PRIDE Secret Files

[tenniswhiz]

No problem and yeah, I miss PRIDE too and this only motivates me to go back and re-watch them.


It's an amazing book, but it's in Japanese.

I'll be posting the notes that stand out to me the most, so just check this thread regularly as I'll continuously post what stands out.

In Japanese, too bad, hope an English version comes out eventually.

Also, I find (if it's true), Lorenzo's lack of knowledge regarding the Yakuza is almost unbelievable. Nobody told him how hard it would be to move forward with the tarnished Pride name?

 

[the ambush]

I'm currently reading the PRIDE Secret Files book and this is a pretty good book that hardly receives any discussion on here. I've been posting notes on it on Tapology, so I guess I'd post those notes on here too to garner some discussion. I think these are some bits of information which should be known by PRIDE fans.

Lorenzo Fertita brought PRIDE in March of 2007, but he had been wanting to buy it since July 2006 when PRIDE was dropped by Fuji TV.

Lorenzo was motivated to get into the MMA business because of the great Kazushi Sakuraba vs. Royce Gracie fight. He had some great expansion ideas for the new PRIDE as he was really enthusiastic about it.

PRIDE was already in a huge financial hole due to losing their TV deal with Fuji TV and it would've cost Lorenzo $12 million to put on an event which was ridiculous.

On October 4 of the same year, Jamie Pollack called the PRIDE FC Worldwide offices and notified they would be shutting down and all of the employees were dismissed.

The new PRIDE was originally scheduled to have a lightweight GP taking place. The first round was scheduled to take place on May 20, 2007 at the Saitama Super Arena, the second round on July 16 at the Nihon Gaishi Hall in Nagoya, Japan and the finals on September 30 at the Saitama Super Arena.

Takanori Gomi, Hayato Sakurai, Tatsuya Kawajiri, Mitsuhiro Ishida, Gilbert Melendez, Joachim Hansen, Luiz Azeredo, Marcus Aurelio, Shinya Aoki, Satoru Kitaoka who beat Fabricio Monteiro in a fight in DEEP were all scheduled to participate in the tournament. There were rumors that Georges St. Pierre, Matt Hughes and Sean Sherk who was the UFC lightweight champion at the time would also be participating in the tournament.

This never occurred though because there was only a timeframe about a month for them to set up the card because the Fertitas had purchased it a little over a month previously the card and they thought it was a bad idea to set up such a big card on such a short notice and they dropped the event.

After PRIDE folded, the old PRIDE management, DSE still decided to put together DREAM with the hopes of following in the footsteps of PRIDE and put together their own lightweight GP of their own at DREAM 1 with some of the fighters that were scheduled to appear in the PRIDE lightweight GP.

GSP and Hughes would of gnp and folded anyone of them up in a tournament match at that time.

Hell probably even now, too. Just my two sense.

 

[K4BOSH]

I remember mark hunto was supposed to fight butterbean at the second coming show, but because butterbean didnt have many mma fights, the nsac forced the fight to be cancelled.

 

[Lunatic Fringe]

When Mirko Cro Cop transferred from K-1 to PRIDE, his first PRIDE fight was against Heath Herring. Mirko's manager Kenichi Imai who also worked with fighter contracts in K-1 flew to Holland where he met up with Stefan Leko. Imai asked Leko to go hard with Herring in sparring mainly hitting him with hard shots to the face so he would be timid when he fought Mirko about taking head shots. Herring was so timid of head shots that when he fought Mirko, Mirko began throwing head shots and Herring would cover up his face a lot and expose his body allowing Mirko to strike his body and TKO him due to a body shot.

Damn thats crazy

 

[BiG NoG]

Great work

 

[aichokyu]

thank you TS

 

[stevebobeve]

Damn thats crazy... *in reference to cro cop's manager paying leko to rough herring up*

i think herring was just afraid of cro cop. he had nothing for cro cop. i don't believe the story. unless leko confirmed it somewhere


the part about crazyhorse not ko'ing silva is bullshit. silva himself all but confirmed it on "the voice versus...". so whoever is wrote the book this must not have thier facts straight.

 

[ShinkanPo]

What did Rickson do to Anjo? Why is his face bloodied? I thought that was just a pure grapling match

 

[BukHumLae]

Moar

 

[Kanster]

Good thread dude.

 

[wowspare]

Before TUF, PRIDE already done a reality TV show called PRE-PRIDE and PRIDE OU or PRIDE KING. The show ran for 6 seasons with the winners of the seasons getting a chance to fight in PRIDE. The coaches for the first season were Masaaki Satake, Daijiro Matsui, Akira Shoji and Alexander Otsuka. Some of the winners of the show didn't fight in PRIDE as one of them choose to fight in RINGS instead of PRIDE and others only fought once or twice but were never promoted as the winners of the show on the PRIDE cards.

Yushin Okami won one of the seasons of the show and he wore a Batman mask in the walk out to his fights on the show.

Man that would have been a sight

 

[BG Knoccout***]

GSP and Hughes would of gnp and folded anyone of them up in a tournament match at that time.

Hell probably even now, too. Just my two sense.

Maybe. I think the cut to 160 would have taken a lot out of both guys though.

 

[BukHumLae]

prime gomi wud have KO'd GSP bro...


heh

 

[BG Knoccout***]

prime gomi wud have KO'd GSP bro...


heh

Ishida is basically a mini Asian GSP,


So I'm inclined to agree

 

[ThunderL1ps]

i think herring was just afraid of cro cop. he had nothing for cro cop. i don't believe the story. unless leko confirmed it somewhere


the part about crazyhorse not ko'ing silva is bullshit. silva himself all but confirmed it on "the voice versus...". so whoever is wrote the book this must not have thier facts straight.

Mirko's manager confirmed that Herring had two weeks notice to fight Cro Cop. Herring thought he was facing a wrestler and was training as such. There's a video of it on the Spike website I think.

 

[FierceHitman]

I've always heard cro cop was brought in initially to lose to their japanese wrestlers like Fujita and whatnot since they assumed hed have no grappling skills due to his kickboxing background. It wasn't until he beat the shit out of all of those guys and got super popular that they started promoting him like crazy.

As for his manager's stories, I do believe there was a bitter falling out reported a little while back and most of the "facts" he gave on cro cop were not true and disproved. Which ones were and which ones weren't I don't know.

Heath Herring was on a local sports radio show here right before his fight with Brock; during the interview they asked him a lot about Pride and even brought up Cro Cop and he had nothing but good things to say. Perhaps he chose not to bring up all this negative talk, but I doubt he wouldn't have at least hinted at something shady going on.

 

[Sivo The Ram]

crazy thing about the herring/cro cop fight is that is the best (physically speaking) i think heath had ever looked and still got smashed. young cc was a scary dude

 

[Deleted member 363827]

Every single K1 top fighter was brought into mma to lose to Japanese wrestlers/famous
Japanese athletes.
With all confirmed crazy stories of Rampage being paid more to lose to Saku (plus
crazy short notice weight cut), Wandy being offered ridiculous money to fight Hunt
in less than a week notice.
Confirmed fixed fight (Takada vs Mark Coleman, don't need to be a genius to figure
that one out)
I think Cro cop's stories might very well be true, since he was treated like Japanese
stars back then.

 

[Deleted member 363827]

What did Rickson do to Anjo? Why is his face bloodied? I thought that was just a pure grapling match

It was pure no hold bar match. Rickson beat the crap out of him, and became
star in Japan.

 

[Vil7]

Every single K1 top fighter was brought into mma to lose to Japanese wrestlers/famous
Japanese athletes.
With all confirmed crazy stories of Rampage being paid more to lose to Saku (plus
crazy short notice weight cut), Wandy being offered ridiculous money to fight Hunt
in less than a week notice.
Confirmed fixed fight (Takada vs Mark Coleman, don't need to be a genius to figure
that one out)
I think Cro cop's stories might very well be true, since he was treated like Japanese
stars back then.

I heard they tried to offer to pay Rampage not to tap to the choke when he fought Sakuraba.