestling and almost all of Maeda's fights in RINGS were pro-wrestling.

There's a lot of pro-wrestling matches on Sherdog Fight Finder. This is something that's been pointed out on multiple occasions, but they never get cleared out. Now would be a good time for them to clear these out, specially as they've been cleaning out the fight from Armen Petrosyan.

I would even consider removing fights like Takada/Sturgeon as that was clearly a fixed fight and could even be considered a pro-wrestling match.

 
Kforcer said:
sometimes it was hard to tell.
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I don’t think this is true anymore. It’s just that nobody wants to sift through endless hours of RINGS in order to edit wiki, FF or whatever database one uses for fight records.
 
Buffmeister said:
@JayPettryMMA
What about Tamura vs Kohsaka?

Stumbled across this a couple days ago...

It is listed on fight finder but also listed by Meltzer as a 5 star wrestling match...

What is going on?


...havent seen the "fight" yet
View attachment 947626
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I haven't seen this in years, but it's pro-wrestling as well.

I've watched a ton of RINGS through the years and a lot of it, mostly featuring the likes of Maeda, Han, Tamura and TK were pro-wrestling matches.
 
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DUNKS said:
The majority of Han's fights were pro-wrestling. A lot of Tamura's fights in RINGS are pro-wrestling as well. All of Akira Maeda's fights are pro-wrestling, too.

There's a lot of pro-wrestling matches on Sherdog Fight Finder. This is something that's been pointed out on multiple occasions, but they never get cleared out. Now would be a good time for them to clear these out, specially as they've been cleaning out the fight from Armen Petrosyan.
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I agree with everything you wrote. No matter how they were billed, they were not real fights. I don’t say that to disrespect any of these guys, because a lot of them were legitimate toughguys and/or professional fighters. Like Tamura, we know he really knuckled-up.
 
panem-et-circenses said:
I don’t think this is true anymore. It’s just that nobody wants to sift through endless hours of RINGS in order to edit wiki, FF or whatever database one uses for fight records.
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Exactly. It's pretty simple to prove a lot of them were fixed. All you really have to do is look at the dodgy striking and the clear cooperation in the grappling. However, no one really wants to sit through endless hours of RINGS to find out what is what.
 
Here's another known pro-wrestling match listed on Fight Finder.

9eG1u43.png
 
panem-et-circenses said:
What about Craig Oxley versus Genki?


Dismantling RINGS events will be easy, but some of the Pancrase stuff can get confusing, imo.
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I haven't seen the fight yet, but I know Pancrase had some known fixed fights as well. Isn't there the one fight Ken lands a ridiculously cooperative northern lights suplex on someone? I believe there's folks who've come out and admitted to having done pro-wrestling matches in Pancrase. I believe Hume is one of the folks who's come out and admitted to having participated in fixed fights in Pancrase. I'm sure if you asked, Ken would probably tell you himself as well which fights he was in that were fixed.

When I was working with the guys over at Tapology, I began cleaning up some of the records, but I was also covering a lot of events, so it was hard to get it completely cleaned up. One of the changes I made, was the Han/Funaki match I posted above.

jAic4SA.png


One of the things I cleaned up were the records from The Outsider which was the new promotion Maeda had opened up that featured all of the outcasts. Those fights were originally recorded as pro fights, but they were really 2 3 minutes round fights that were built as semi pro fights, so we categorized them as amateur fights. They did have some 2 5 minute round fights that were built as pro fights, but those were mostly co-main and main events.

It took a while for me to clean it up on Tapology, but I got most of it under organized. I also see Fight Finder followed up with the guideline and cleaned it up as well.
 
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DUNKS said:
I would even consider removing fights like Takada/Sturgeon as that was clearly a fixed fight and could even be considered a pro-wrestling match.
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Lmao I forgot about this match. Clearly before kayfabe died and pro-wrestlers had to fight. We glamorize PRIDE (for good reason), but they put on events that were questionable at times. I haven’t went through early PRIDE in so many years, but I bet we could sift through them and find more that should be removed.
 
panem-et-circenses said:
Lmao I forgot about this match. Clearly before kayfabe died and pro-wrestlers had to fight. We glamorize PRIDE (for good reason), but they put on events that were questionable at times. I haven’t went through early PRIDE in so many years, but I bet we could sift through them and find more that should be removed.
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Yes sir. There's plenty pro-wrestlers who fought in PRIDE that had questionable fights, namely Takada. I'm sure if I dig in deep enough and go down the rabbit hole, I could probably find some odd Diet Butcher and Ishikawa fights that were fixed as well.

Regardless, if @JayPettryMMA ever decides he wants to clean up old Japanese Fight Finder records, I'm always down to help, just hit me up. Years of experience watching fights and covering events and the Tapology crew can always vouch for the work I did for them.
 
DUNKS said:
Yes sir. There's plenty pro-wrestlers who fought in PRIDE that had questionable fights, namely Takada. I'm sure if I dig in deep enough and go down the rabbit hole, I could probably find some odd Diet Butcher and Ishikawa fights that were fixed as well.

Regardless, if @JayPettryMMA ever decides he wants to clean up old Japanese Fight Finder records, I'm always down to help, just hit me up.
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Sakuraba versus Newton is clearly a worked fight, too. From PRIDE 3. We don’t ever acknowledge that.

Sherdog should hit you up since you’ve gone through fights before. Three people should look at a fight before taking it off of a record though, because it’s a sensitive topic.
 
DUNKS said:
One of the things I cleaned up were the records from The Outsider which was the new promotion Maeda had opened up that featured all of the outcasts. Those fights were originally recorded as pro fights, but they were really 2 3 minutes round fights that were built as semi pro fights, so we categorized them as amateur fights. They did have some 2 5 minute round fights that were built as pro fights, but those were mostly co-main and main events.
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I have seen some of their events, and some of the other promotions popping up on YT. Unified rules are the accepted ruleset the world over, but I’m open to changes. As long as guys aren’t fighting with headgear, participating in worked/fixed fights, then their fights are fair game and legit. Iirc some of those The Outsider fights were brutal.
 
panem-et-circenses said:
I have seen some of their events, and some of the other promotions popping up on YT. Unified rules are the accepted ruleset the world over, but I’m open to changes. As long as guys aren’t fighting with headgear, participating in worked/fixed fights, then their fights are fair game and legit. Iirc some of those The Outsider fights were brutal.
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That's one of the things with The Outsider. They didn't wear head gear and such, but the fights were semi pro which is the equivalent to amateur fights. They didn't allow grappling and had modified rules as they weren't pro's yet. There was only a handful of fights that were actually pro fights where they had normal Unified rules and would allow grappling.
 
DUNKS said:
Isn't there the one fight Ken lands a ridiculously cooperative northern lights suplex on someone? I believe there's folks who've come out and admitted to having done pro-wrestling matches in Pancrase. I believe Hume is one of the folks who's come out and admitted to having participated in fixed fights in Pancrase
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...that was the one with Matt Hume
 
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