Six years ago I published Shamrock. It was a book twenty-five years in the making, born out of a lifelong obsession with the kind of people most respectable folks crossed the street to avoid.

It had everything I loved about the early, Wild West days of mixed martial arts: brave warriors, damaged men, fistic visionaries, and absolute degenerates. Pioneers who built a sport out of an outlaw spectacle once sneered at as “human cockfighting.” Japanese pro wrestling, wild road stories from the Attitude Era heyday, the California club scene—it was the life story of a guy who once jumped off the back of a motorcycle to rob his own drug dealer. What more could you want?

I came off the release on a pure contact high. Dan Le Batard called. Dave Meltzer loved me again. Hollywood suits were sniffing around. There were treatments, documentary pitches, and serious talk about a lightly fictionalized HBO dramedy.

The horizon felt wide open.

My move was to build Hybrid Shoot—a rogue ship for combat sports writers to publish their untamed dream projects without having to beg the New York houses for permission. The math was simple: one book a year, and I would lead the charge.

For the first time in my career, it seemed possible that my obsession might actually be a viable business model and not just something that drove my wife crazy. I had spent decades accumulating stories nobody sensible thought were worth accumulating. Suddenly those stories were an asset. Maybe there was a lane here after all—not just for me, but for every writer sitting on the wrestling or fighting book no conventional publisher could quite understand.

Then the silence set in.

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The Shamrock options expired without a single frame of film shot. My dream of tackling the definitive, unvarnished history of PRIDE Fighting Championships hit an impenetrable wall of Japanese politeness, language difficulties and closed doors. I had the subject, the contacts, presumably the knowledge, even the willingness to spend years on it—and none of that mattered because there was a cultural and institutional wall I couldn’t brute-force my way through.

Some books, I learned, simply refuse to exist no matter how badly you want them.

We had some wins, with me mostly in an advisory role. We made lists of legendary and bloody wrestling matches. Sang the ballad of Kevin and Sami. But it wasn’t all success and glory. Boxing writers took advances and disappeared with our money. Artists cashed checks and delivered partially finished product. Scrapers stole our digital files for pirate libraries. The ship wasn’t expanding. It was taking on water.

I partnered with Kevin Sullivan to document his incredible, dark, brilliant career—and then Kevin died.

We had recorded substantial material, stories about his crazy life that defied belief. But there were questions I hadn’t gotten to. So many questions. We’d talked at great length about his life as a behind-the-scenes producer at WCW and very little about his earliest days in the business. There were so many things he had promised to explain next time we talked.

We never did.

I find myself looking at notes, plans and outlines, realizing those questions will never be answered.

A book can survive bad sales. It can survive a missed deadline. It can survive a cover artist disappearing. What it can’t survive is the death of the only man who knows how the story ends.

Jimmy Garvin didn’t die, thank God. But after two interviews, our book did. He took a long look at the prospect of reliving his past and walked away. We kicked the tires on a Mark Coleman project. They fell off and the car never left the curb.

It turns out that the big New York publishers were on to something—they don’t avoid niche combat sports books out of cowardice. There just aren’t that many people waiting to buy them. Hell, most people don't buy books at all. This is a labor of love, a tribute to an industry and performers who don’t always get their flowers. When you write about the history of blood sport, you aren’t racing a publisher’s deadline. You are racing the clock. You are chasing men whose bodies and memories paid the bill decades ago. You’re racing pacemakers, failing brains and backs, and hospital visits.

The generation that wrestled in the territory days is dying. So are the pioneers who first mixed the martial arts. Memories disappear before bodies do. Some can’t remember. Some don’t want to. Others finally become willing to talk—and then there isn’t enough time. I’m writing a book about the Malenko wrestling family and there isn’t a single wrestler alive who wrestled the Great Malenko in his prime and can still tell the tale.

Not a single one.

I still think these stories are worth telling, even when the attempt costs you. You put your time, your money, and your sanity at risk on a hand you might lose, chasing a story that could slip through your fingers before the tape recorder stops running.

You either fold, or you sit back down at the keyboard.

This year, finally, the ship is moving again. I’ve written a book with Bret Hart that will come out next year for ECW Press. There are hundreds of pages in the can on two more for Hybrid Shoot, including the Malenkos. It’s exactly the kind of book Hybrid Shoot was created to make: a multigenerational story for the wrestling obsessive, a combination of oral and archival history, far too peculiar for most risk-averse publishers.

It’s what I set out to do right after Shamrock.

Better late than never.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

WWE has recently begun opening the door to one of the more fascinating rooms in its enormous video mausoleum. Its Vault channel is releasing complete house shows from the Omni in Atlanta, remnants of Georgia Championship Wrestling from the early 1980s that previously survived mostly as newspaper results, old-timer memories and fragments passed between collectors.

Now the shows simply exist. You can watch them. In their entirety.

In a world where many hardcore fans feel like they’ve already seen it all, this has produced an increasingly rare sensation among wrestling fans: discovery.

Viewers too young to have attended events at the Omni—and, in many cases, too young to remember when professional wrestling operated as a series of regional fiefdoms—have reacted with something approaching wonder. The shows are not merely historical curiosities.

They are alive.

The crowds surge and recede. The wrestlers inhabit their characters instead of periodically stepping outside them to assure everyone that they understand the joke and aren’t truly bad fellas. Matches unfold according to rhythms that modern wrestling has mostly abandoned.

Old-school enthusiasts such as Wrestling Playlists have treated these releases as both entertainment and cultural archaeology. Another missing piece of wrestling’s past has been restored, another data point for those trying to piece together the sport’s complicated history. Fans can watch the footage, argue about it and form conclusions that have not been filtered through four decades of received wisdom. For a brief moment, the whole community seemed to have been handed a newly recovered past.

Then Dave Meltzer arrived with the spreadsheet.

Meltzer, professional wrestling’s most influential business historian and foremost critic, to the extent such a position exists, was unimpressed by some of the praise. Georgia Championship Wrestling, you see, was experiencing a commercial lull during portions of this period. Some of the Omni shows did not draw particularly well. The crowds were smaller than they had been during hotter periods.

The joke, apparently, was on the people enjoying the wrestling.

It had not drawn.

It was the perfect argument for our moment because it takes a useful historical fact and uses it to commit intellectual vandalism. Attendance can tell us whether a promotion was commercially healthy. It can help explain why a booker changed direction, why a wrestler lost his position or why a territory eventually collapsed. It cannot reach through forty years of history, sit beside you on the couch and determine whether the match you just watched was good or not.

But this is what the spreadsheet provides and this is the world it’s created. It does not merely provide context for what the viewer experienced. It overrules it.

Fans watched the wrestling and found it compelling. But the market had rendered its judgment in 1983, and no subsequent jury was authorized to reconsider the case.

It’s more complicated than that. Most things are.

There is also an old hierarchy quietly being restored. For decades, wrestling history belonged disproportionately to the people who were there, knew someone who was there or subscribed to the publication whose anonymous sources supplied the accepted version of what had happened. Scarcity of information created authority. The historian, even when his evidence was anecdotal or possibly fictional, possessed something more powerful than an opinion.

He possessed the accepted version of reality.

The Vault disrupts that arrangement. A younger viewer no longer needs to accept that a cold period necessarily means the wrestlers were ineffective or the matches forgettable. They can press play and decide for themselves.

Perhaps this is not conscious gatekeeping. Most gatekeepers don’t see themselves as such—they imagine they are merely maintaining standards. But the function is the same. Once fans can watch the footage and judge for themselves, the old authority starts to wobble. That is when the gate figures come out, even when those figures are themselves mostly bits of lore repeated until everyone accepts them as fact.

This is the Spreadsheet Society: a culture in which people are taught to distrust their own response to art until a financial report tells them what it meant.

It’s one thing for Dave Meltzer to do this. It’s kind of his thing.

But, at some point, without any formal announcement, ordinary people began speaking like vice presidents of content strategy too. Wrestling fans became ratings analysts. Moviegoers became box-office reporters. Pop listeners became chart strategists. Everyone acquired imaginary fiduciary responsibilities to corporations they didn’t own, work for, or even understand.

The number ends the argument—or at least lets everyone pretend the argument has ended. It feels objective. More important, it keeps anyone from having to defend an actual opinion.

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It began, like many terrible ideas do, as a reasonable one.

“Just let people enjoy things” was originally a useful rebuke to a recognizable cultural pest—the professional sneerer who treated enthusiasm as evidence of intellectual weakness. This person could not simply dislike a superhero movie or a pop song. He needed everyone who enjoyed it to understand they had been manipulated by capitalism, inadequate cultural education or some defect in their cognitive capacity.

He was exhausting.

There was value in reminding him that pleasure did not require permission.

But “let people enjoy things” gradually mutated. It stopped meaning that people should be allowed to enjoy mediocre art and began to mean nobody should even be allowed to call the art mediocre. A negative review became an attempt to confiscate happiness. Disappointment became toxicity. Criticism became harassment.

The writer working alone at a kitchen table on a Substack blog was recast as the bully. The multibillion-dollar entertainment conglomerate or celebrity with 10 million followers became the vulnerable victim.

This inversion only makes sense because audiences no longer merely enjoy cultural products. They incorporate them. They become them.

“I like AEW” becomes “I am an AEW fan,” which eventually becomes “An attack on AEW is an attack on people like me.” The same process occurs with WWE, Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Marvel, DC and almost every corner of modern culture that has been successfully turned into a team sport.

Once taste becomes identity, disagreement becomes existential. A complaint about pacing is not about pacing at all. Not really. It means you think the audience is stupid. Criticism of a singer becomes an attack on young women, barely coded misogyny. Disliking a superhero movie means you hate childhood wonderment or modern tools of creation.

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A bad review is no longer an argument about a piece of art. It is a hostile incursion into somebody else’s sense of self.

This is why modern fan arguments so quickly become moral arguments. A product cannot merely be bad. It must be harmful, offensive or created by monsters. Conversely, liking the product cannot merely be pleasurable. Supporting it must represent kindness, inclusion and human decency.

People defend massive corporate monopolies while speaking the language of resistance. Buying the officially licensed plastic cup becomes an act of progressive solidarity.

The recent battle between Taylor Swift fans and Olivia Rodrigo supporters supplied a nearly perfect demonstration. Swift had a No. 1 song. Rodrigo had a song attempting to reach No. 1. Swift’s continued commercial success was therefore described in some quarters not as a chart result but as an ethical offense.

She had “blocked” Olivia.

The implication was that the top position belonged to Rodrigo by moral right and Swift had selfishly occupied it. It was evidence of greed, insecurity and hostility toward another woman.

Notice what the argument did not require: a discussion of the songs.

Was Swift’s song better? Was Rodrigo’s more interesting? Did either contain a melody, lyric or production choice worth remembering?

Those questions are almost quaint.

Fans instead transformed themselves into amateur chart analysts and prosecuting attorneys. One artist had not merely sold more music. She had committed an ethical violation by winning.

Commercial performance had become moral evidence.

Superhero fandom does the same thing with box-office grosses. Marvel supporters celebrate their franchise’s superiority over DC by producing worldwide revenue totals as though Disney will distribute dividends among everyone who defended Ant-Man online. DC loyalists wait for a Marvel film to stumble and announce that the empire is collapsing.

Whether a comic book film is good in any traditional sense is almost irrelevant. Who cares? Check the opening weekend.

Fans now do public relations work for enormous companies for free, then congratulate themselves when the company makes more money. People who once argued about art now argue about market share. Teenagers who might have debated which hero was more compelling, who they could more easily relate to, instead celebrate one conglomerate’s ability to extract more money from its customers.

From them.

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Politics has inevitably absorbed this logic. The right-wing version is especially blunt. A movie featuring women, gay people, nonwhite leads or any politics more progressive than a 1986 Ford Bronco commercial underperforms, and the spreadsheet is immediately presented as proof that the public has rejected “wokeness.”

The failure is no longer attributed to one screenplay, one marketing campaign, one release date or a collection of poor creative decisions. It becomes a national referendum. The market, we’re told, has voted against feminism.

When an inclusive film succeeds, the same people suddenly rediscover that box office is complicated. Existing intellectual property matters. Marketing matters. Release windows matter. Sometimes audiences simply like a popular character.

Again, the number means whatever the tribe requires. It is objective only when it can be weaponized.

AEW ratings discourse follows the same pattern every week. When the audience declines, critics announce that viewers have rendered a final verdict on the creative direction. When the audience rises, many of the same people explain that one week means nothing. Supporters reverse the formula. A good number proves the show is connecting. A bad number is caused by basketball, cable erosion, holiday travel, news coverage, poor lead-ins or the unknowable habits of people between eighteen and forty-nine.

All of those explanations may contain some truth. Television measurement is complicated. But complication is only acknowledged when simplicity becomes inconvenient.

The rating is treated as an infallible measure of quality until it produces the wrong answer.

The selective worship of numbers explains how these arguments work. It does not explain why fans have become so personally invested in winning them.

There have always been obsessive fans. Beatlemania did not need broadband. Wrestling fans tried to stab heels before anyone could quote-tweet them. The modern difference is an economic system designed to convert emotional identification into recurring revenue.

The old transaction was comparatively clear. An artist created a record, book, movie or performance. The audience purchased it. They talked about it with their friends or in zines. The transaction ended.

The collapse of physical media, fragmentation of audiences and microscopic economics of streaming altered the bargain. For many writers, musicians and performers, selling the work is no longer enough. They must also sell access to themselves.

The creator tweets through breakfast, posts from the airport, shares personal anxieties and addresses paying supporters with the comfortable intimacy of a friend. Patreon, Kickstarter, Substack, Cameo and the VIP package all sell slightly different versions of the same thing—the feeling that the person on the other side of the screen knows who you are. Or cares.

Nobody involved has to be lying for the arrangement to get weird. The artist may sincerely appreciate the people paying the bills. The audience may genuinely feel understood. But the creator knows only a crowd, a username or a revenue category. The fan comes to believe he knows a person—childhood wounds, pets, politics, illnesses and daily emotional weather. They are not meeting on even-ground.

What the audience buys is the sensation of mutual recognition. What the creator receives is recurring income.

Once fans believe they own a tiny piece of someone’s life, they begin protecting that investment.

This is the parasocial protection racket. The creator lets the audience feel close. In return, the audience buys the shirts, pays the monthly fee and patrols the internet looking for enemies.

Being a critic in this world is a dangerous game.

The artist does not need to explicitly order an attack for it to occur. Taylor Swift would NEVER.

A screenshot will do. A quote-tweet. An Instagram story placing a negative review before several million emotionally invested followers. The question “Why are people like this?” functions like a mob boss wondering aloud why a certain restaurant remains standing.

The millionaire is the underdog. The critic with 2,300 followers and a freelance gig at a failing website becomes the powerful aggressor.

In wrestling, the consequences can be tangible. Access disappears. Interview requests go unanswered. Editors decide no article is worth three days of abuse.

I’ve lived it.

Writers learn to preface every negative judgment by affirming that the wrestler seems like a wonderful person, the promotion employs many talented people and nobody should interpret criticism of a televised performance as a wish for personal suffering.

Eventually, it becomes easier to stop judging the performance all together.

This is where the spreadsheet offers refuge.

Numbers create the illusion of criticism without the danger of expressing personal taste. Calling a segment dramatically incoherent could anger the wrestler and their fans. Saying it lost viewers sounds neutral.

Calling a superhero movie lifeless corporate inventory invites a war. Saying it underperformed against projections is “business analysis.”

The critic retreats into metrics because metrics seem bloodless. The fan embraces them because metrics create clear winners and losers.

Wrestling was uniquely prepared for this transformation. The Monday Night War trained viewers to regard ratings as weekly sporting results in their own right. Attendance, television audiences and pay-per-view sales can help explain whether a performer connected with the public.

But what was once useful context became the entire conversation. Fans now debate quarter-hours and demographics they do not understand, merchandise figures they cannot actually see and television contracts from which they will never receive a dime.

The old wrestling fan wanted to believe the punch was real. The modern wrestling fan wants to believe he participated in the earnings call—or could have.

I understand the temptation because I participate in it too. I have dismissed commercial success as irrelevant until it supported my beliefs. Anyone who publishes online learns to refresh the dashboard and watch page views or subscriber totals rise and fall as though the numbers contain some final judgment about the work itself.

The spreadsheet is seductive because it offers something criticism never can: the possibility of being conclusively right.

Two people can argue forever about whether a wrestling match told a coherent story. They cannot argue that a quarter hour gained viewers if it didn’t. A billion-dollar-a-year TV contract sits at the end of a conversation like a court ruling.

But commercial popularity proves only that a lot of people paid attention, spent money or pressed play. McDonald’s has served more meals than the finest restaurant in your city. This does not make the Quarter Pounder civilization’s supreme culinary achievement, though I’d allow top five.

Popularity only tells us that something was popular. People keep asking it to tell us much more than that. It can’t. It’s not an aesthetic judgment. It’s a financial one.

Once we surrender that distinction, ambitious failure becomes indefensible. There is no room for the fascinating mess, the flawed experiment or the work whose audience arrives twenty years late.

Or not at all.

The cult classic becomes impossible because the opening weekend has already delivered the official verdict. The cult, in the world of the spreadsheet, is simply wrong.

We also lose the ability to love something while demanding more from it. You cannot enjoy AEW while criticizing its television. You cannot admire Taylor Swift while disliking the fact she is a product in addition to being an artist. You cannot believe Marvel comics accomplished something extraordinary while wondering whether its assembly line films now produce mostly expensive trailers for future trailers.

You cannot watch a forty-year-old wrestling show, feel transported by it and say that it was wonderful. Not if the building was half-empty.

It no longer matters what you thought you saw. The numbers say you were wrong.

Here’s the thing—taking art seriously means accepting that it can fail. Songs, movies, books and wrestling matches matter enough to deserve judgment, not unconditional affirmation. Honest criticism is not the opposite of love. It is what love looks like after the merchandise table closes.

We traded criticism for bookkeeping. We let box-office grosses, streaming totals, live gates and quarter-hour ratings decide what was true, beautiful and good. Some of my favorite records never sold much. Arrested Development, my favorite television comedy, never found a network audience. The best wrestling ever committed to videotape happened in tiny arenas in Japan in front of nobody.

The bookkeepers can tell us who got rich. They cannot tell us what was worth watching. Only a person can do that. And I’d hate for us to lose the habit.

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Jonathan Snowden is a longtime combat-sports journalist and the author of Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe for more essays on wrestling, combat sports and the strange machinery surrounding them.

A wrestler on AEW Dynamite runs toward the ropes and leaps, a daring, indescribable act of trust, foolishness and professional craft. His opponent is supposed to catch him on the floor. For a fraction of a second, they are not quite in the same place at the same time.

The wrestler crashes to the floor. The crowd lets out a groan, holding that breath until he gets up to his feet.

Nobody dies. Nobody is injured. The match continues. Three minutes later, almost everyone watching has forgotten it happened.

Online, however, the mistake has already undergone a complete forensic examination.

The clip is isolated, slowed down and posted before the wrestler has returned to the ring. Someone with a username that includes the word “botch” announces that it represents everything wrong with modern professional wrestling. Someone else explains that mistakes happen in every promotion and produces footage of a similar incident from SmackDown. A third person notes that the SmackDown incident was fundamentally different because the wrestlers involved understood psychology. A fourth person demands to know why anyone who hates AEW watches every Wednesday anyway. A fifth person posts a screenshot of the overnight rating, although the overnight rating has not yet happened—the show, after all, is still on.

Within ninety seconds, a slightly mistimed dive has become evidence in a sprawling civilizational trial involving Tony Khan, Triple H, Jim Cornette, television executives, declining birth rates, the creative bankruptcy of American entertainment and whether Harley Race would have tolerated any of this shit.

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The actual wrestling move is incidental. It is merely the body discovered at the beginning of the procedural.

Nobody online is reacting to wrestling anymore. They are reacting to the reaction to wrestling. You don’t even have to watch to participate.

This distinction explains almost everything about the modern internet wrestling community. A match is no longer permitted to exist as an isolated aesthetic experience. It cannot simply be exciting, boring, funny, excessive, sloppy or surprisingly good. Every match is now a proxy war over the existential validity of the corporation that presented it.

A Will Ospreay match is not a Will Ospreay match. It is a referendum on whether wrestling should prioritize athletic spectacle over simulated combat. A Roman Reigns promo is not a Roman Reigns promo. It is a loyalty oath concerning the patient brilliance of long-term storytelling. The Young Bucks are not two brothers performing professional wrestling. They are either postmodern geniuses dismantling the form from within or the final stage of a disease that began when Shawn Michaels discovered he could slap his thigh.

Nothing is small enough to remain small.

This is partly because wrestling fans have always been insane. That should be stipulated at the beginning. For decades, otherwise functional adults have spent substantial portions of their lives arguing about whether Hulk Hogan should have lost to Bret Hart in 1993, an event that did not happen during a championship reign that ended more than thirty years ago. Wrestling fandom has never required much encouragement to turn hypothetical booking into the Council of Nicaea.

But the modern ecosystem added something new. It attached a cash register to the arguments.

Once social-media platforms began monetizing engagement, bad wrestling opinions ceased to be merely bad opinions. They became inventory. Outrage became output. The most hysterical possible interpretation of a mundane event was no longer just emotionally satisfying; it was potentially profitable.

This created a new class of wrestling personality: the transactionally outraged.

The transactionally outraged person may genuinely dislike AEW, WWE or whichever promotion has been selected as the enemy. Sincerity is not required, but neither is dishonesty. What matters is that the emotion must be expressed in the form most likely to generate resistance. It cannot be enough to say that a segment did not work. The segment must expose a fundamental contempt for the audience. The promotion cannot merely have made a bad creative decision. It must be collapsing. The wrestler cannot have had an off night. He or she must be unsafe, selfish, untrained, exposed and personally responsible for the disappearance of the territories.

The ideal take is not the one most likely to be true. It is the one most likely to make 500 people furious enough to quote-post it.

If you can help pay your electric bill by convincing strangers that a standard Will Ospreay match constitutes an insult to the memory of Frank Gotch, you are no longer functioning primarily as a critic. You are an employee of the outrage economy. It is a low-yield blue-collar job performed from an ergonomic gaming chair. Some do it for money, some for mere likes and an iota of attention.

The product being manufactured is anger. The people screaming at you are not just the customer—they are also the raw material of your act. It would be brilliant if it wasn’t quite so awful.

The Symbiotic Grift

The conventional understanding of wrestling Twitter is that two opposing armies are engaged in trench warfare. On one side are the professional cynics: podcasters, aggregators and aspiring personalities who treat every AEW production error as the Zapruder film. On the other side are the promotion’s most committed defenders, who spend Wednesday nights patrolling social media for ideological trespassers.

These people believe they hate each other.

They are mistaken.

The performative cynic and the hyper-defensive stan are not natural enemies. They are business partners who have never exchanged banking information. Each is indispensable to the other.

A podcaster who makes a living being theatrically appalled by Tony Khan’s booking requires an audience willing to respond with white-hot fury. Without that response, the original post disappears into the same digital void occupied by vacation photographs, earnest poetry and advertisements for independent wrestling shows in Indiana. The defenders supply the quote-posts, replies, screenshots and multi-day discourse that transform one inflammatory sentence into monetizable reach.

But the dependency runs both ways. The committed defender also needs the grifter.

Without the constant suggestion that AEW is on the verge of death, following the promotion would simply be a leisure activity. You would watch the program, enjoy some parts, dislike others and perhaps discuss it with friends. This is psychologically inadequate. The presence of an organized enemy elevates consumer preference into moral courage. You are protecting the very possibility of alternative professional wrestling against a hostile media apparatus determined to destroy it.

You are no longer watching a television show. You have an identity. You are part of a movement.

Every picture of an empty seat becomes disinformation. Every ratings decline requires context. Every unflattering report is traced back to its probable source, which is then praised or buried according to your preference. Every criticism carries the faint odor of sabotage.

This is fandom experienced as permanent counterintelligence.

Both sides therefore receive exactly what they need. The cynic receives engagement. The defender receives persecution. Together they operate a closed-loop emotional refinery in which everyone feels angry, important and strangely alive.

The relationship resembles professional wrestling more than either side would care to admit. The heel insults the audience. The audience pays to see the heel punished. The heel interprets the payment as evidence that the insult worked and returns the following week with a louder one.

The critical difference is that old wrestling understood the exchange was supposed to end with catharsis. Bruno Sammartino eventually punched the villain and pinned him in the middle of the ring. Dusty Rhodes eventually drew blood. The fan went home believing the universe had been temporarily restored to order.

Online wrestling discourse never delivers the blowoff.

There is no cage match. There is no loser-leaves-town stipulation. There is only another episode, another rating and another opportunity to interpret a mildly disappointing quarter-hour as the fall of Saigon.

The Monday Night War at least involved two wrestling companies attempting to produce television people wanted to watch. Its degraded reenactment consists largely of fans examining spreadsheets on behalf of corporations that do not employ them.

The Tyranny of Forced Joy

Eventually, some fans attempted to escape.

They left Twitter—or X, although calling it X still feels like agreeing to participate in a divorced man’s rebrand—and migrated toward smaller platforms such as Bluesky. The goal was reasonable. They wanted to discuss wrestling without being ambushed by monetized hostility. They were tired of feeding people who had learned to convert their irritation into impressions.

For a while, the new environment felt healthier. The most exhausting actors had either remained behind or had not yet developed sufficient incentive to follow. Sure, people posted screenshots to argue with their rivals in abstentia—but they also posted about matches they enjoyed. Conversations occurred without everyone immediately demanding proof of ideological consistency.

Then a different pathology emerged.

When a community defines itself primarily in opposition to negativity, criticism begins to resemble insult. The acceptable range of opinion does not merely narrow. It becomes non-existent, replaced with a hive mind.

A match cannot be pretty good. “Pretty good” is what the enemy says before posting a screenshot of the attendance. A storyline cannot be losing momentum. That is concern trolling. A wrestler cannot be overexposed, miscast or simply having a bad year. Such observations might provide ammunition to people who do not deserve ammunition.

The result is performative positivity: the obligation to experience every competent wrestling match as a landmark achievement in human expression.

A wrestler executes a complicated sequence and the match is immediately described as cinema. A reasonably effective television angle is Shakespearean. A bloody main event has changed the business forever, even though the business was also changed forever the previous Wednesday and will apparently require revolutionizing again next week.

The language of enthusiasm becomes so inflated that ordinary pleasure is treated as betrayal.

This is not happiness. It is a defense mechanism.

The tragedy is that the safe space becomes intellectually unsafe in a different way. It protects fans from obvious antagonists while making them increasingly suspicious of anyone capable of expressing ambivalence or even liking some things more than others.

This is how you arrive at the tyranny of forced joy: an environment where everyone is free to share an opinion, provided the opinion is that the last pay-per-view was somewhere between “incredible” and “a generation-defining masterwork.”

The hostility has not disappeared. It has merely changed uniforms.

On Twitter, dissent is punished through ridicule and pile-ons. In the aggressively positive enclave, dissent is punished through moral suspicion. You are not accused of being wrong. You are accused of creating unsafe conditions for enjoyment.

This sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous.

It is also understandable.

Many AEW fans spent years watching every setback converted into content by people openly rooting for the company’s failure. They saw injuries treated as punchlines, attendance problems celebrated and ordinary creative mistakes used to argue that the entire enterprise had been fraudulent from the beginning. It is natural that some became defensive.

But understandable behavior can still become destructive. A bunker protects people from bombardment. It is also a terrible place to build a window.

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The Death of the Thought Experiment

The most significant casualty of this war is not civility. Wrestling fans have survived without civility for as long as wrestling fans have existed.

The casualty is curiosity.

When everyone is presumed to be operating in bad faith, abstract thought becomes impossible. You cannot ask a question without first proving you have the moral right to ask it. You cannot entertain an alternative without being accused of endorsing it. “What if?” is no longer an invitation to experiment. It is treated as the first stage of a rhetorical trap.

Healthy fandom depends on what might be called Schrödinger’s Booking: the capacity to hold two conflicting ideas about wrestling at the same time.

A performer can be brilliant and trapped in a bad storyline. A company can be producing good television while making damaging long-term decisions. A match can be technically spectacular and emotionally empty. A wrestler you dislike can make a persuasive point. A wrestler you love can be full of shit.

These ideas do not invalidate each other. They coexist until evidence, time or personal preference causes one to become more important.

But tribal discourse cannot tolerate ambiguity. It requires every statement to resolve instantly into allegiance.

Consider the seemingly ordinary sentence: “I love this performer, but this storyline is dying on the vine.”

In a functioning conversation, this creates several possibilities. Why is the story failing? Is the wrestler miscast? Has the booking become repetitive? Is the crowd reacting differently than expected? Could a change in presentation revive it?

In the modern ecosystem, the sentence triggers a background check.

Do you actually love the performer? Have you criticized this promotion before? Why did you not make a similar point when WWE did something comparable? Are you repeating a podcast talking point? Do you secretly want the company to fail? Why are all your replies from the same six accounts? What did you say about the Continental Classic in 2023?

The match disappears. The storyline disappears. The subject of the conversation becomes the speaker’s presumed intention.

Every interaction is an interrogation conducted by people searching for the hidden camera.

This is partly a consequence of repeated exposure to obvious bad faith. If someone spends four years insisting that every AEW television show is the worst episode ever produced, it is reasonable to stop treating each new complaint as an independent critical judgment. Patterns matter. Motives exist.

But the habit spreads. Eventually, nobody is allowed to possess an uncomplicated thought. Every opinion is examined for concealed ideological machinery.

This destroys the thought experiment because thought experiments require temporary vulnerability. You must be able to consider an idea without marrying it. You must be able to say, “I’m not sure this is true, but let’s follow its course for a minute.”

The result is a culture that produces endless takes but very few thoughts.

A take is a conclusion designed for distribution. A thought is a process that may lead somewhere embarrassing or even wrong. Thoughts require uncertainty. Takes require branding.

The wrestling fan once asked, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if…?”

The wrestling content producer asks, “Which version of this opinion will perform?”

Increasingly, the ordinary fan does too.

The Fan in the Mirror

It would be comforting to blame all of this on grifters, platform owners and podcasters making thumbnails in which Tony Khan’s eyes have been replaced by flames. They deserve their share of blame. The algorithm rewards the most exhausting people in every community and then presents their success as evidence that the community wanted them all along.

But the ecosystem cannot function without us.

We supply the outrage. We perform the free publicity. We search for the most offensive possible interpretation of a post, carry it onto another platform and place it before an entirely new audience. We insist we are correcting misinformation while ensuring the misinformation receives ten times more circulation than it would have achieved on its own.

We keep touching the electric fence and then write posts demanding to know why someone keeps electrifying it.

The internet wrestling community is not unique. Wrestling is simply louder and weirder than most other cultural communities, which makes its structural decay easier to observe. Political reporting underwent the same transformation. So did film criticism, video-game discourse and nearly every other field where identity became fused with consumer preference.

Every object becomes a symbol. Every preference becomes an affiliation. Every disagreement becomes evidence of corruption.

Wrestling merely adds its own surreal details and an inclination to imitate the bombastic personalities on television. The combatants are arguing about monopoly power and television distribution while using profile pictures of men in sequined robes pretending to be nature boys.

The form works by convincing the audience that emotional investment is a kind of action. And for decades, that investment had somewhere to go, towards the ring and the characters.

The internet redirected that impulse from wrestlers to promotions.

The fan is no longer simply asked to cheer. The fan is asked to manage the brand.

We monitor ratings. We study attendance maps. We argue about rights fees. We explain why the quarterly financial report is being misinterpreted. We defend executives who would have us escorted from the building if we appeared at corporate headquarters and asked to use the bathroom.

This is exhausting work, made more exhausting by the fact that nobody assigned it and nobody is getting paid.

The grifter at least receives a check.

The rest of us sit in our living rooms staring at one screen while holding another, defending billionaires who do not know we exist from professional antagonists who only want our clicks. We spend the match preparing our response to the response. We anticipate the bad-faith argument before it arrives. We compose the rebuttal while the wrestler is still climbing the turnbuckle.

Then the table breaks.

For a second, something real happens. A human body falls through wood. The crowd makes a noise that cannot be reduced to a demographic. We feel the involuntary thrill that brought us here in the first place.

But the moment passes quickly.

We reach for the phone.

There is work to do.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

Jushin “Thunder” Liger had made the walk hundreds of times. Thousands, maybe, the iconic “Ikari no Jushin” blaring as he made his way to the ring, the song still echoing as he climbed the corner to greet the crowd. But make no mistake—Jushin Liger had never walked the aisle quite like this.

Bare-chested.

Wearing a stripped-down combat mask.

On foreign ground.

Ready, or trying to be, for a real fight.

It was November 30, 2002. The place was Yokohama Cultural Gymnasium. A sellout of 5,900 had come to see the most elaborate showman in all of wrestling stripped nearly bare.

Across the ring was a man he had once known well, a dojo kid1 when Liger began his transformation into something larger than himself. But Minoru Suzuki was a young boy no more. Years in the UWF style, then Pancrase, had hardened him into something colder than iron. He was a living weapon, a submission machine. If Liger was a bright star, the joyous savant of the junior heavyweight division, Suzuki was a black hole where joy went to die.

Suzuki explained it this way:

“There’s something Liger said in a magazine. That pro wrestling is about making your opponent shine. That’s Liger’s pro wrestling. But I’ve said before that my pro wrestling is about erasing the opponent’s light. If they want to shine, they can shine on their own. So I say to Liger: if you can shine, let’s see you shine.”2

It was 9:15 p.m. when the bell rang, Liger jumping the gun only to be sent back to the corner, the energy electric as everyone waited to see how his flashy style of combat would translate to a type of wrestling reduced to its barest, most essential elements.

“His body, that distinctive pro-wrestler kind of body that is broad from side to side,” Weekly Pro-Wrestling wrote, “stood out at once.”

So too his actions.

The first thing Jushin Thunder Liger did in Pancrase was the most Jushin Thunder Liger thing imaginable. He crouched low, came forward behind a jab like a man about to shoot—and then hurled himself into the air, turning his body into a rolling kick.3

It was defiant, beautiful, absurd, and doomed.

Suzuki slipped to one side. The kick caught him high but did no real damage. He kept his feet, maintained his base, and quickly came down on top. Right in front of the assembled press, he looked up and did the scariest thing possible.

Minoru Suzuki laughed.

It was over before it had truly begun.

But this is not really a story about a wrestler trying MMA once and failing. It is a story about a promise that changed hands.

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The Man Beneath the Mask

The mask made it easy to misunderstand him—but Liger was not a mere mascot, some cartoon wrestler who accidentally wandered into a shoot. Before the shooting star press and the colorful costume, he was Keiichi Yamada, just like Suzuki a New Japan dojo product, one of those strange creatures formed in a system where performance, punishment, and pride shared the same room.

In the New Japan apparatus, no matter how elaborate the public exhibitions became, the back room training remained the same. Kotetsu Yamamoto built the bodies, endless, cruel training a daily ritual. Then Yoshiaki Fujiwara took over, stretching the worn joints and muscles to breaking, teaching a collection of testosterone junkies something approaching science, classes in kinesthetic torture turning showmen into warriors.

Masakatsu Funaki, who founded Pancrase alongside Suzuki, remembered Liger as a man who loved “cement,”4 who took Fujiwara’s real sparring sessions5 as seriously as anyone. Hot-blooded, he was the first to step forward when violence seemed the most acceptable answer.

“If someone came storming into the dojo looking for a fight,” Funaki recalled, “Liger was the first one to go.

“At the time, he was one of the most martial-arts-minded people in New Japan. I remember Fujiwara School very clearly. Back then, we were all starving for technique. Everyone was an ambitious wrestler. Everyone wanted to work with Fujiwara-san. The one monopolizing his time was Liger. After Liger went overseas6, I monopolized Fujiwara-san. After I went overseas, Suzuki monopolized him.

“...His specialty back then was the armlock. The moment he grabbed your arm, you thought, ‘Ah, he’s got me.’ Anyway, he’s very strong. Fujiwara-san used to tell him all the time, ‘With you, it’s all strength. Use more leverage.’”

These early training sessions did not make Liger the equivalent of a Pancrase fighter. Those dojo days were in the distant past after all, miles and mileage of a life spent in wrestling sapping his body’s ability to respond to his commands. But it made the reckoning that unfolded sharper. Liger knew enough about violence to respect it—and perhaps just enough to truly believe he could still answer its siren song.

Liger’s sudden, unexpected appearance in Pancrase clearly left Funaki, himself recently retired, feeling nostalgic. In a different timeline, it might have been him and Liger who founded the promotion, not him and Suzuki.

But it was Minoru who had the vision for it, the will to change an entire industry to suit his desires, molding the wrestling universe to be an answer to his dreams. That, Funaki believed, would be the difference.

“For Suzuki, this is a match he absolutely cannot be allowed to lose,” he said. “He left New Japan, created his own style, and built up the Suzuki we have now. For him to lose easily to a pure New Japan guy like Liger — he cannot allow that. It’s a Pancrase ring. He absolutely cannot lose.”

The stage was set. The stakes high. And here’s the twist—Liger had not chosen this moment. He was not supposed to be opposite Suzuki in that ring. He was there because another man wasn’t.

A Rookie’s Dreams

Fifteen years earlier, two young men met in the dojo of New Japan Pro Wrestling, bonded in the way that young men can only be in the formative years of their lives. Twelve times they met in the ring as young wrestlers in 1988, both promising prospects, both with futures bright.

Twelve times Kensuke Sasaki got the better of Minoru Suzuki.

It wasn’t quite that simple of course. Even in 1988, the dynamic was already strange. Sasaki won the matches, but Suzuki won the magazine writeups. Every line bent toward Suzuki, praising his preternatural ability and poise: his joint locks, his UWF scent, his connection to Fujiwara, his unnerving confidence. All this in a 20-year-old’s body. Sasaki had beaten him, sure. But the article made it feel like Suzuki had revealed the future:

Against Sasaki, Suzuki did not show any gap in experience at all. If anything, he showed offense and defense equal to Sasaki’s — maybe even beyond it.

When they tied up, Suzuki would throw. When it went to the ground, he would go for joint locks. Armbar, wakigatame, facelock — he showed one submission technique after another, changing freely from one to the next.

Recently, New Japan’s preliminary matches have been criticized for lacking energy. But this unexpected offense pulled the crowd in. Even though it was the first match, people were shouting, “Finish him!” and “Squeeze!”

Suzuki’s joint-lock style was not foreign to New Japan. It was New Japan before New Japan forgot itself. He’d learned it, first from his contemporary Funaki and then from the wily old master himself, Fujiwara, the product of hours on the mat.

“Even if I got caught 100 times the first time, if the next day it’s 98, I’m really happy,” Suzuki said in a 1988 interview. “And if the day after that it’s 97, then that means there was one more hold I didn’t get caught in. That’s what it feels like.”

Many young wrestlers dreamed no larger than simply moving one rung up the ladder at a time. But not Suzuki. This was a young man who dreamed so large, his ambitions couldn’t exist in the sport as it was. He’d need to rebuild it in his own image first. And he would. That, however, was the future.

“I used to talk about this with Funaki all the time. If we were going to surpass Inoki, we said, we had to do something bigger,” Suzuki said. “Funaki said he wanted to fight Mike Tyson. Me? I wanted to move people. If Funaki could move 100,000, I wanted to move a million. Bigger is better. I wanted to become that kind of man and throw everything I had into pro wrestling.”

But in 1988, grand designs weren't enough. Brand new to the ring, Suzuki’s enviable skills were routinely neutralized by the sheer mass of the mountain.

In the old clippings from Weekly Pro Wrestling, their rivalry already had its shape. Suzuki was the revelation, the young joint-lock prodigy who made reporters talk about Fujiwara, UWF, and New Japan’s forgotten origin point. Sasaki was the “mountain.” Again and again, Suzuki could make him suffer, could attack the legs, could force him into the old game of holds and counters. But Sasaki remained above him, winning not with subtlety but with strength. If the 1988 articles made Suzuki look like the future, they also made clear that Sasaki was the first summit he could not reach.

“The mountain named Sasaki” was “high and steep.” Suzuki couldn’t scale it. Would that be different in 2002? That’s something the two men hoped to find out.

A Promise Between Men

After their final match in 1988, the two made a promise to each other, a young man’s vow, powerful and pure.

“We started at the bottom together,” Sasaki recalled. “We trained together under Fujiwara. We wanted only to become strong. Someday, when we had risen, we would do this again...We made a promise.”

Instead, the two took very different paths.

Suzuki and Funaki migrated to the Newborn UWF, attempting to prove pro wrestling was the ultimate martial art. But even that wasn’t bold enough for the two young visionaries. Breaking free from the system entirely, they founded Pancrase—a revolutionary experiment that asked a dangerous question: What if pro wrestling was all cement, all the time?7

For a time, Tokyo fell in love with the answer. Pancrase became a cult phenomenon, a sanctuary for fans looking to mainline violence in its purest form. But the subsequent explosion of global mixed martial arts quickly crowded the market, taking combat to extremes that made even the Pancrase pioneers uncomfortable. Worn down by years of unscripted punishment, the founders broke. Funaki retired. Suzuki, plagued by knockouts and head injuries, was forced into modified catch bouts that banned striking entirely.

Worse, to Suzuki and Funaki, the promotion’s new crop of fighters lacked the theatrical soul of the founders. They were gifted martial artists, but they didn’t understand the pro wrestling ethos—that a dramatic, heartbreaking loss could hold more value than a boring win.

Pancrase was struggling.

Sasaki, by contrast, stayed the traditional course. He ascended to the top of New Japan, captured heavyweight gold, and even donned face paint to partner with Road Warrior Hawk. Yet, no matter how much steel he lifted or how many titles he held, he could never fully escape the towering shadows of the men who preceded him—the iconic Three Musketeers.8

When the MMA boom hit Japan, Sasaki’s position grew perilous. Antonio Inoki had become obsessed with reality combat, aggressively inserting his wrestlers into legitimate shoots while bringing foreign fighters into wrestling rings. In this hostile new landscape, traditional showmanship was losing its value.

To survive, Sasaki needed a different kind of currency. He quietly traveled to America, training with Don Frye and taking a last-minute fight on a low-profile Gladiator Challenge card. But a brief excursion into regional MMA wasn’t enough to alter his trajectory. Cutting his signature mullet wouldn’t change what he was in the eyes of the public either.

To truly reinvent himself, he didn’t just need a win. He needed a reckoning. He needed Minoru Suzuki.

On May 2, 2002, immediately after a celebration of New Japan’s first 30 years, the two men agreed the time had come. A bout between the two was originally scheduled for the event, scuttled when “negotiations fell apart because Pancrase didn’t think it was a good idea for one of their wrestlers to do a worked match.”9

But the two men weren’t willing to let things go that easily.

They felt strongly they should do battle once again, both looking to start new chapters in the waning days of their primes. There was something authentic and genuine about their confrontations in those early days, something both felt was missing in their current incarnations. They were ready, once again, to see who was stronger.

“We shook hands in total darkness, where the spotlight didn’t even reach us,” Suzuki said. “That’s very us, though.”

It was almost anti-television. The cameras missed it. Suzuki didn’t care. “So what?” he said. “‘Shall we do it?’ ‘Let’s do it.’ Isn’t that enough?” That was the whole point. The promise did not need broadcast proof or an audience. It only needed the two men who had originally made it.

“Whether that moment lives or dies depends on our own spirit,” Suzuki told the press. “Whatever the rules are, this is still a story made from raw emotion. The feelings that exist inside Kensuke Sasaki and Minoru Suzuki — those are raw.

“So why not have a raw fight? A living fight.10 There are a lot of people who don’t like the phrase shinken shōbu11 — “serious fight” or “real fight” — so call it something else if you want. But that’s what it is.”

—So Minoru Suzuki vs. Kensuke Sasaki is something that goes beyond pro wrestling rules or vale tudo rules?

Suzuki: I hope it becomes that.

If he is still the same human being he was back then — if he still has that same pure feeling of wanting to climb upward — then I think something incredible will be left behind. But if he has changed, then it becomes something different. That I don’t know.

We won’t know unless we go in with the feeling of, “Ready, go,” and trade blows for real.

—Still, the reason this match is attracting so much attention is that…for Kensuke, this is an outside-style fight — maybe the first of his career in a real sense.

Suzuki: A pure promise from when we were kids — that’s important. I really think so.

When you become an adult, poison gets into your body. All kinds of escape routes get in too. And now, of course, my life and his life are completely different. The influences we’ve been under are different. The way we’ve turned out is different.

But no matter where you are, no matter what job you’re doing, there’s a part of you that shouldn’t change.

I think this match makes people wonder: what happens when the feelings from that time, still inside Suzuki, collide with New Japan Pro-Wrestling’s Kensuke Sasaki?

Sasaki viewed this upcoming fight as an otoko to otoko no yakusoku12—a “promise between men”—which represented a private code of honor built on their shared suffering and training. In describing it to the press, he broke down, caught in the hazy memories of his youth.

“I want people to really think about why it has to be me and Suzuki,” he said. “When Suzuki and I were undercard wrestlers in New Japan, we trained together under Fujiwara-san. We sweated together. We said, ‘Right now we’re at the bottom, but we are absolutely going to become strong.’”

Here, Kensuke began to break down.

“We trained with pure feelings. We took what we trained and smashed it into our matches. We competed with each other. We weren’t carrying the huge burdens we carry now. We just wanted to become strong. That was all.”

For a man, a sport, predicated on stoicism and toughness, it was a reminder that even the heroes of the ring are human.

For Suzuki, the match was equally symbolic; he believed it was a chance to see what would happen when the pure, raw emotions of their youth collided with the established fighters they had become.

Suzuki understood the danger of growing up. The question was not whether he and Sasaki had meant what they’d said when they were young. Of course they had. The question was whether the men they had become could still keep the promise the boys had made.

Exit Ramps

Initially, the corporate machinery complied. Sasaki vs. Suzuki was booked for New Japan’s massive October 14 Tokyo Dome event—the grandest possible stage for personal reinvention.

Then the first exit ramp appeared. In September, New Japan abruptly announced the bout was postponed, blaming a Sasaki ankle injury. Behind the scenes, the backstage coverage was far more cynical.

“Insiders claim that despite the public posturing,” Dave Meltzer reported in the Wrestling Observer, “Sasaki didn’t want to risk his career by losing a shooting match to someone past his prime and much smaller, so wound up with the ankle injury.”

Desperate to salvage something from what was looking like a potential debacle, New Japan proposed moving the fight out of their territory entirely and onto a Pancrase card. But transplanting the match fundamentally altered its DNA. In the Tokyo Dome, the bout could survive as a hybrid myth—part theater, part reality, protected by narrative constraints. Inside a Pancrase ring, it became impossible to domesticate. It was no longer a tribute to a shared youth; it was a traditional heavyweight being asked to step into a shark tank Suzuki had personally constructed.

The private compact was officially co-opted. Dates, venues, rules, and promotional points were being decided by executives. Sasaki watched the emotional purity of the venture evaporate in real time.

“The match between me and Suzuki,” he said, “which should have been a match just for the two of us, became New Japan vs. Pancrase.” Then he sharpened the complaint: “But now, at this point, the organization is stepping in between me and Minoru Suzuki.”

When Sasaki pulled out a second time, the promotional apparatus fractured. With the November 30 show in Yokohama suddenly missing its marquee attraction, Minoru Suzuki was left stranded. The cancellation didn’t just jeopardize a live gate; it left Suzuki with nowhere to direct fifteen years of resentment.

He had trained for Sasaki.

He had aimed himself at Sasaki.

He had built his body and mind around the collision, putting on weight for a collision with a larger man.

Suzuki’s emotions had been summoned, sharpened, and then abruptly denied a destination.

When New Japan executive Fumihiko Uwai and Jushin Thunder Liger arrived at the Pancrase office to offer formal apologies, promotional president Masami Ozaki braced for an administrative disaster.

Instead, the icon stepped forward.

“If I’m acceptable,” he said, “please let me fight him.”

The Debt

It was not opportunism. It was not a masked star reaching for one more strange headline in a career full of them. Liger understood the debt New Japan had created. He understood Suzuki’s complicated feelings about pro wrestling and New Japan. He knew the man too.

“With things the way they are… then I felt I had to do it myself,” Liger said. “I want to do it. I want to fight in the Pancrase ring. As New Japan, I bow my head over what happened with Kensuke. But as a wrestler, I understand Suzuki’s feelings, and I want to take them on myself.”13

Sasaki had left Suzuki’s challenge hanging in the air, and Liger offered himself as the place where it could safely land. Suzuki, still processing the shock, warned him plainly: “If you’re really going to step into this, come in prepared.”

Liger did not blink.

“I won’t run. I won’t hide. I’ll come straight at you.” The complicated discussions that had plagued the Sasaki fight were immediately pushed to the side. It was a Pancrase ring, Liger said, Pancrase rules were fine by him.

The offer was accepted. The show would go on. But the reckoning, the fallout, was almost immediate. They had solved one problem and created another.

Furious that the defining match of his career's second act had been surrendered, Sasaki called a retaliatory press conference and resigned from New Japan “for the sake of the Suzuki match—for that one match alone.” Liger vs. Suzuki was a dream match, he admitted, but not as an act of corporate salvage—not as his replacement.

Later, when the idea of money came up with the media, Sasaki scoffed at the idea the issue was financial, reducing the whole thing to its purest form: “Fight money? Train fare is enough. I just want to fight Suzuki.”

By then, however, the machinery, powered in this circumstance by two promotional offices, had already begun to move in a new direction. Posters were being printed. Media work had begun. Suzuki’s mind had shifted. He would later say the line from Liger that shook him most was this: “I’m the only one in New Japan who can answer what you’re feeling, aren’t I?”

The old fire, his battle with New Japan, was still alive. But it had changed hosts.

Liger was now the fight.

A Wrestler’s Burden

Although it was initially built around Sasaki, Suzuki did not treat Liger like a consolation prize. If anything, the substitution made the whole thing stranger, more dreamlike, and potentially more dangerous.

“When I saw Liger-san’s eyes,” Suzuki said, “I started trembling. I felt this incredible seriousness from him.”

At that point, Sasaki was firmly in the rear view, the past in the past. Suzuki wanted to fight Liger with everything he had. Somehow, absurdly, the replacement had become more emotionally charged than the original.

“Honestly,” Suzuki admitted, “right now, my motivation is even higher than it was for Kensuke.”

Liger accepted that burden with a wrestler’s confidence, which is to say something just adjacent to madness. He had a full New Japan schedule to maintain, a company to represent, a costume to wear, towns to make, tickets to sell. He was not disappearing into the mountains for a private camp. He was not taking six months off to remake his body for a new sport. He was Jushin Thunder Liger, still working as Jushin Thunder Liger, trying to become something else in the hours left over in the day, which weren’t that many.

But he was not walking in blind.

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He got his hands on four Suzuki tapes: the Solar fight in DEEP, a Pancrase bout where Suzuki had been badly beaten by a foreign fighter, another match against a striking-based foreigner, and a catch-rules match with a Japanese opponent. He watched them looking for patterns, habits, some hidden weakness in the man across from him. What he saw, or thought he saw, was a fighter more likely to shoot a takedown than strike, a man whose obvious weapons were the armbar and ankle hold. Dangerous, yes. But legible. Not so far removed from the techniques and lessons of Fujiwara.

A problem that could be studied.

A problem that could be solved.

So Liger built a plan.

He would keep his stance low. He would stay at distance. He would strike first, using his ability to switch stances and hit from either side. If Suzuki came for the takedown, Liger would sprawl, put his weight on him, crush him down, and take the superior position. If Liger hurt him standing, he would shoot himself, take mount, and then, on the ground, maybe find the ankle. Achilles hold. Ankle lock. A classic from the Fujiwara vocabulary. Something that still lived somewhere in the physical memory of Keiichi Yamada.

“Because I’m a wrestler,” Liger said later, “what I really wanted was to take my time and have an exchange of joint locks.”

There was a kind of innocence in that. Not ignorance exactly. Liger understood better than most that the old knowledge was not enough. “The kind of ‘cement’ Fujiwara-san taught us back then — the joint-lock exchanges — and what I’m doing now are completely different,” he said. In the dojo, if danger came, a man could curl up, turtle, protect himself, wait for the next exchange.

“If you do that now,” Liger said, “punches come flying in.” The old Fujiwara school had taught him how to suffer in purgatory. Early Pancrase looked like this too. The new Pancrase, more brutal than ever with an injection of MMA DNA, asked what happened when stolid suffering met flying fists.

That was why Liger humbled himself. The living legend went looking for help from younger specialists. Masayuki Naruse, a veteran of RINGS, was in his corner, practical and calm, checking Liger’s pulse before the fight and finding it a little over 100, just about where Liger wanted it: warm enough to be alive, not so high that fear had taken the wheel. Toru Yano, still early in his own career but already with a serious amateur wrestling base, gave him looks he could not get in ordinary pro wrestling practice. Yano’s takedowns, his weight shift, the small details of balance and pressure — Liger knew those were things he could not simply summon from pride.

He sparred with everyone who had something to give him. Judo people. Striking people. Wrestlers. Men whose special knowledge might exceed his own in their individual worlds. That, too, was part of the strange nobility of the whole thing. Liger did not pretend the mask or his stature in the industry made him invulnerable. He lowered his head and asked to be taught.

Suzuki carried an entirely different burden: absolute pressure. This was his promotion, his ring, his architecture. He had abandoned New Japan to forge this realistic alternative, and now a pure product of that original system was invading his sanctuary. To lose here to a masked senior would not simply embarrass Suzuki. It would call the whole journey into question, invalidate a life’s work.

Funaki understood that immediately. For Suzuki to lose easily to “a pure New Japan guy like Liger” was impossible. This was a Pancrase ring. He could not allow it.

So Suzuki trained as if he was the one with something to prove. In Yamanashi, cut away from the usual noise, he rebuilt himself around power. Years of injury had pulled him toward technique, toward smaller solutions and safer answers. For Liger, he wanted the old force back. Submissions were one weapon, of course, but he wanted weight behind them. Collision. Impact. A body that could hit another body and make the room understand.

“This fight is about power against power, heart against heart.”

He wanted to hit Liger head-on. He wanted to smash into him and blow him away. Pancrase, he thought, had drifted too far toward technique, too far from the original hunger that created a new world in the first place. The younger fighters knew the holds. They knew the positions. They knew the science. What they did not know, Suzuki feared, was the spirit that had launched the whole enterprise.

Liger was preparing for Suzuki.

Suzuki was preparing for the possibility that Pancrase itself had gone soft, that the vision wouldn’t survive without the founders. This would be his final lesson for those to follow.

Unsentimental Nostalgia

And yet underneath all that pressure was memory. When Suzuki was just starting in New Japan, the opponent he most wanted to fight was Liger back in his unmasked days. By facing him now, a feeling buried under years of dust had come back to life. The more Suzuki became conscious of that meaning, the easier it would have been to become sentimental.

But sentimentality was a luxury he could not afford.

If Suzuki carried even one fragment of nostalgia into the ring, he would not be able to hit Liger in the face. So he had to become exactly what he said his wrestling was: a man whose job was to extinguish the other guy’s light with 100-percent purity.

Then the bell rang, and all the preparation met the one thing no man can completely train out of himself.

Instinct.

The abise-geri was not in the plan. If Liger used it at all, it was supposed to come later, hidden behind strikes and feints, after Suzuki had been made to think about other dangers. But the crowd rose, his name was announced, the air changed, and Liger’s body betrayed him by telling the truth.14 He did not open like a cautious Pancrase novice trying to survive his first real fight. He opened like Jushin Thunder Liger.

He came forward low, behind the jab, and then he flew.

In that instant, the fighter who needed patience to survive, to make a respectable showing, was overruled by the wrestler who had spent a lifetime making impossible things look natural.

“That abise-geri was not in the game plan,” Liger said later. “I got drunk on that atmosphere.15 I got drunk on myself.”

The moment he threw it, he knew. “Oh no. I screwed up.”

The kick caught Suzuki high and did nothing. Suzuki kept his feet, kept his base, and came down on top. Whatever fragile bridge Liger had imagined between the old Fujiwara school and the new fighting world broke beneath him at once.

For a second, the scene read like a fantasy, surreal to all. Suzuki, on top of the man he had once merely imagined fighting, murmured, “Wow, this is like a dream.”

Underneath him, Liger grinned.

“For me too.”

Then the dream ended.

Suzuki began throwing punches like a madman. That was the part theory could not soften. Liger had imagined distance, takedowns, sprawls, maybe even a joint-lock exchange that would let him meet Suzuki inside the old grammar. But underneath Suzuki, with punches coming through, the fight became something simpler and worse. Position. Impact. Panic. Suzuki pressed into him, hit him, forced him to turn, took the back, and found the throat.

There was no room for sentimentality.

The administrative maneuvering had taken months. The execution took 108 seconds.

And yet, somehow, Liger did not disappoint.

That was the strange part. In the American accounting, the fight was a disaster: a beloved pro wrestling legend thrown into a real fight he was never equipped to win, exposed in less than two minutes by a trained shooter on his home ground. That reading was not wrong. It was obvious, even logical.

But the Japanese moral accounting ran on different arithmetic. Liger had accepted the debt. He had walked into the wrong ring for the right reason. He had been beaten, badly, and still something about the act of standing there afterward — tall, proud, undiminished — impressed more than a merely respectable performance might have. One longtime Pancrase fan left the building saying, “I fell for him. Starting tomorrow, I’m a Liger fan.”

Suzuki seemed almost annoyed by the scale of his own admiration for his opponent. “Liger really was amazing,” he said. “He really was a man.”16 Then the ultimate compliment in this world: Liger had lost, and his value had not dropped at all. “Liger really is too amazing,” Suzuki said. “I’m really glad Liger came.”

That was the final reversal. Suzuki had extinguished the light. But somehow, when the smoke cleared, everyone could still see Liger shining as bright as ever.

A Moment Passed

And then there was Sasaki, the man whose fight had become someone else’s sacrifice. He had spent the whole strange season insisting the Suzuki fight belonged to him — not as a spot on a card, not as New Japan vs. Pancrase, but as a promise.

It was a fight Sasaki needed: not because it would have been safe, but because it would not have been. It was a chance to stake his own claim in this strange new world.

Instead, Liger stepped into the space Sasaki had left vacant. He did not beat Suzuki. He barely survived him. But he answered.

He stood in the wrong ring, paid the debt in public, and somehow walked away larger in defeat. The very thing that might have become foundational for Sasaki’s second act — the dangerous crossing, the raw fight, the adult test of the old promise — became Liger’s strange masterpiece of sacrifice.

Sasaki was left with the role he least wanted: witness.

Afterward, the old feeling flared again. Of course it did. Sasaki watched Liger disappear beneath Suzuki’s pressure and understood, maybe better than anyone, what had been lost. “I’m fired up. I really got fired up. That was a great match. Really. Next, it’s my turn,” Sasaki said as he departed the arena. And, for an instant, the story tried to reassemble itself.

But the moment had already passed.

When Sasaki and Suzuki finally stood across from each other again, two years later, the danger had leaked out of the room. The raw fight had become a wrestling match. The promise remained unfulfilled. The future moved on without him.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

The lives of those who choose the high altars of sacrifice are brief, terrifyingly so. In Japanese women’s professional wrestling, youth was less a season to be savored than a currency to be spent. Even after the twenty-five-year retirement rule faded, the women kept wrestling as though the hourglass was already running low.1

They came to the sport as girls, called by the romantic pull of the Crush Gals and the brighter, crueler dream beyond them. By their mid-twenties, many were already old in the profession’s private arithmetic, their bodies carrying the accumulated weather of years that ordinary athletes never had to live through. Over all of it hung an old refrain from Japanese popular song, one that Weekly Pro-Wrestling would later paraphrase and bend toward the ring: Inochi mijikashi, koi seyo otome. Life is short; fall in love, maidens.2

For Noriyo Toyoda, known to the wrestling world as Combat Toyoda, that love affair was never easy. It began in the hard winters of the All Japan Women’s dojo, in the dormitories and training halls where girls swept floors, ran roads, and learned how much of themselves the profession would demand. It ended, or seemed to end, in the smoke and white flash of an open-air stadium in Kawasaki, with barbed wire, explosions, and her body offered up as the price of a fitting exit. In that world, a woman was not supposed to fade out gently. She was supposed to go hard and finish strong. The retirement match — the intai3 — was not merely a booking custom. It was the one moment a wrestler could still seize and shape for herself: the last chance to make meaning out of years of pain, compromise, loyalty, and work.

The Dojo and the Will

The ledger of their shared life began on a cold morning, January 19, 1986. More than five hundred girls gathered at the All Japan Women’s dojo, breath clouding in the winter air, each carrying the same desperate hope that she might be chosen. Only eight were accepted. Among them were a girl from Saitama named Megumi Kudo and a girl named Noriyo Toyoda, who carried herself with the quiet gravity of someone who had already decided. They entered the dojo together that spring and were unmade together under Jaguar Yokota’s eye — the same exhaustion, the same floor, the same silence before sleep. They ran the same roads, slept in the same dormitory, cleaned the same floors, dreamed the same impossible dreams. They were classmates in the strictest and deepest sense: daughters of the same institution, forged by the same discipline, held together by something that had no name yet but would survive everything that tried to dissolve it.

They did not arrive at Kawasaki as triumphant daughters of the orthodox order. They arrived as women who had been pushed out of it, who had built a second life for themselves in wrestling’s outlaw country. What burned in Kawasaki was not only flesh. It was the old judgment on them. In the white flash of the explosions, the story of two AJW castoffs was consumed, and what remained was legend.

On the eve of May 5, 1996, Toyoda sat in the FMW office and tried, with typical bluntness, not to look too directly at what was coming.

“Right now, May 5 isn’t really in my head,” she said. “Thinking about it scares me, so I try not to. The explosions are an unknown world, and the match is so big that it still doesn’t feel real that I’m retiring.”

That is what makes her pre-fight statement so moving. It does not read like macho bravado, and it does not read like a death wish. It reads like a woman deliberately narrowing her gaze so she can keep walking forward. Yet there is no self-pity in it. There is even a kind of modest ambition, a hope not for immortality but for remembrance.

“If this explosion match means people remember me — ‘Oh yeah, there was a women’s wrestler named Combat Toyoda’ — then maybe that will be enough.”

Toyoda’s feeling about the match was not that she had been pushed toward something grotesque, nor that she was consenting to mere spectacle. It was closer to freedom. There were no more burdens of theme or positioning to satisfy, no more questions of where she fit into someone else’s long plan. This was the final thing, and it belonged to her. The retirement match, in Japanese wrestling, has always had something ritualistic about it. For Toyoda, the ritual was simply being intensified until it reached flame.

The Idol and the Altar

Megumi Kudo was the sun around which the FMW women’s division revolved. She was the ace, the beauty, the idol, the woman whose image held together the strange duality of the promotion: part blood-soaked outlaw carnival, part pop-cultural dream machine. Her great gift was not merely that she was beautiful, though she was. It was that she understood, and was willing to exploit, the terrible dramatic force created when beauty was violated in public. In wrestling-magazine terms, it was oishii4: not “delicious” in the literal sense, but advantageous, high-impact, made for the camera. When Kudo bled, it became more than damage. It became meaning.

But Kawasaki was never only about Kudo’s suffering. Her own prematch interview is valuable precisely because it resists the simpler, prettier story that later fans were tempted to tell. She did not describe the match as a noble act of self-immolation on behalf of a departing friend. She described it as a hinge point in history.

“This is my own emotional retirement match too,” she said.5 “The new FMW women’s division begins from here.”

That is a remarkable sentence. Kudo was not retiring on May 5, not literally, yet she understood that something in her own life and identity was ending in the same ring where Toyoda would make her formal exit. More than that, she understood that the bout had to do practical work. It could not simply be a grand gesture, or some ornamental bloodletting offered up to nostalgia.

“This can’t just be a match where we throw ourselves into explosions and that’s it,” she said. The match had to mark the death of one order and the birth of another. It had to lead somewhere. “It’s a match we’re fighting with our lives on the line.”

That is the Kudo who matters here: not only the tragic beauty, not only the idol desecrated for art, but the hard-minded steward of a division who knew exactly what was being asked of her. She loved Toyoda, yes, in the dense and complicated way wrestling classmates often love one another, but she also knew this match had to serve the living as well as the departing. It had to honor Toyoda and clear a path into the next day.

The Confession of Kojima

In the years that followed, much of the Western wrestling world would file the Kawasaki match under Megumi Kudo’s name. That was understandable. She was the image most easily legible to distant viewers, the instantly iconic face caught in the white flash of the explosions. But the domestic Japanese coverage framed the event very differently. In Japan, the moral center of the match was not Kudo’s martyrdom. It was Toyoda’s due.

No one expressed that more nakedly than Weekly Pro-Wrestling reporter Kazuhiro Kojima. What he wrote afterward did not feel like a standard magazine celebration of a big match. It felt like an apology:

“From the moment they left the dressing room, both women already had tears in their eyes,” he wrote. “They were trying to make fighting faces, but those faces kept turning into crying faces.” Already, the bout had been cast not merely as violence but as emotional ordeal.

Then Kojima reached the terrible hierarchy underneath it all. “Kudo was the ace, Kudo was the star, Kudo was the idol.” That sentence is the key to the whole thing. Kudo was the center of the layout, the one around whom the company’s women’s wrestling had been marketed, photographed, and sold. Yet in pure competitive terms Toyoda had often had her number. More than that, she had done the invisible work: carrying load, accepting position, absorbing slights without complaint. Kojima’s point was not only that Toyoda had been underappreciated. It was that everyone knew she could be leaned on. They had all, in effect, relied on her patience because they knew she would not make a scene

.

So when Kojima wrote “Toyoda, I’m sorry,” the phrase did not read like a purple flourish. It read like a confession from someone who suddenly understood the shape of an injustice that had been normalized by habit, commerce, and charisma. The cover of Weekly Pro that followed — Toyoda screaming amid the aftermath of the blasts — was not merely commemorative. It was reparative. A public giving of flowers, too late and yet not entirely too late.

The Shadow of the Master

Inside Kawasaki Stadium on May 5, 1996, Atsushi Onita’s absence was only nominal. He was no longer an active wrestler on that anniversary stage, but everything about the match was steeped in his aesthetic and his authority. No-rope barbed wire. Explosions. Theatrical suffering. Public love made visible through punishment. It was an Onita match in soul even without Onita’s body in the center of it.

The match

That mattered to Toyoda. It mattered to Kojima too, who framed one of the match’s central moments in almost devotional language: Toyoda unleashing Thunder Fire before her master, the treasured sword drawn in tears.6 The move did not finish the match. That is part of why it carries such force. It was tribute without salvation, lineage without rescue.

When the end finally came — after the final double-suicide blast, after Kudo’s merciless finishing powerbomb, after Toyoda could no longer really stand — Onita entered the scene not as conquering hero but as witness. He splashed water over the two ruined women. He lifted Toyoda onto his back. And as “Wild Thing” played, he carried her up the long entranceway and out of the ring for the last time. It is a scene that would be ridiculous if it were not so nakedly sincere. In FMW, that was always the line: absurdity pushed hard enough that it broke through into feeling.

The Bridge and the Boundary

The match remains one of the best arguments that deathmatch wrestling can be not only effective but beautiful when performed by wrestlers who understand structure and emotional architecture. What made it extraordinary was not the existence of explosions. It was the way the explosions were subordinated to everything else. The pacing mattered. The conventional wrestling mattered. The Romero Special in the midst of the barbed wire mattered. The women were insisting, with their bodies, that this was still wrestling — still craft, still composition, still a story of choices and consequence rather than a mere procession of stunts.

The explosions, when they came, were terrible because they were placed so carefully. Toyoda took the fuller damage more than once. Kudo’s terror and pain registered not as generic suffering but as part of a long shared language between the two of them. And underneath it all ran the press’s chosen phrase, kokoro no kecchaku — a reckoning of the heart7 that could not be reduced to victory or defeat.

Three days later, when Kojima sat down with Toyoda at the FMW office, the grand mythology of Kawasaki had already begun to harden around her, 34 stitches and a magazine cover symbols of a job done well. Toyoda herself remained almost disarmingly plain. “It’s over. That’s all,” she said. “I still don’t really feel like I’ve retired. There wasn’t even a ten-count gong or a ceremony.”8

Asked whether she regretted choosing the explosion match, she was firmer still: “Not at all. This is one thing I really don’t regret.”

That plainness is part of what saves the story from becoming too ornamental. After all the smoke, all the magazine rhetoric, all the post-match tears and Onita iconography, Toyoda sounds like a worker who did the last job and can now finally sit down. Yet even then, the emotional question at the center of the bout still lingered. Had she and Kudo reached their reckoning?

“I think I reached it,” she said. “But I wonder how Kudo feels. I think that will only become completely clear when Kudo’s own retirement match is over.”

That may be the truest ending available. The match was a masterpiece, but not a miracle. It did not erase hierarchy, nor friendship’s asymmetries, nor the strange obligations wrestlers inherit from the systems that make them. What it did do was build a bridge: between AJW and FMW, between ordinary wrestling and deathmatch spectacle, between Toyoda’s departure and the uncertain future Kudo knew she still had to carry. It was the old world of FMW women’s wrestling dying in public, with a bang bright enough to illuminate, for a moment, everything that had been owed.

When the ambulance doors shut and drove off into the Kawasaki night, Kudo was still there with Toyoda, holding her hand. That image, more than the explosions, is the one that endures for me. Two classmates from the winter of 1986, burned, cut, exhausted, still gripping each other after the fire, as if neither one could let go until the other did.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

ENDNOTES and JAPANESE CONTEXT

Vote for the Greatest Wrestler Ever here!

List-making is one of the great cheap thrills in sports writing. Always has been. I loved it in my Bleacher Report days and I love it now. A good list is an argument with numbers attached. It is part confession, part provocation, part Saturday-night bar fight. It tells people what you believe, gives them something to argue and holler about, and, if it has any life in it at all, sends them back to the footage to prove you wrong.

That is the beauty of it. Not that it settles anything. That it stirs the pot.

That was the whole point of this exercise. Not to march up the hill with stone tablets and announce the final, indisputable truth about wrestling. This business is too sprawling, too weird, and too gloriously unruly for that.

The fun is in the hunt.

Putting this list together, encouraged by the great Elliott on Twitter, gave me an excuse to go wandering through old territories, old tapes, bad transfers in 240p, old masterpieces, and old names that have slipped out of the everyday conversation.

Memphis. All Japan. RINGS. Lucha. Joshi. New Japan. FMW. Famous classics and half-forgotten gems. The headliners everybody knows and the lunatics, craftsmen, and geniuses you only find when you start pulling on loose threads.

A list, if you do it right, is not a conclusion. It is a treasure map. Perhaps there is gold here for you on your fandom journey?

In the course of working through this project I learned a lot about wrestling—and even more about myself. What I found, or maybe just finally admitted to myself, is that I have a type. Or, I guess, types.

I like strong babyfaces. I like wrestlers who know how to suffer and make you feel it in your own bones. I like great technicians, the sly devils who can make an absurd enterprise look as natural as sunrise. I like people who push the form forward, who invent new wrinkles, new violence, new beauty, new ways of making a crowd hold its breath. I like wrestlers who test the edges of the craft without losing sight of the old magic trick at the heart of it.

Make it hurt. Make it matter. Make me believe.

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The people on this list do not all arrive by the same road. Some are here because they could make one punch feel like a gunshot. Some because they could turn struggle into poetry. Some because they made wrestling feel less like performance and more like a desperate, dirty contest for survival.

Some are inventors. Some are sadists. Some are poets with cauliflower ears. Some are human car crashes who somehow found beauty in the wreckage. But all of them, in one way or another, understood the assignment. They could make the thing feel alive.

So no, this is not definitive. It is personal. It is biased. It is occasionally stubborn.

Good. It should be.

The point of a list is not to settle the matter once and for all. The point is to send you back to the tape with a better eye and sharper questions. Why do I love this wrestler and not that one? Why did one wrestler capture my heart for decades and another evaporate before the tape could even finish rewinding?

What am I really looking for when the bell rings?

This list is my answer. Today, anyway.

The Greatest Wrestler Ever (official and undisputed)

1. Kiyoshi Tamura: A shoot-style master whose incredible speed, timing, and technical realism placed him at the apex of the hybrid wrestling movement.

2. Terry Funk: A legend across generations and continents who evolved from a classic technical NWA champion into a hardcore pioneer without losing an ounce of psychological depth. Equal parts silly and sadistic.

3. Genichiro Tenryu: Tenryu hit a man like he meant it and did not seem to care how his opponent felt about it. Somehow, miraculously, he only got better with age, working every notable name of the 1980s and 1990s and pinning most of them to the mat.

4. Ric Flair: “The Nature Boy” whose legendary conditioning and ability to elevate his opponents made him the definitive NWA World Champion. Frantic, frenetic, and slightly unhinged, there were many imitators over the years, but only one Ric Flair.

5. Stan Hansen: The definitive brawler whose stiff, unbridled aggression and devastating lariat made him a legend in both Japan and the United States. When Hansen hit a man, he stayed hit.

6. Jerry Lawler: The “King” of psychology who understood the power of a simple punch and the dramatic flow of a match better than almost anyone. Most fans know him now for commentary, but Lawler was an outrageously good worker as both a babyface and a heel.

7. Andre the Giant: The greatest special attraction in history, whose early-career mobility and late-career psychology remain unparalleled. His unique presence created unique opportunities, and the Frenchman almost never failed to make the most of them.

8. Volk Han: A Russian Sambo legend whose creative and realistic submission work in RINGS remains a high-water mark for hybrid wrestling. Arguably the greatest technician of his era, he became an incredible worker almost immediately despite having no background in professional wrestling.

9. Toshiaki Kawada: A master of physical grit and stiff strikes whose legendary rivalries defined the peak of All Japan. Equally at home in singles and tags, few worked an epic quite like Dangerous K.

10. Akira Hokuto: The “Dangerous Queen” of joshi who redefined emotional storytelling and physical sacrifice in the ring. Willing to risk it all, she could look like a daredevil or a demon depending on the night.

11. Nick Bockwinkel: A sophisticated champion whose technical brilliance and articulate promos made him the definitive standard-bearer for the AWA.

12. Bret Hart: “The Excellence of Execution,” whose commitment to logic and realism made him the premier storyteller of the 1990s. The favorite son of a wrestling dynasty, Hart’s influence is still felt every week on television.

13. Kenta Kobashi: A symbol of Burning Spirit whose physical intensity and emotional connection made him one of the most beloved workers in history. Come for the ultra-stiff strikes. Stay for the ludicrously beautiful moonsault.

14. Randy Savage: A meticulous perfectionist who combined high-flying innovation with high-drama storytelling and unmatched charisma.

15. Jumbo Tsuruta: A freakish natural athlete who combined Olympic-level pedigree with effortless power to become the ace of All Japan.

16. Eddie Guerrero: A creative genius who could work any style, from lucha to technical grappling, while maintaining an unmatched connection with the crowd.

17. Hulk Hogan: The most important draw in the history of the sport, whose mastery of crowd psychology and big-match structure defined an era.

18. Atsushi Onita: A psychological genius who transformed the deathmatch from a spectacle of violence into a deeply human, emotional narrative.

19. Rey Mysterio Jr.: The most influential high-flyer of all time, who proved that talent and creativity could overcome any size disadvantage. Together with his peers, Mysterio helped reinvent wrestling in America every Monday night on WCW Nitro.

20. Dump Matsumoto: The greatest villain in joshi history, whose terrifying presence and violent tactics made her the perfect antagonist for a generation.

21. Mayumi Ozaki: A master of reinvention who transitioned from a premier technician to the industry’s most enduring and sadistic heel anchor.

22. Fritz Von Erich: A powerhouse heel whose physical dominance and iron claw made him a terrifying and iconic force in the industry. The family became famous for tragedy, but the patriarch was telling gripping stories in the ring long before the world caught up to the name.

23. Mitsuharu Misawa: The “Emerald Warrior,” whose stoic dignity and flawless in-ring execution made him arguably the greatest worker of the 1990s.

24. Lou Thesz: The definitive world champion, whose legitimate wrestling background and technical mastery established the modern standard for professional wrestling.

25. Ricky Morton: The ultimate babyface in peril, whose selling and fire made him one of the most effective tag team workers in history. Few men have ever made an audience ache for the hot tag the way Morton could.

26. Antonio Inoki: The architect of Strong Style, who combined world-class technical skill with an unmatched aura of legitimacy. One of the great lunatics in a sport full of them.

27. Aja Kong: A powerhouse who combined terrifying physical intensity with an incredible ability to sell for smaller opponents.

28. Mariko Yoshida: A technical genius whose Arsion style prioritized intricate, realistic submission grappling above all else.

29. Steve Austin: The biggest star of the Attitude Era, who used a gritty, relentless brawling style to revitalize the entire industry.

30. Chigusa Nagayo: The most popular joshi wrestler ever, whose fire and emotional connection with fans sparked a national pop-culture phenomenon.

31. Vader: The most dominant super-heavyweight in history, combining massive size and strength with shocking athletic agility. A violent god who cared little for his opponent’s well-being.

32. Yoshiaki Fujiwara: The spiritual father of shoot-style, whose mastery of the armbar and grizzled realism made him one of wrestling’s strangest and most compelling craftsmen.

33. El Satánico: The definitive rudo maestro of CMLL, whose four decades of excellence made him the gold standard for Mexican heels.

34. Bull Nakano: A terrifying innovator who could work as a brutal monster or a high-flying technician with equal mastery.

35. Mick Foley: A psychological mastermind who used extreme physical risk and bruised humanity to tell some of wrestling’s most compelling stories. A maniac who sacrificed his body for art.

36. Bruno Sammartino: The quintessential ethnic hero, whose believable powerhouse style anchored the industry’s most important territory for two decades.

37. Giant Baba: A towering figure whose mastery of psychological storytelling and King’s Road booking made All Japan a global leader in quality.

38. Roddy Piper: A chaotic brawler whose mastery of the fight made every match feel like an unpredictable struggle. A rebel with a cause, Piper almost single-handedly carried WWF storylines through one of the promotion’s most explosive periods.

39. El Hijo del Santo: A technician who successfully carried the most famous name in lucha libre while carving out his own legacy of in-ring excellence.

40. Dusty Rhodes: “The American Dream,” whose incredible charisma and ability to command an audience made him a legendary draw and psychological master. One of the great talkers outside the ring, he had a knack for holding fans in the palm of his hand.

41. Riki Choshu: A revolutionary whose fast-paced style and aggressive offense forever changed the pace and intensity of New Japan Pro Wrestling.

42. Buddy Rogers: The original “Nature Boy,” who invented the flamboyant heel archetype while remaining a technically gifted pioneer.

43. Killer Kowalski: All elbows, angles, and ill will, Kowalski made awkwardness into an art and menace into a profession.

44. Carlos Colón: An elite babyface worker whose psychological mastery of peril and blood made him a legendary and convincing regional draw.

45. Kenny Omega: A high-octane athlete who redefined the modern main event with his blend of explosive movement and long-term storytelling. The Golden Lovers saga gave him room to explore emotional territory most wrestlers never even approach.

46. Tatsumi Fujinami: A pioneer of the New Japan junior style who successfully transitioned into a versatile and athletic heavyweight champion.

47. Ricky Steamboat: A sublime babyface craftsman whose impeccable timing, athletic grace, and emotional clarity made him one of the most universally compelling workers in wrestling history.

48. Shinya Hashimoto: One of the Three Musketeers, whose thunderous strikes and King of Destruction aura made him a massive draw for New Japan. After January 4, 1999, he somehow found a second act that was even stranger and more interesting than the first.

49. Kyoko Inoue: A charismatic babyface whose combination of speed and innovative offense made her a top star during the creative peak of AJW.

50. Terry Gordy: A powerhouse with surprising agility who anchored the Fabulous Freebirds and later became a dominant force in All Japan. Even with a career cut short, his place in wrestling history is secure.

51. Tiger Mask (Satoru Sayama): A true revolutionary who combined martial arts and high-flying innovation to change the trajectory of the business forever. A huge star, he walked away at his peak to help launch a new combat-sports world in Japan.

52. LA Park: A charismatic rudo who masterfully blends wild brawling with a deep understanding of traditional lucha libre psychology.

53. Megumi Kudo: The Princess of FMW, who combined technical grace with an incredible willingness to sacrifice her body in brutal deathmatches.

54. Dick Murdoch: A quintessential Southern brawler who could make a simple punch or elbow drop look like a fight-ending blow.

55. Akira Taue: An acquired taste because of the gangly frame and awkward posture, Taue was a master of timing who served as the indispensable glue of All Japan’s Four Pillars.

56. Kazuchika Okada: A modern-day master whose flawless execution and ability to structure epic-scale matches have set a new global standard.

57. Perro Aguayo: A high-sacrifice rudo-turned-técnico whose bloody intensity and legendary silla dive made him a master of the emotional, risk-heavy struggle.

58. Jack Brisco: A scientific marvel with an elite amateur background whose fluid pace and technical logic defined the NWA title standard of the 1970s.

59. Greg Valentine: A sour, merciless grinder who dragged opponents into slow, punishing fights and made every hold and strike feel like it came with bad intentions.

60. Jushin Liger: An international icon who blended high-flying innovation with rock-solid fundamentals to become the face of junior heavyweight wrestling.

61. Negro Casas: A timeless master of lucha libre whose unmatched timing, charisma, and command of both comedy and violence made him one of the most complete wrestlers in the world.

62. Lioness Asuka: One half of the Crush Gals, whose athletic prowess and hard-hitting offense were instrumental in the mid-1980s joshi explosion.

63. Bill Dundee: A nasty little Memphis genius whose fire, timing, and refusal to waste a moment made him one of the territory’s great ring mechanics.

64. Bob Backlund: A technical powerhouse whose NCAA pedigree and relentless stamina allowed him to carry the WWWF through its longest transitional era.

65. Chris Benoit: A relentless technician whose intensity and snug physical style made every movement in the ring feel urgent and real. His crimes remain inseparable from any honest accounting of his legacy.

66. Tsuyoshi Kohsaka: A RINGS standout whose legitimate judo and grappling skills allowed him to bridge wrestling and MMA with unusual ease. One of the most fluid and realistic workers ever, even while building a second career as a UFC title contender.

67. Yumiko Hotta: A physical cornerstone of the 1990s joshi explosion whose Marine Wolves pedigree and kick-heavy offense lent a gritty realism to AJW.

68. Devil Masami: A grim, heavy-handed ace whose control, cruelty, and ability to shift from brute force to cold precision made her one of joshi’s most formidable presences.

69. Kota Ibushi: A unique talent who oscillates between terrifyingly stiff strikes and reckless, gravity-defying aerial innovation.

70. Bison Kimura: A violent foil whose physicality, volatility, and willingness to turn a match ugly made her an essential force in joshi’s most combustible years.

71. Daisuke Ikeda: A snarling BattlArts standout whose crushing kicks, punishing grappling, and unshakable physical conviction made him a pure embodiment of fighting spirit.

72. Yuki Ishikawa: The founder of BattlArts, who carried the torch of hybrid wrestling through physical suffering and fighting spirit.

73. Dick Togo: A master craftsman of the junior heavyweight style whose technical precision and timing are virtually without flaw.

74. Dynamite Kansai: A stiff-kicking powerhouse whose physical presence and intensity made her a central figure in the joshi inter-promotional wars.

75. Bryan Danielson: An all-time elite technician who proved that pure work rate and in-ring intelligence could override almost any traditional mold.

76. Arn Anderson: The definitive wrestler’s wrestler, whose economy of motion and believable offense made him a technical gold standard.

77. William Regal: A master of British-style wrestling, whose technical complexity and physical grit made him a wrestler’s wrestler in the best sense.

78. Tully Blanchard: The definitive chicken-shit heel, whose technical soundness and timing made him a cornerstone of the Four Horsemen.

79. Yoshihiro Takayama: A towering warrior whose legendary toughness and insistance on brutal wars made him an iconic figure in both wrestling and MMA.

80. Barry Windham: A naturally gifted all-rounder whose rare blend of size, fluidity, and quiet authority made high-level wrestling look almost effortless.

81. Buddy Rose: A master of ring psychology who could generate massive heat while making every opponent look like a world-beater.

82. Jaguar Yokota: An in-ring pioneer who introduced a level of technical complexity and speed that revolutionized women’s wrestling in the 1980s.

83. Hans Schmidt: A blunt instrument in boots, Schmidt brought an ugly, believable violence to the postwar boom and made menace look simple.

84. Verne Gagne: A clean-cut mat idol whose smooth athleticism gave the AWA its house style, even as his instincts as a promoter later narrowed the world he helped build.

85. Blue Panther: A sublime technician whose intricate mat work, airtight logic, and quiet authority made him one of lucha libre’s purest and most respected craftsmen.

86. Jun Akiyama: The Fifth Pillar, who refined King’s Road with a cold technical precision and a devastating arsenal of suplexes.

87. The Rock: An electrifying megastar who understood that true charisma requires vulnerability. For all the arrogant catchphrases, he was a master of the glorious, absurd bump, willing to make every Stunner or Spear look like a fatal car crash just to elevate the drama.

88. Jon Moxley: A psychological brawler who brings a gritty, high-stakes reality to modern wrestling through his uninhibited intensity.

89. Dory Funk Jr.: A classic NWA world champion whose fundamental soundness and thinking man’s approach made him a universal technical standard.

90. Jerry Brisco: A fundamentally sound worker’s worker whose elite amateur pedigree and technical precision made him a cornerstone of tag and singles wrestling across the territories.

91. Akira Maeda: The visionary who bridged the gap between wrestling and combat sports, anchoring the entire shoot-style movement.

92. Manami Toyota: A whirlwind of energy and innovation whose stamina and aerial mastery produced a legendary run of match-of-the-year candidates.

93. Wahoo McDaniel: A legendary former football player whose stiff chops and authentically rugged presence made him the premier hard-hitting babyface of the territory era.

94. Great Sasuke: A visionary daredevil whose fearlessness and emotional intensity transformed junior heavyweight wrestling into something more dangerous and alive.

95. Nobuhiko Takada: The commercial face of shoot-style, whose legitimate aura and kicks helped turn UWF-i into a massive phenomenon.

96. Alexander Otsuka: A hybrid-wrestling ace whose grappling, awkward scrambles, and relentless sense of competitive strain made every moment of success feel hard-earned.

97. Sami Zayn: A master of vulnerability and momentum whose underdog fire and emotional intelligence made him one of the most compelling wrestlers of his generation.

98. Shawn Michaels: The Heartbreak Kid, whose athleticism and flair for the dramatic earned him a reputation as the premier big-match performer.

99. Mitsuhiro Matsunaga: A deathmatch extremist whose grotesque willingness to absorb punishment turned bodily destruction into a bleak and unforgettable form of spectacle.

100. Brock Lesnar: A freakish combination of amateur credentials and explosive power who brings an undeniable sense of danger to every match.

Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

The cold cut through everything in Nampa that night. It was Christmas, 2008, but the holiday cheer had evaporated about fifteen minutes earlier in the driveway of the house on Happy Valley Road. Justin Eilers and his ex-girlfriend, Melanie, were going at it. Screaming about their kid, about parenting, about the things people scream about when the money is gone and the vodka is flowing.

She’d had enough. She walked away, telling the cops later she just couldn’t deal with the yelling anymore. But Justin wasn’t done. He had that heavy, forward momentum that had defined his whole life. He turned back toward the house. Inside, James Malec was doing the dishes, listening to the shouting through the walls, feeling the heat rise in his chest. Malec was a former jailer, a guy who liked order. He didn’t like the noise. He didn’t like the disrespect. And he definitely didn’t like Justin Eilers coming back into his kitchen.

Before the booze and the bad blood, Justin Eilers had been a wrecking ball in shoulder pads. He was a Nampa kid who went to Iowa State and played the game like he was trying to hurt the ground he stood on. He was undersized for a linebacker—six-two, maybe 215 pounds—but he had a motor that didn’t idle.

He was the kind of guy who made teammates nervous on Tuesday afternoons. Jack Whitver, a receiver for the Cyclones, said Eilers was “super intense,” the type of guy who’d knock his own teammates cold in practice just to make a point. Fights on the practice field were a regular occurrence.

“I play hard, I play physical,” he told the papers. “Sometimes guys think I go too hard in drills. They don’t like it, and pushing and shoving matches start, but that’s just the way I play.”

He wasn’t big, but he was loud in the way that mattered. In a game against Ohio in 2001, he racked up 18 tackles. He finished his senior season with 93 stops, helping drag the team to the Independence Bowl.

But the glory didn’t stick. It never does.

By June 2002, the uniform was off, and the trouble started. Eilers was working a landscaping job on campus with a former teammate, a walk-on named Aaron Howard. It got ugly. Howard told the cops Eilers got frustrated, dropped a racial slur, and punched him in the mouth.

When the cops tossed their apartment, they found the gear. Vials of Testanon. Generic steroids. Syringes. Marijuana seeds. Howard told them Eilers was “raging with the intent to kill me,” and that he’d seen Eilers beat up his girlfriend. Coach Dan McCarney had to stand in front of the press and talk about “clean programs” while Eilers skipped town before the cops could put the cuffs on him, heading for the Mississippi River to learn how to hurt people for a paycheck.

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He landed in Bettendorf, Iowa, at the Miletich camp. It was the Ivy League of face-punching. Eilers fit right in. He was a scrapper, a guy with heavy hands and an iron chin. He rattled off wins in small shows, beat his childhood friend Mike Kyle, and got the call to the big show, the UFC.

Then came the night that defined his luck. UFC 53. He took a heavyweight title fight on short notice against Andrei Arlovski. Arlovski was a terrifying human being in 2005. Eilers didn’t care. He went out there and got dismantled.

It lasted four minutes and ten seconds. By the time the ref waved it off, Eilers had broken both his hands. He’d torn his ACL. He’d dislocated his knee. His nose was smashed. He flew home in first class because he couldn’t fit his broken body into coach. When a passenger asked him what the other guy looked like, Eilers grinned through the bruises. “Not a mark on him,” he said.

He became a journeyman, fighting for paychecks that got smaller while the opponents got bigger. His last real shot at a belt was in July 2008 against Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva. Eilers weighed 224. Silva was a giant. Eilers got stopped in the second round. The punchline? Silva tested positive for horse steroids after the fight. Eilers lost, Silva cheated, and nobody handed Eilers a refund on the brain damage.

Now it was Christmas night, five months after the Silva fight. Eilers hadn’t fought since. He was broke. He hadn’t bought presents. He couldn’t pay child support. The depression was sitting on his chest like a barbell.

He stood in his mother’s kitchen, drunk on vodka and whiskey, his blood alcohol sitting at .17. He was furious. He swept his arm across the counter, sending glass crashing to the floor.

James Malec was watching him. Malec had a new toy—a .45 caliber handgun he’d gotten as a gift that very day. He told people he carried a gun for “skunks and coyotes” out in the country. But tonight, the varmint was his stepson.

Eilers got in his face. “What you got, old man?” Eilers yelled. “Put one in me. Put one in me.”

Malec wasn’t going to fight a professional cage fighter. He knew better. He’d told people before: if Eilers caused problems, he’d shoot him. Malec drew the .45. He held it in a “high ready” position. He told Eilers to get down.

Eilers didn’t get down. He took a step forward.

Malec fired. One shot.

The bullet hit Eilers in the chest, punching through his lung. The big man looked surprised. He looked at his mother, Gwen, who had been standing right there, feeling the wind of the bullet pass her ear.

“I’m dead,” Eilers said. “I’m dead. I love you, Mom.”

And then he was.

In the Canyon County courtroom, Malec’s lawyer tried to play a DVD. It was a highlight reel of Eilers in the cage, knocking men unconscious, pounding them until they went limp. The lawyer wanted the jury to see what Malec saw: a lethal weapon that walked on two legs.

The judge said no. Too prejudicial. It would just make the jury think Eilers was a brute.

They’d already tried to paint Eilers as trouble. A 230-pound problem that needed solving. But that wasn’t the guy Geno Ray knew. Ray, a fellow fighter, knew the guy who stood in his corner for every single bout, offering tips, encouragement, and a steady voice when the lights were bright. “He never had a big head,” Ray would say. “He was one of the boys. Funny, generous, humble”.

Malec’s self-defense plea didn’t fly. The jury didn’t buy the whole story. They didn’t see a premeditated murder, but they didn’t see self-defense either. They saw a “sudden quarrel”. They saw a stepfather who brought a gun to a fistfight. Even the prosecutor admitted, “Justin Eilers was acting like a jerk, there’s no question. He was ruining Christmas. He was disrespecting the defendant in his own home. But he didn’t deserve to die.”

Malec got fifteen years for manslaughter, eligible for parole in six and a half. He went to a cell. Justin Eilers went into the ground at Kohlerlawn Cemetery. His mom, Gwen, was left with a husband in prison and silence where her son used to be.

“I want my son back,” she said, weeping. “That’s what I want.”

Years before, Eilers had told a reporter about his plans for after the fighting was done. “When I’m 55, I plan on playing in the PGA senior tour,” he’d laughed. He liked golf. He liked grilling steaks. He liked the quiet.

He never made it to the senior tour. He never made it out of the kitchen.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

This isn’t a sports story. Forget the stats. Forget the win-loss records. This is a story about something bigger. Savage, blood-drinking, Old Testament religion!

The theology of simulated violence.

We are talking about a ritual sacrifice performed on the grandest stage of them all: 58,500 screaming witnesses at the Tokyo Dome, watching a father slit the throat of his favorite son at the Altar of the Shoot.

Shinya Hashimoto. The King of Destruction. The Elvis Presley of Strong Style. He was the sun around which New Japan orbited.

But Antonio Inoki? The God? He was looking past the sun. He was looking into the black void of the future. He saw the MMA wave coming to usurp the throne of the King of Sports.

His was the earthquake that launched the tsunami. Ali. Ruska. Williams. Wepner. He’d “fought” them all. And he knew—he knew in his mad genius guts—that the sport needed that kind of energy again. Needed something harder. Something with jagged, razor-wire edges.

Someone like Naoya Ogawa.

Born of the Kodokan, not the New Japan dojo, Ogawa was a judo star who’d captured Olympic silver and World gold four times.1 Inoki didn’t see Ogawa as a wrestler; he saw him as a corrective measure. He looked at Hashimoto and saw a “performer” who had gotten comfortable. He looked at Ogawa and saw raw clay that he could mold into a combat machine—one stripped of the “bad habits” of cooperation and showmanship.

“You have to understand, Japanese Pro Wrestling is unique. You don’t find this anywhere else on Earth. It is something we built... something we inherited directly from Rikidozan,” Inoki said. “But now I have to ask: Who is going to carry that torch from here?”

Ogawa was groomed not to work a match, but to end it. Legendary writer Tarzan Yamamoto called him a “Frankenstein’s Monster” sent by his creator to destroy the village so the Doctor could rebuild it. Wrestling had shifted, in Inoki’s mind too far, from its past. The distinction between it and real fighting was a gulf that was in danger of becoming impassable.

This wasn’t a choice he wanted to make. Ogawa was the monster Inoki had to build because his "human" sons, Three Musketeers from a gentler age, weren't violent enough for this new world.

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THE AXIS SHIFTED!

Do you remember January 4, 1999? The world tilted! GURA GURA!2 Ogawa, the Judas in a judogi, assaulted the King. It wasn’t a match; it was a mugging, a brutal assault disguised as a show. A new star emerged from the morass, born from the blood and humiliation of the old one.

The wrestling press, led by Suzuki at Weekly Pro Wrestling, called it a “Fumi-e”—a test of faith used in feudal Japan to root out Christians:3

“Fans had to decide: Do they cling to the ‘faith’ that Hashimoto is strong, or do they accept the brutal reality that Ogawa is stronger?”

Inoki didn’t just want Hashimoto to lose; he wanted him broken publicly to force a rebirth. The Japanese had a word for Inoki’s willingness to humiliate his own “son” to prove a philosophical point. That kind of cruelty is called egetsunai.4 It was the price required to birth a new star.

And oh, how that new star was polished bright! Not in the safe confines of the Dojo, but in the abattoir of PRIDE. Pro wrestling had only met brutal defeat there, Sakuraba alone shining a bright light in the darkness.

Enter the Golem!

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Naoya Ogawa went into the cage and took Gary Goodridge—a UFC stud, a man made of iron and bad intentions—and turned him into paste. BAM! BAM! Legitimacy! In that moment, Ogawa became the Proto-Inoki. He was the bridge. He was the Golden Child who could walk the razor’s edge between the “Work” and the “Shoot” without getting cut. He was an athlete willing to be a monster.

The response from the audience was energetic, a reaction that confused matchmakers and suits in the back. It was, as Weekly Pro Wrestling wrote “a tremendous, passionate welcome. Almost all industry insiders were surprised by this. Why is Ogawa, who should be a Heel, being treated like a Hero? At this point, a colossal gap had arisen between the industry and the fans.”

They had built Ogawa as a villain to be conquered, a heretic destroying pro wrestling. But what do wrestling fans respect more than strength?

As the fans cheered, the vultures circled, my friends! Akira Maeda sniffed around to book a bout with Yoshihisa Yamamoto. Ogawa had eyes only for Maeda himself. PRIDE waved the checkbook. But the gravitational pull of Inoki-ism was absolute.

The Monster found his way back to New Japan. He found his way to his master.

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AND HASHIMOTO WAS WAITING.

Poor, doomed Hashimoto. He had spent five months in the desert! Five months staring into the abyss, trying to decode the whispers of the Mad God Inoki. Five months deciding whether or not he fit in this new world of pro wrestling. But, as it was for so many, the pull was too strong.

“I know that if I’m not fighting in the ring, I’m not me,” he said before the fight. “I was humiliated in that way [at the Jan 4th match]. But I have my pride; I couldn’t just come back for nothing. So I rested. Finally, I realized—If I’m not fighting, I’m not the Destruction King. I’m not a pro wrestler. I felt like I finally touched the core of that answer. That’s why I decided to return.

“Humans have ups and downs. How hard you can hang on when you sink determines how high you fly when you rise. I’m done sinking. I’ve hit the bottom. Now, I just have to climb.”

Resigned to continue on this road, he even considered following Ogawa’s path into the new wilderness. If Society (Seken)5 wants a shooter, he mused “then I should just do the same thing.” He trained with Don Frye, intent to expand his capabilities.

Looking to find the path back to the top, he humbled himself. As Ogawa thrived, he tried to understand his new place in the pecking order.

“I don’t know if it’s stubbornness (Iji)6 or greed, but it’s my feeling of not wanting to be No. 2 or No. 3. Since I was a Young Lion,” Hashimoto told Weekly Pro Wrestling in a long article that was part interview, part confessional. “There is pride too... and that wasn’t the Pro Wrestling we do. If everything is judged by that kind of thing, I can’t stand for it.”

Hashimoto was ready to take his spot back. He and Ogawa had danced this kind of dance before, back in 1997 when a puffier judoka still wore his gi to the ring, the two men from disparate martial disciplines trading victories in the New Japan ring. But the fix was in this time. The office, the era, the momentum—it all conspired to trap him. As Hashimoto himself confessed in a moment of terrifying clarity just days before the execution:

“They pulled the ladder out from under me.7 They lifted me up, then took it away... I asked myself, ‘No matter how dirty this setup is, can I really just walk away?’ The answer came to me naturally. I have to cross paths with him.”

He thought this match was his Redemption Song. He thought if he showed enough Heart, enough Toukon, the God would smile upon him again.

FOOL!

In the end, October 11 was not about redemption. It was about REALITY! First came the Monster. Ogawa. He didn’t walk, he stalked. And the sound! The speakers blasted “Galaxy Express 999”—a heroic, uplifting theme song, surprisingly jaunty for a man best known for extreme, unhinged violence. It was a surreal, psychotic juxtaposition. Here was a man wearing the NWA World Heavyweight belt, the symbol of “Old School” American wrestling tradition. But on his hands were open finger gloves, the symbol of the new, violent temple with its own gods: MMA.

Watch the Match (Shhh)

Look at his face! There was a psychotic imbalance between his cute T-shirt and his “Face of Death”. His eyes were itchatta—”gone.” Completely gone. He wasn’t looking at the crowd. He wasn’t looking at the lights. He was looking only towards the future and what he must do to get there.

Hashimoto walked in wearing the “Toukon Densho” gown—the red robe embroidered with the “Inheritance of Fighting Spirit.”8 It was a surrender flag. Nine months ago, after Ogawa humiliated him, he had torn Inoki’s portrait off the dojo wall. But tonight? Tonight he wore the master’s colors. He was the prodigal son returning to the altar, hoping that if he embraced the god, the knife wouldn’t cut so deep.

But he knew. Oh, he knew. Hashimoto was draped in the symbols of the faith. But faith is useless against a mounted punch.

“Ogawa is an ‘Artificial Robot’ wrestler,” Yamamoto, the Dean of wrestling journalism wrote. “He is Frankenstein. He is a powerful, living Machine. Of course he’s strong! Of course Hashimoto can’t beat him!”

Despite his best efforts—despite the kicks, the chops, the desperate screams of a dying era—Hashimoto was dismantled. Systematically. Brutally.

“I have never felt the severity of reality in a Pro Wrestling ring as painfully as in this match,” one reporter wrote, thoroughly thrown off by the abrupt fall of pro wrestling, its suddenly inability to master the moment. Another writer compared it to “Butsukari-Geiko”, a training ritual for young sumos.9 At one point he slid out of the ring, removing his MMA gloves. He would face whatever came as the thing he truly was—a professional wrestler. But no symbolic act could stop the machine Inoki had built.

It got so bad that even the Monster flinched! Ogawa, the ascendant star, the man with the “Gone Eyes” (Itchatta), actually grew uncomfortable with the extent of the drubbing.10 He looked at the referee, eyes wide, asking, “Must I actually kill him? Is that the contract?”

THE HUMAN TOWEL!

The referee, New Japan’s figure-head President Tatsumi Fujinami, froze, wanting to give Hashimoto the chance to rescue himself “until the very, very end.” The cornermen froze. Tarzan Yamamoto screamed from the press box:

“No one stops him. No one can stop him. Not even the President! Not even God!”

So the Creator himself had to intervene! Antonio Inoki, the man who ordered the hit, threw his own body into the ring! A “Human Towel” to stop the bleeding!11

"He would've died,” Inoki told the press. “I couldn't watch anymore. You shouldn't let them do that much. The referee is Fujinami, so he has feelings for the wrestler and wants to see them fight until the end…but anyone could see the match was over. You shouldn't let it go beyond that."

Hashimoto had been in endless big matches and taken on the best on the largest stages. He knew how to work a crowd, how to tell a story, how to be a Star. But on this night, under the harsh lights of the Tokyo Dome, he lacked the one single thing that Naoya Ogawa possessed. The only currency that matters in the new world Inoki fashioned in his own image: the ability to fight for real.

When the lines blur, only fighting comes into focus.

Hashimoto, who finally stood up, shouted “Inoki-san! Inoki-san!! Thank you very much!!! Please treat me well from now on!” and collapsed like a giant building crumbling. Inoki, burying Hashimoto’s face in his own chest, was weeping.

“I thought I’d kill him,” Ogawa confessed after the fight. “Truly. If I did any more than that... I couldn’t understand why he kept standing up. It was a little scary today.”

The Illusion was dead. Long live the Shoot. As the battered King of Destruction stumbled to the back, hiding his face in shame, the New Japan faithful did the unthinkable. They turned.

“What poured down on the figure of the Hero acknowledged by everyone was... The ‘Ogawa’ Call by New Japan Fans,” Weekly Pro Wrestling reported. “Has the Symbol of Strength changed to this man?”

By dominating Hashimoto so thoroughly, Ogawa seduced the crowd. The fans basically said, “We don’t care that you’re an outsider. You are the Strongest. Therefore, you are our new King.” This betrayal by the fans hurt the deposed lord more than punches ever could.

And Shinya Hashimoto? He was just the first martyr to bleed out in an attempt to forestall the MMA revolution. More would follow, grist for the mill of Inoki-ism. Kashin, Nagata, Takayama. Inoki’s vision ate his own children.The Mad God would sacrifice the world if he must.

Three days later, wearing a black suit like a man attending his own funeral, Hashimoto whispered the final epitaph for the 20th Century wrestling business.

“I might be the veteran of a hundred battles—but in that one specific dimension... that is where I lost,” he told the press, barely able to make eye contact. “I’m still just not good enough.”

Hashimoto, who announced he would not participate in the next tour, considered walking away from the sport. Some believed him.

But not Ogawa.

He knew theirs was a tale that hadn’t fully been told and Hashimoto was a man whose will wouldn’t break no matter how many times you threw him to the ground.

“He will come, eventually,” he said. “Because he is a man who crawls back up again and again. He is a man who surprises. I was surprised today. I want to say something cool, but it was a little scary.”

It was the fear of a man realizing he was the only one left standing. The ladder was gone, the King was dead, and the Monster was alone in the ring, the master of an industry careening into an uncertain future.

The sacrifice was complete. What it purchased, no one could yet say.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

As some of you know, I’m currently writing a book on the origins of PRIDE Fighting. While Western nostalgia often centers on the dominance of foreign wrecking machines like Fedor Emelianenko, Wanderlei Silva, and Rampage Jackson, the view from Japan was radically different. There, the promotion’s heartbeat was a series of Quixotic suicide missions undertaken by pro wrestlers, all desperate to prove their craft was the strongest martial art on earth. This interview, translated from the original Japanese, represents the kind of primary source material I’m using to build that narrative—offering you the same picture you remember, but through a completely different lens.

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At PRIDE 1, the myth of Japanese “shootstyle” had been dismantled in front of 47,000 stunned fans at the Tokyo Dome. Nobuhiko Takada, the stoic ace of UWF International, hadn’t just lost to Rickson Gracie—he had been exposed. The worked submissions and cooperative grappling that had looked so real in a pro wrestling contest dissolved under the pressure of the real thing, leaving the Japanese wrestling industry in a state of existential shock.

But Takada wasn’t done. In a move that seemed less like matchmaking and more like a ritual sacrifice, he signed a contract to fight Mark Kerr at PRIDE 6.

To understand the insanity of this decision, you have to remember who Mark Kerr was in 1999. Before the fall documented in The Smashing Machine, Kerr was not a tragedy—he was a tank. A chemically enhanced, collegiate wrestling wrecking ball who had steamrolled through the World Vale Tudo Championship in Brazil and then the UFC. He was the “Specimen” who kept other heavyweights awake at night.

No one wanted to fight him. No one except Nobuhiko Takada.1

In this rare, candid interview from SRS-DX, translated here for the first time, we see a Takada stripped of his illusions. He doesn’t promise victory. He barely promises survival. Instead, he speaks of Hakai—destruction—and Kejime—the moral decision a man must make to settle his debts. This is a pro wrestler walking knowingly into a burning building, hoping that if he burns bright enough, the fans might finally forgive him, framing the match not as sport, but as a ritual sacrifice required to restore his reputation.

Editor-in-Chief Interview: “A Presence to Watch” Nobuhiko Takada

A fight with Rickson was within the realm of imagination, but the beast Kerr is completely off the charts. What on earth is he thinking!?!?

Interviewer: Sadaharu Tanigawa2 | Photography: Hisao Yamaguchi

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At this moment, my eyes are fixed on Nobuhiko Takada. He embodies the image of a pro-wrestler in every way, yet the Rickson fight pulled him deep into the realm of Vale Tudo. There is no doubt that Takada’s direction has become the pivot point for the entire sport.

Tanigawa: Recently, I’ve been most interested in you, Takada-san. When the Rickson fight happened, I was surprised, thinking “Is this for real?” But considering the flow of the U-Inter [UWF International] era and the feud with the Gracies, I thought it was possible to connect the dots. Originally, your mentor [Antonio] Inoki-san fought massive mixed martial arts matches too. But this match with Mark Kerr—even for me, this is a fight that is off the charts and defies all logic.

Takada: No, even within my own martial arts life, it’s off the charts (laughs). I think it’s a match that defies all expectation.

Tanigawa: Well, to put it bluntly, I wonder what you are thinking (laughs)? You could say Kerr is the strongest man in the world of Vale Tudo, yet relatively speaking, he is unknown. You are a pro-wrestler, not a Vale Tudo fighter. That’s why I think this match carries too much risk for you.

Takada: That fact, that people wonder “what is he thinking”, might be what gives it meaning for me. Certainly, I also consider Kerr to be “Humanity’s Strongest.” How should I put it... no matter who he fights, I’ve never seen him in a dangerous situation. That [Branko] Cikatić had no choice but to grab the ropes. [Pedro] Otavio (a strong contender in Luta Livre) was taken down and easily finished with an armlock. And [Hugo] Duarte was kept on the ground and couldn’t get up. Everyone is so unable to fight him properly—that is how strong Kerr is! Everyone is terrified that they might be destroyed. [Aleksandr] Karelin is strong, but you don’t feel that kind of fear from him.

Tanigawa: I am more scared of Akira Maeda-san than Karelin (laughs). However, looking around the world, the only people saying they want to fight Kerr are you and Enson [Inoue].

Takada: I heard Gary Goodridge said that if he’s going to fight Kerr, give him three times his guarantee.

Tanigawa: Regarding that Kerr fight, I heard that you were the one who told the PRIDE side, “I’m okay with fighting Kerr.”

Takada: Why did I say such a thing, right? (Laughs).

Tanigawa: No, no, but it is actually happening (laughs).

Takada: When looking around to see who is the strongest in Vale Tudo, until a little while ago, it was Rickson. But recently, it’s Kerr.

Tanigawa: Even Rickson is said to absolutely refuse a match with him.

Takada: Yeah. So, if it turns out Kerr is the strongest…my instinctive desire is “I want to fight the strongest guy.” So truthfully, I wanted to raise my hand and say “I want to fight Mark Kerr” with a loud voice. But I had given up, thinking “If only I was 4 or 5 years younger.” I intended to seal away my desire for a Kerr fight in my heart for the rest of my life. But, it just happened that my true feelings slipped out while talking to the PRIDE people.

Tanigawa: That’s the point, isn’t it? Why did Nobuhiko Takada speak Kerr’s name? What is he thinking, and what is he trying to do? I understand the mental structure of Enson wanting to fight Kerr. Enson is purely a Vale Tudo fighter, and he wants to exchange blows and get battered by a beast like Kerr. He intends to go in ready to die. You can see the pure instinct of wanting to live as a man. But you, Takada-san, aren’t entering this as a suicide mission to get beaten to a pulp, right?

Takada: That is not the case (laughs). It just happened that various timings aligned. The fact that Kerr was injured and couldn’t compete last time, and this time Enson hurt his fist and couldn’t do it—impossible things happened timing-wise.

In that situation, the thought of fighting Kerr, which I had sealed inside myself, matched up with everything else. Well, it was the same with the Rickson fight, but when you chase them, you can’t catch them, and when you wait, what doesn’t come, doesn’t come. In that sense, it’s like a present from God... or rather, of all things, the timing just aligned in every sense. That’s what it feels like.

Tanigawa: You sound like it’s someone else’s problem (laughs).

Takada: I don’t want this to be misunderstood, but I am a pro-wrestler, not a Vale Tudo fighter. I haven’t converted to being a Vale Tudo fighter. I have absolutely no intention of ending my life as a Vale Tudo fighter. That type of fighting physiologically doesn’t suit me, and there is a limit to how much I can shine there. I believe that is a place where Saku [Kazushi Sakuraba] and TK [Tsuyoshi Kohsaka] shine more than me.

“What I am obsessed with is the Gracies.”

Tanigawa: Meaning?

Takada: What I am obsessed with is the Gracies. The sport of Vale Tudo is a means to fulfill the objective of “Defeating the Gracies.” Why? Because even if I say let’s fight Rickson or Royce [Gracie], they won’t have the courage to step into a pro-wrestling ring. That’s why I went out there. And so, I lost twice to Rickson in the arena of Vale Tudo. Therefore, fighting [Mark] Coleman and Kerr is a gamble to challenge Royce and Rickson one more time. No matter what anyone says, neither Rickson nor Royce has fought Kerr yet.

Tanigawa: I see, so that explains the motivation for the Kerr fight. So, after the Kerr fight, will you narrow your focus solely to “Defeating the Gracies”?

Takada: The media and fans might be thinking, “Is Takada going to live in Vale Tudo from now on?” or “Is he aiming for the pinnacle?” but that isn’t it. My focus is strictly 'Gracie,' not Vale Tudo. Fighting Kerr is a matter of honor—a necessary step I must take as a man—in order to face the Gracies again. It isn’t about winning or losing; I see fighting Kerr as a duty I must fulfill, and I want the fans to see that.3

Regarding the Gracies, there will be another time for that. If it’s decided, I’ll go out there anytime.

Tanigawa: To be rude, Takada-san, your statements used to have parts that weren’t entirely clear. Honestly, it was hard to understand why you were fighting Rickson. But today is good. It’s very easy to understand.

Takada: I’ve entered my late 30s too, you know. Honestly, the countdown has started in my heart. Regarding that countdown, I want to end it while holding onto the glittering dreams I had when I debuted.

Not being obsessed with Vale Tudo is part of that. I want to fight matches with a purpose, achieving the things I want to do one by one. Regarding the Rickson fight, I felt that the very act of me and Rickson facing off in the corners was glittering.4

So, if it is to chase Rickson and Royce, I will settle my accounts even in Vale Tudo. However, other than that, I might have matches in New Japan, RINGS, or Pancrase. Even stepping up to WCW or WWF—if I can have a purpose, I believe I can seriously shine and glitter. There hasn’t been a pro-wrestler like that until now, right?

Tanigawa: No, truly, you seem like a new man today, Takada-san.

Takada: When I make a chronology of myself as a wrestler... there was the debut, I fought [Gary] Albright, [Big Van] Vader, and [Koji] Kitao. There was the fact that I fought Maeda-san, [Masakatsu] Funaki, Tenryu-san, and New Japan. And, I fought Rickson twice.

Within that history of fighting, certainly, there was a period in the middle where I couldn’t fight purely due to private trouble outside the ring. But, for Takada’s battles from here on, I want to show the fans fights without evil thoughts [janen], like when I debuted—my final way of living.5 If I can headline in any ring and shine brightly, that would be the best.

Tanigawa: What were those “glittering dreams without evil thoughts” that you envision?

Takada: That is simple and clear! A pro-wrestler has an overwhelming presence. They are strong and cool. They are respected in a way different from pro baseball players. It’s about whether I can fight to become that kind of athlete.

Tanigawa: Thinking about it, my image of pro-wrestlers was like that too (laughs). But even so, Kerr is dangerous, isn’t he?

Takada: When Kerr first came to Japan, he trained at Takada Dojo. Watching Kerr then, I thought, “Does a guy like this actually exist?” He is undoubtedly the strongest human I have ever seen, and he had an impact that made me wonder if he should even be categorized as human. However, interacting with Kerr in private, I realized he is a man I can respect very much as a human being.

And when you find someone like that, somewhere deep down, you just get the urge to test yourself against him.

Tanigawa: But, when I heard about this match, I felt that maybe a feeling of “I want to prove them wrong” was working inside you—directed at the humans who hold prejudice against “Pro-Wrestler Takada” doing Vale Tudo, specifically some media and fighters.

Takada: Even if I beat Rickson, or beat Royce, they will still say it. I think that is something that will follow me around for life. But it’s all part of a larger process. Losing twice to Rickson, beating Coleman, and fighting Kerr now... I think the evaluation will change after several years pass. I believe that by throwing myself into Vale Tudo, the entire world of pro-wrestling will be seen in a new light.

Tanigawa: That is for sure. Even for Rickson, by fighting you, his name became widespread among the general public. But, Takada-san, if anything, you are the “Action before Words” [Fugen Jikko] type.6 So I thought maybe in your heart you had a feeling of “You guys, just watch me!”

Takada: I do have the feeling of “I am actually doing it.” I want to say this much: by me entering this world, look how much light has been shed on Vale Tudo. I have pride in that. I want to make that a medal for myself for the rest of my life. If they are going to say that much, then come up to the pro-wrestling ring. Even Rickson, he didn’t come, so I went.

Tanigawa: Certainly, Inoki-san realized matches with [Willem] Ruska the Judo Gold Medalist, the active World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Ali, and Kyokushin’s “Bear Killer” Willie [Williams]. For you, that is Rickson, Coleman, and Kerr.

Takada: Exactly. Well, let’s see them try it then. Even among pro-wrestlers, nobody else is stepping outside the ring to fight Rickson. It’s all just talk.

Tanigawa: So your attitude is: “I’ll prove them wrong, even if it means getting beaten to a pulp.”

Takada: Well, I don’t intend to get beaten to a pulp (laughs).

Tanigawa: Wow, you’re a man. But, truthfully, don’t you have fear regarding Kerr?

Takada: I don’t have the fear of losing. With Rickson, rather than getting hurt, I had a fear of losing. The pressure from those around me was huge too. But in Kerr’s case, it’s different from that.

Rather than losing, there is a fear that I might be destroyed [hakai].7 Speaking in terms of war, well, he is a modern weapon. Moreover, it’s like... when he passes through, not even the weeds remain. But I intend to gradually adjust that fear while training.

“I had a fear of losing the Rickson fight, but in the Kerr fight, I fear being destroyed.”

Tanigawa: Certainly, it is the fear of destruction. But if you fight Kerr, you won’t have anything left to fear.

Takada: I’ll do my best in various ways.

Tanigawa: Position-wise, you can’t run away like Cikatić or Hugo could. So I thought you must be quite scared.

Takada: No, when the gong rings, I might run away (laughs). There is a 100% chance I won’t end up on top. I wonder what will happen (bitter laugh).

Tanigawa: But there is the saying from your former mentor, “Is there a guy who thinks about losing before he fights!?” (laughs).

Takada: That’s right (laughs). I’ll think about it in Seattle.8

Tanigawa: Since going to Seattle in April, you really seem to have changed. I feel like that Seattle trip was the first step into Vale Tudo for you.

Takada: Of the Ultimate matches I’ve seen so far, the one that surprised me the most was Maurice [Smith] vs. Coleman. Before watching, I thought Coleman would absolutely win, but Maurice won. I wondered, “Why was a kickboxer able to win while being on the bottom?” Certainly, Maurice is a top-class kickboxer, but that man stayed on the bottom, dealt with it calmly, and tired Coleman out. As a wrestler, I was incredibly surprised, it gave me confidence, and it made me want to ask for his teachings. Actually, the guidance from Maurice and TK was very precise.

Tanigawa: But, even in a short period, I think you absorbed it well. It’s rude to say this, but you are strong after all, Takada-san.

Takada: I’m not weak (laughs). What’s good about Maurice is that he understood how much I can do, what I am looking for, and who I am fighting, and instructed me accordingly. That’s probably why I was able to absorb what he said very efficiently in a short time. I also have a rugged trainer named Kevin Yamazaki-san, so the environment is the best.

Tanigawa: So, Takada-san’s potential as a Vale Tudo fighter is really just beginning.

Takada: Speaking of instructors, before the first Rickson fight. We called a person from Brazil who supposedly drew with Rickson in Jiu-Jitsu.

Tanigawa: That is the first time I’ve heard that.

Takada: We didn’t understand Jiu-Jitsu over here. So, what that person said was, “Don’t punch, don’t kick, don’t touch.”

Tanigawa: Don’t punch, don’t kick, don’t touch (laughs).

Takada: Because I’m obedient, I was listening like “Yes, Yes,” but if you think about it, what are you telling me to do? (Laughs). Anyway, he said to keep my back to the ropes and run while circling. If I’m about to be grabbed, grab the rope, and eventually a chance might come. I actually fought exactly as that person said (laughs).

Tanigawa: That is a funny story. So that’s why it turned out like that. Come to think of it, the seconds were yelling “Don’t kick!” and “Don’t grapple!”

Takada: Thinking about it now, if I had done it more decisively, it might have been different in terms of feeling and how the match unfolded. That’s why I don’t have the fear of losing anymore.

Tanigawa: Age-wise, there might not be much time left for you, but I truly think your Vale Tudo [career] is just starting. I think that will benefit the entire mixed martial arts scene as well.

Takada: Really, recently fans in the street call out to me saying “Good luck in PRIDE.” A year ago, the name “PRIDE” wouldn’t have even come up. I think that is very big for PRIDE too.

Tanigawa: That is certainly big!

Takada: They say PRIDE is betting the house on this upcoming July show. The Kerr fight is also with that in mind. After all, I have a desire for PRIDE to head in a good direction.

Tanigawa: Then, if it’s PRIDE, would you do a match with Ogawa?9

Takada: That won’t happen. The more I am provoked, the colder my feelings get.10 Unlike Kerr, if a feeling of respect doesn’t sprout within me, I absolutely don’t want to do it. With him, the first meeting was bad. I don’t even want to touch on it anymore.

Tanigawa: Is that so? But it seems there is still a lot in store for you. For now, I am scared to see what happens in this upcoming Kerr fight, but I will support you with all my might.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

The wrestling world changed forever with a kick.

Akira Maeda was famous for them. He threw them with the casual violence of a man who viewed his own body as a weapon and his opponent’s body as a suggestion.

But he had never thrown one quite like this.

It was November 19, 1987. The venue was Korakuen Hall, a cramped, concrete box in Tokyo known as the “Sacred Ground” (Seichi) of martial arts. Two years after their return from a failed exodus, the wrestlers of the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF) still carried the scent of danger. They were the “invaders” in New Japan Pro-Wrestling, men who wore dark suits and refused to smile. Every time they stepped through the ropes, the friction was palpable—a static charge waiting for a spark.1

On this night, the spark found powder.

In the center of the ring, Riki Choshu was doing his job. He was the “Revolutionary Warrior,” the man competing for the throne in a post-Antonio Inoki future. He had grabbed Osamu Kido, a UWF veteran, and twisted his legs into the Sasori-Gatame—the Scorpion Deathlock.

Choshu sat back, grimacing at the lights, pulling on Kido’s legs. It was a pose. It was theater. It was the “Business.”

Maeda stood on the apron, watching. He stepped through the ropes to break the hold.

Business as usual.

Except it wasn’t.

Maeda didn’t stomp. He didn’t chop. He didn’t play to the crowd. He walked up behind Choshu, tapped his shoulder, and as Choshu turned his head—trusting the rhythm, trusting the work—Maeda threw a right high kick.

It did not make the sharp thwack of skin slapping skin, the noise of the work. It made a dull, wet sound. The sound of a heavy book dropped into mud.

Maeda’s shin connected directly with the orbital bone of Choshu’s right eye.

Choshu didn’t roll away. He collapsed in on himself, his legs wobbly, his hands clutching the ropes to stay standing. He staggered but never fell, a hell of a man. But still just a man.

He could bleed. He could break.

The diagnosis would be clinical and brutal: Fracture of the right orbital floor (Ganka tei kossetsu).

The arena went dead silent. When he got his bearings, he went after Maeda, if half-heartedly. Maeda swaggered forward, awfully John Wayne for a fighter who’d kicked someone who wasn’t looking. Men filled the ring. Whatever was happening, it was no longer a wrestling match, at least in the traditional sense.

The controversial match was never aired on television.

Shigeo Miyato, a Maeda disciple, was there that night, a young boy just integrating into the New Japan system. In his book, UWF: The Strongest Truth, he described the aftermath, the uncertainty suddenly a palpable, almost living force:

The match ended in chaos, unsettled. The violence lingered in the air, and we feared a brawl in the dressing room. Maeda was incandescent with rage.

“If they’re coming, let them come!” he roared in the back. “If they have something to say, I’ll finish it right now!”

He refused to back down. I remember Nobuhiko Takada and the others frantically trying to soothe him, eventually wrestling him into a car to get him away from the venue.

Was the kick an intentional execution? Was it the act of a Zealot lashing out against an industry that was dying slowly, choking on its own artifice? Maeda had spent years screaming that the “Old System” was fake. When he saw Choshu posing in that submission hold, perhaps he decided to remind everyone what “Real” felt like.

Or was it the reckless mistake of a paranoid man? Just hours before the match, an executive had whispered a rumor to Maeda: “Starting next year, we are moving to individual contracts.” To Maeda, this wasn’t policy; it was an assassination attempt on his “UWF Family.” He believed the office was plotting to split them up, to fire the weak and keep the strong. He had made commitments to these people. Uprooted his life for these people. This was not a move he could take lightly. He had an obligation.2

He entered that ring feeling like a cornered animal. And a cornered animal doesn’t care about workplace safety; it cares about survival.

Or, perhaps, was it simply a “receipt” gone wrong? A moment of frustration where Maeda meant to “snug” the kick—to hit him hard enough to bruise the ego—but the angle was wrong, the force was too high, and the bone was too weak? “It wasn’t intentional,” Maeda would later claim, his voice flat. “It wasn’t an incident, but an accident.”

The answer is, as it so often is, in the eye of the beholder.

To his enemies in the New Japan front office, it was “The Maeda Incident”—a convenient excuse to exile a dangerous employee who refused to follow the script. To the fans, it was a revelation. It was the moment the veil dropped.

To Maeda it was an answer to what they were doing on the other side, an attempt to heat things up the way Genichiro Tenryu was generating excitement with Baba’s group.3

“Over in All Japan Pro Wrestling, Tenryu and Wajima were doing something outrageous,” Maeda recalled. “They were pounding each other for real (nama). From our perspective as pros, it was unbelievable. Both of them were taking clean shots. It wasn’t half-hearted. When I saw that, I thought we had to go above that. If Tenryu and Wajima did a match like that, our shadows would fade... there was that fear. That was true radical pro wrestling. And this impatience exploded.”

Whatever the truth of the moment, it has long since moved beyond the realm of fact. November 19, 1987, lives now in lore. It is the story of two men—the Mercenary and the Believer—colliding in the only way they knew how. But it is also the story of a birth.

Because when that bone broke, it didn’t just end a match. It broke the timeline. The “King of Sports” died on the canvas that night, and something new, something violent and religious, was about to be born from the blood.

The Mad King and the Exiles

Say what you will about Antonio Inoki—he was not a man who dreamed in two dimensions. To Inoki, wrestling was not a mere carnival sideshow; it was a vehicle for global diplomacy and personal mythology. He fought Muhammad Ali. He negotiated with Saddam Hussein. He would eventually stage a festival for peace in North Korea. To dream for Inoki was to believe.

But in the early 1980s, Inoki’s most recent dream was rotting in the Brazilian sun.

He’d turned his considerable powers toward the global energy crisis, investing heavily in a bio-venture called “Anton Hi-Cell.” The plan was visionary: ferment sugarcane waste (bagasse) to create cheap fuel and cattle feed.

The reality was a disaster. The fuel was too expensive to produce. The cattle ate the feed, developed severe diarrhea, and died. And as inflation in Brazil skyrocketed, Inoki didn’t cut his losses. He doubled down. He raided the coffers of New Japan Pro-Wrestling as if it were his personal piggy bank.

It was a tragic irony. On the surface, New Japan was in a Golden Age. Tiger Mask was a cultural phenomenon, drawing legions of new fans—housewives and elementary school children—who lined up for hours just to touch his cape. Choshu and Fujinami were in place as the next heavyweight stars. Maeda lurked as the next big thing. And Inoki was still Inoki. The venues were sold out. The television ratings were over 20%.

But backstage, the company was insolvent. Lieutenants were ordered to put their houses up as collateral. Rank-and-file wrestlers were coerced into buying worthless “Hi-Cell” corporate bonds. The locker room, once a brotherhood, became a place of suspicion and debt.

“In the spring 1983 contract renewals, most wrestlers were offered no raise,” Ken Yanigisawa wrote in UWF in 1984. “(The wrestlers asked) ‘The crowds are this big, so why are our salaries so low?!’

“... on June 18th, a New Japan Pro-Wrestling shareholders’ meeting was held. It was reported that against sales of 13.58 billion yen, the retained earnings were a mere 7.5 million yen. When sales manager Naoki Otsuka, attending the shareholders’ meeting for the first time that year, investigated the financial situation with Kotetsu Yamamoto, it was discovered that the accounting had been cleverly manipulated to divert money to Anton Hi-Cell.”

By August, Inoki had offered his resignation, if not in disgrace, in behind-the-scenes ignominy. But just three months later, he’d returned, inserted back into the Presidency by TV Asahi, which declared “There is no New Japan Pro Wrestling without Antonio Inoki.”

Needless to say, the rank-and-file were not pleased.

As 1984 dawned, the two brightest young heavyweight stars in the company looked at the “King of Sports” and saw a tyrant. They both decided to leave. But they left for very different reasons—and very different destinations.

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THE MERCENARY (RIKI CHOSHU)

Riki Choshu was a realist. An Olympic wrestler who had been told he was “too small” for the heavyweight division, he viewed the industry through a cold, transactional lens. He saw Inoki burning money in the jungle, and he made a calculation: I am an asset, and this asset is being devalued.

He didn’t want to change the sport, despite his own marketing. At least not change it in a fundamental way. He wanted to own his slice of it.

Choshu joined forces with a brilliant producer named Naoki Otsuka to form “Japan Pro-Wrestling.” They didn’t just defect; they invaded Giant Baba’s rival promotion, All Japan Pro Wrestling. And they did it with a war chest that would have made Inoki weep.

The matches were brilliant. So was the money.

Otsuka had secured a meeting with Katsuji Takeda, a wealthy furniture store tycoon. In a hotel room, Takeda made a phone call to his wife, who arrived shortly after carrying a simple paper bag.

Inside the bag was 140 million yen in cash.

Takeda handed it over without a contract. “I am investing in your guts,” he told them.

With that capital, Choshu became a superstar. He traveled in luxury. He pioneered the “Sold Show” system, bypassing the shady traditional promoters to sell entire events to legitimate local bosses—sake brewers and chamber of commerce leaders—guaranteeing profit before the bell even rang. Choshu proved that if you treated wrestling like a business, you could get rich.

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THE BELIEVER (AKIRA MAEDA)

Akira Maeda didn’t care about the business. At least not in the same way. He cared about the Truth.

Maeda, along with his mentor Yoshiaki Fujiwara and the original Tiger Mask (Satoru Sayama), formed the Universal Wrestling Federation (UWF). Their goal was to strip away the pageantry and present wrestling as a legitimate sport.

It was a romantic idea. It was also a financial suicide mission.

Without the “sake brewers” or the paper bags of cash, the UWF starved. The reality of their revolution hit home in Hagi City, Yamaguchi Prefecture.

The crew set up the ring in a drafty gymnasium. There were 30 staff members and wrestlers present. There were only 25 paying customers in the seats.

Maeda, the “Ace” of the promotion, had to swallow his pride. He put on a track suit and walked the streets of the town, knocking on doors like a desperate encyclopedia salesman. “Please,” he begged. “It is real fighting.”

“Maeda-san,” an old woman told him, “you are a kind man.”

She bought a ticket out of pity. Maeda realized then that “tickets are heavy.” Every single person in that gym was a weight on his shoulders. But as the debts mounted and the “UWF Family” faced ruin, Maeda had to make the hardest choice of his life. To save his crew—Takada, Yamazaki, the young trainees—he had to crawl back to the Mad King.

Maeda returned to New Japan in 1986 not as a hero, but as a prisoner of war.

The “UWF Army” was treated with open hostility. They were isolated in the locker room. Inoki, sensing Maeda’s dangerous popularity, decided to break him.

In April 1986, someone from the New Japan office sent Andre the Giant to Tsu City with unspoken orders to humiliate Maeda. The match remains one of the most uncomfortable spectacles in wrestling history. Andre arrived drunk and refused to cooperate. He stood in the center of the ring, a seven-foot wall of indifference, daring Maeda to try his “shoot style” moves.

Maeda realized the company was trying to kill his career right in the middle of the ring. So he stopped wrestling and started chopping. He kicked the Giant’s legs until the monster collapsed.

Maeda survived the trap, but the paranoia took root. He began to see enemies in every shadow.

THE COLLISION COURSE

By 1987, the stage was set for the explosion.

Riki Choshu returned to New Japan as the conquering hero. He had made his millions in All Japan. A flashy young star, he had stripped off his gold chains before entering the boardroom to negotiate his comeback, a show of fealty to Inoki.4 But everyone knew the truth: Choshu was a power player now.

And he would need to be.

When he walked back through the curtains of New Japan in 1987, he wasn’t just returning to fight Inoki. He was walking into a war zone that already existed between Inoki’s loyalists and Maeda’s UWF.

The “Generation Struggle” (Sedai Toso) was the promotion’s solution to the tension, intended to be the grand narrative of 1987—a civil war between the “New Generation” (New Leaders) and the entrenched “Old Guard” (Now Leaders). On one side stood the uneasy alliance of Riki Choshu and Akira Maeda, two wolves forced to hunt together, demanding the throne. Standing in their way was the immovable wall of the establishment: Inoki and his lieutenant Seiji Sakaguchi, men who controlled not just the ring, but the flow of money and power. It was supposed to be a revolution; instead, it became a pressure cooker, as Inoki deftly manipulated the younger men’s egos, stepping aside just enough to let Choshu and Maeda turn their fangs on each other rather than the king.5

Inoki, the wily survivor, maneuvered out of the way, focusing his attention on Masa Saito. Soon enough, the old guard side included Young Lion Keiji Muto, proof the generational battle had become meaningless theater. The narrative had lost all steam. It was no longer about sweeping out the old and the new blood ascending. Inoki had, as was his wont, found his way into the comfort of the briar patch.

The top prize remained in his grasp and his grasp alone. Rather than be deposed, he let the two young wolves turn on each other instead, competing with Fujinami for the silver medal. On one side: Riki Choshu, the Company Man who believed in the “Work.” On the other: Akira Maeda, the Zealot who believed in the “Shoot.”

They were two men defined by their exiles. One had learned that wrestling was about making money. The other had learned that wrestling was about survival.

When they stepped into the ring on November 19, 1987, there was no room left for negotiation. Choshu went to apply a hold. Maeda went to apply a verdict.

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THE TRIAL

In the days after the kick, Tokyo was alive with thrilling energy, fans and wrestlers alike shaken by the removal of any limiters, by the implicit foundations of the very enterprise being challenged so brazenly.

The press had been summoned for an emergency conference. They expected a storyline, perhaps a worked angle to turn the chaos into ticket sales. Instead, they found Vice President Sakaguchi wearing the grim expression of an undertaker. Flanking him were Kotetsu Yamamoto and senior referee Mr. Hattori.

They were not there to promote a fight. They were there to explain one, a delicate dance in light of the fact they still presented pro wrestling as real.

“If we condone this,” Sakaguchi said, his voice flat, “it becomes a chaotic brawl. A kill-or-be-killed situation. We have to draw a line.”

The medical report from the hospital in Hiroshima sat on the table like an indictment. Riki Choshu, the Revolutionary Soldier, the man who had returned from the wilderness with a paper bag full of cash to save the company, was broken. The diagnosis was clinical and brutal: “Fracture of the right orbital floor.”

The eyeball itself had been spared—he wouldn’t go blind—but the eyelid was swollen shut, the vision was blurry, and the doctors had ordered two weeks of absolute, immobile rest.

A big match against Ric Flair? Gone. The “Singing Duel” promotional event with Tatsumi Fujinami? Canceled. The entire year-end “Tag Festival,” the company’s holiday touring show, had to be completely overhauled. The machinery of the business had been ground to a halt by a single piece of bone snapping in Korakuen Hall.

It was the capstone to a “cursed year” for New Japan, a year already marred by boycotts from stars like Bruiser Brody and abysmal match outcomes. The trust with the ticket-buying public was fractured. Sakaguchi had to thread a needle. He had to punish Maeda for violence in an industry predicated on it.

The executives laid out the crime. It wasn’t just that Akira Maeda had kicked Riki Choshu; it was how he did it.

The kick occurred outside the bounds of competition Sakaguchi explained, parsing the violence with legalistic precision. “It caught the opponent completely off guard. It was an intentional foul. A sucker punch.”

Then came the phrase that signaled the death of the era. Sakaguchi didn’t say Maeda broke the script. Not in so many words. Instead, he said: “We agreed that this was an act that deviated from the realm of professional wrestling.”

The verdict was swift and draconian: Indefinite Suspension.

“We cannot allow him to step into the ring again until he fully understands the danger of what he did,” the statement read. “And returning to the UWF is out of the question. President Inoki has been notified.”

To the reporters in the room, and the fans reading the breathless coverage in Weekly Pro, the suspension felt like a formality. The real story was the “Why.”

The magazines had already started dissecting the film like the Zapruder tape. They saw what the office refused to admit: the “wavelength” between the two men had been poisoned long before the kick landed. For ten minutes, they had watched a collision of two incompatible realities.

The photos told the story. Choshu, the consummate professional, the master of the emotional moment, couldn’t get Maeda to play nice, no matter how much the crowd wanted it. The short match was filled with an awkward tension. When Choshu tried to apply his signature Scorpion Deathlock—the move that sold t-shirts and filled arenas—Maeda didn’t feed him the leg. He curled up, his body going soft and limp, refusing to participate in the geometry of the performance.

“There was a palpable sense of hatred,” one reporter noted—and he wasn’t wrong.

It was an enmity that went back four years to November 3, 1983 and a match that taught Maeda what betrayal in the ring actually felt like. It was the young “supernova” Maeda and the established “Revolutionary” Choshu in the kind of contest that had lit the promotion on fire. This was a glimpse of the future, two wrestlers clearly ready for bigger things colliding in the middle of the ring. Midway through the bout, the unspoken contract of the ring was violated, at least as Maeda remembers it.

Normally when Choshu applied his signature Scorpion Deathlock, the move is theatrical—he sits back comfortably, creating the illusion of pain while actually protecting the opponent’s back.

This time, Choshu sat deep. He torqued his hips. He turned a piece of performance art into a legitimate spinal lock.

Maeda, trapped in the hold, felt the difference immediately.

“He really locked it in tight, trying to force me to tap out for real,” Maeda later recalled with bitterness. “That was breaking the matchmaking. I actually messed up my lower back in that match.”

The 1983 Match

The referee stopped the fight, awarding the win to Choshu. In the locker room, Maeda didn’t just nurse a strained back; he nursed a grudge. In the code of the wrestler, you trust your opponent with your life. Choshu had taken that trust and twisted it.

For four years, Maeda carried that receipt in his pocket, waiting for the right moment to cash it in.

This, at least, is one of many versions of the story. But it wasn’t the one being told in 1987, when Maeda refused to explain himself or walk the kayfabe tightrope.

Instead, he was on trial for his professional life. The evidence was laid out in the executive suite in Roppongi. It was not a body, but a strip of developed film, the negatives magnified to reveal the precise millisecond where the fiction of professional wrestling had curdled into assault.

New Japan Pro-Wrestling ran on the “unspoken agreements” of a fraternal order. You protect your opponent. You catch him when he falls. You do not kick him in the orbital bone with the intent to blind. Yet here, the executives stared at the black-and-white proof of heresy. Frame one: Akira Maeda grabs Riki Choshu’s leg. Frame two: The boot connects. Frame three: Choshu covers his face, the agony unscripted, the trust irrevocably broken.

To the brass, this was a “crime.” But to understand why Maeda committed it, you have to understand the war that had been raging inside his head for years. This wasn’t a sudden snap; it was the inevitable collision of two incompatible religions.

On one side stood Riki Choshu. To Choshu, wrestling was a job, a protected guild where seniority commanded respect and the performance was paramount. A former Olympian, he drew a sharp, pragmatic line between “The Fight” and “Pro Wrestling.”

On the other side stood Maeda, the “Dojo Yaburi”—the man who storms the school to challenge the master. Maeda possessed the heart of a karateka and the skillset of a European catch wrestler. To him, the line Choshu drew was a lie. “The Strongest is Beautiful,” Maeda preached. He didn’t just want to perform for the fans; he wanted to show them the Tao—the Road. In his mind, Riki Choshu wasn’t a colleague to be protected; he was an obstacle obscuring the view of the truth.

“My ideology is completely different from Choshu’s,” Maeda had said months earlier. “We can never mix.”

In Choshu’s mind, Maeda wasn’t a bad guy. He was just a reckless, careless wrestler. But when the executives hauled the 29-year-old Maeda in for the inquiry, expecting a contrite employee, they found a man who had lost interest in their version of reality.

“It wasn’t uncontrolled,” Maeda told them, his voice devoid of the theatrical remorse they required. “It was completely intentional.”

In the silence that followed, the gap between the corporation and the wrestler became a canyon. Maeda confessed he had wanted to “write on the face” of Riki Choshu, to humiliate him for the crime of being lukewarm in a ring that demanded fire. He asked them a question that terrified the men in suits:

“Is the ring a place to read the room? Or is it a place to fight?”

They had their answer. Now, they had to figure out how to bury him.

Thus began the 103-day war of attrition—a tedious, grinding siege designed to break the spirit of the exile.

The suspension was only ten days old when the victim realized that his assailant was more valuable to him in the ring than in exile.

On November 30, 1987, the New Japan tour rolled into the Oita Prefectural Gymnasium. The mood was grim. The “Face Kick” had sucked the oxygen out of the arenas, leaving a vacuum filled with awkward matches and confused fans. Then, Riki Choshu walked out.

He wasn’t in his wrestling gear. He wore a bomber jacket and dark sunglasses to hide the purple wreckage of his right eye. He looked less like a professional athlete and more like a yakuza enforcer collecting a debt. He grabbed the microphone, and instead of condemning the man who had shattered his orbital bone, he issued a demand that stunned the front office.

“Put Maeda back in the ring!”

The crowd roared. It was a masterstroke of wrestling politics. Choshu understood what the executives didn’t: In the wrestling business, hatred is currency. “This isn’t just about resentment,” Choshu said, his voice cutting through the confusion. “If we don’t settle this in the ring, it’s not Pro Wrestling.”

With one promo, the narrative shifted. The “Face Kick” was no longer a crime; it was an angle. Choshu was no longer a patient; he was an avenger.

But back in Tokyo, New Japan chairman Hiroshi Tsujii watched the tape and saw an opening.

Tsujii was a suit, a corporate operator trying to manage a carnival that was rapidly spinning out of control. He was under immense pressure from TV Asahi. The “Golden Time” ratings for Monday nights had bled down to 10%, a disastrous number for a prime-time slot.6 Sponsors were nervous. They wanted a “Commission,” a governing body to sanitize the violence and ensure that “accidents” like the Face Kick didn’t alienate the advertisers.

Tsujii decided to use Choshu’s demand as leverage for a corporate hostile takeover. He would bring Maeda back, yes—but at a price that would kill the insurrection forever.

“The name ‘UWF’ will disappear,” Tsujii announced to the press, his tone clinically detached. “We will sign individual contracts with all wrestlers. It’s the same as a pro baseball team.”

There would be no more “UWF.” The name was unnatural, Tsujii explained to the press, an anomaly that confused the branding. New Japan was returning to the principle of “Economy First.” The era of carrying a subsidiary company was over.

The offer on the table was brutal: Individual Contracts.

The young men who had followed Maeda into the wilderness were told they could return to the castle, but only as foot soldiers. And the pay would be cut—”Significant Down,” the papers called it. The raises they had won the previous year were gone, erased by the sudden realization that without Maeda in the ring, the UWF had no leverage.

But the contract came with a catch, a wedge driven perfectly into the heart of the group’s loyalty. The offer was open to Takada, to Yamazaki, to the others. It was not open to Maeda.

“Maeda is different,” the executives said.

The Front Office had constructed a perfect moral trap. If the five other members signed, they would survive, but they would have to step over Maeda’s body to do it. If they refused, they would join him in an exile that looked increasingly permanent. It was a test of whether they were revolutionaries or employees. “The shop is closing,” the industry whispered.

It was a union-busting tactic of sorts disguised as modernization. For years, Maeda and his cohorts had operated as a “sub-team,” the UWF army, carrying their own banner within the New Japan ring. Tsujii’s ultimatum was simple: Sign with us as individuals, or starve.

The Empire Strikes Back

The milkman didn’t come one day.

Or perhaps he did, and there was simply no one left at the warehouse in Setagaya to unlock the door. For three years and eight months, the delivery of milk bottles had been part of the rhythm of the Universal Pro Wrestling Federation. It was the fuel for the young men who lived there, who ate chanko stew next to the ring, and who believed, with the quiet fanaticism of monks, that they were saving professional wrestling from itself.

The milkman’s brother was a fan. He’d understood the mission.

Now, the mission was over.

It was late December 1987. The Tokyo winter had settled into the uninsulated walls of the dojo, turning the sweat on the canvas into ice. Inside, Akira Maeda sat in the dark. He was not technically alone—Nobuhiko Takada was there, sitting a few feet away—but the distance between them felt like an ocean.

He was wearing a blue tracksuit, the uniform of an army that had been disbanded by corporate decree. The dojo was silent, save for the rhythmic thud-thud-thud of Maeda’s feet hitting the mat and the ticking of a clock on the wall. One. Two. Three.

He was 29 years old. He was the most dangerous man in professional wrestling, and he had nowhere to go.

“Even if I go to the gym for two hours, there is no intensity,” Maeda muttered, staring at his reflection in the dark window. “Without a goal, the body doesn’t tighten up.”

He put a CD in the boombox and began to shadowbox. He threw kicks, perhaps at an invisible Riki Choshu, grappling with the phantom of a career that had been put on ice. The magazines called him a “Ronin”—a masterless samurai waiting for a war. But in the quiet of the dojo, he looked less like a warrior and more like a prisoner of his own ideology.

“I will endure,” he told the empty room. “Until the time comes.”

Maeda knew that his stubbornness—the “Double-Edged Sword” that made him a star—had finally cut too deep. He had refused to be a “Pro” like his mentor Fujiwara, who could swallow resentment and make it look like wrestling. Maeda had insisted on reality.

“Humans have obsessiveness,” the magazine caption read, narrating the scene of the two men sitting in the gloom. “The determination to put a period on your heart and move forward is heavy.”

Maeda looked at his hands. The dream was dead. The only question left was whether he would die with it, or if he would find a new way to fight.

On the wall, a clock was stuck at 10:05. In the corner, a single yellow sponge sat drying on a shelf. The sign on the wooden pillar still read “Universal Pro Wrestling Dojo,” but it hung there like a tombstone.

He was a man built to break things, currently broken by the silence of indefinite suspension. The “Face Kick” at Korakuen Hall had not just shattered Riki Choshu’s orbital bone; it had shattered the fragile economic truce that kept this warehouse open. The “UWF” was no longer a revolutionary army. It was a line item that New Japan Pro-Wrestling had decided to delete.

Empowered by the kick, and Maeda’s refusal to bend, the empire struck back. In December, they slid a contract extension across the table. It was a “Cooling Off” deal, a classic banishment ritual: a 15% pay cut and a one-way ticket to Mexico or Europe. Go away, they were saying. Go wrestle in obscurity until you learn to harmonize.

Maeda pushed it back. “I cannot accept the pay cut,” he said. “I will not go overseas.”

He chose isolation instead.

The False God

It was a Tuesday in January, unseasonably warm for Chiba Prefecture. The sun beat down with a brightness that made heavy winter coats unnecessary, yet Antonio Inoki and Akira Maeda arrived at the Nakayama Hokekyo-ji Temple encased in wool suits—Inoki in navy, Maeda in grey—looking less like professional wrestlers and more like two rival ward bosses forced into an uncomfortable public truce. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder for the photographers, but their eyes rarely met. Inoki, his famous chin jutting forward, seemed to be performing piety for the cameras, a man accustomed to bending any situation to his narrative. Maeda, a man built for violence and ill-suited for diplomacy, stared at the temple floorboards as if plotting an escape route, his shoulders tight beneath the jacket.

They had come ostensibly for spiritual cleansing. Inside, monks were enduring the brutal “100-Day Ascetic Practice,” dousing themselves with freezing water to scrub away bad karma. Inoki, however, was there for a more practical kind of purification. His company was bleeding money, television executives were panicked by the recent violence, and his most valuable, volatile commodity—the man who had shattered Riki Choshu’s face on national television—was currently unemployable. The temple visit was theater; a public act of Sange-metsu-zai, repentance for sins. Inoki needed to demonstrate to the sponsors that the mad dog could be brought to heel, put in a respectable suit, and made to kneel on command.

Maeda knelt on the tatami, surrounded by the droning of sutras and the cloying smell of incense, looking entirely miserable. The reporters present, desperate to spin a narrative of reconciliation, wrote breathlessly of a “mysterious karma” binding the two men, a mix of “love and sadness.” Maeda likely felt only the itching of the unfamiliar fabric and the deep humiliation of being a prop in another man’s angle. He was a fighter who dealt in bone-breaking reality, now forced to play dress-up in Inoki’s theater of the absurd, praying for forgiveness for a crime that had made them both famous, just so he might eventually be allowed to take the suit off and do it all over again.

This boardroom struggle was haunted by the shadow of Maeda’s complicated relationship with Inoki. For years, Maeda had oscillated between being Inoki’s heir and his harshest critic. He had watched Inoki, the “God” of wrestling, drown in financial scandals and soft matches, trading his legacy for live entertainment spectacle.

“Why is Inoki allowed to do anything?” Maeda had railed in the press back in 1985. “He admits to debt, he admits to scandal... and the fans still cheer? Everyone, are your heads empty?”

Maeda didn’t want to destroy New Japan; he wanted to purify it. He wanted to be the Jitsuzō—the “Real Image”—that replaced Inoki’s fading Kyozō (False Image). He had even publicly pleaded with his mentor: “You are tired. Your wrestling is old. Please retire and let us take over.”7

To Inoki, the “Maeda Incident” was not a tragedy; it was a transaction that had simply gone bad. “I don’t mind if we renew contracts or not,” he told reporters, his tone bored. He had already calculated the loss of the UWF, amortized the “Shoot Style” experiment, and moved on to the next hustle.

It was difficult to parse the relationship between the two without being part of it. Maeda, once Inoki’s personal assistant, would later claim he’d lived his wrestling life asking himself “what would Inoki do?” But, despite this intimate bond, the two were not close. In the wake of the Choshu incident, they met in private for the first and only time in their lives, Maeda joining Inoki and his glamorous actress wife Mitsuko Baisho in Daikanyama, an upscale, trendy Tokyo neighborhood, for shots of Wild Turkey.

It was a memorable night—but nothing changed.

The Verdict

While the rest of the industry moved on, Maeda sat alone. He drove his Porsche to the empty UWF dojo in Setagaya, stretched in silence, and waited for the phone to ring. It never did.

But while the office tried to freeze him out, the streets were overheating. The fans, sensing the injustice, began to vote with their lungs. The magazine Weekly Pro-Wrestling launched an “Essay Contest” to gauge public sentiment, and the response was overwhelming: the fans were no longer buying the corporate line. They saw the united front of Inoki and Sakaguchi not as strength, but as a conspiracy to protect a dying business model.

The breaking point came on December 27 at Ryogoku Kokugikan. New Japan, desperate to prove they didn’t need Maeda, booked a disaster: Antonio Inoki pinned in under three minutes by the debuting Big Van Vader, under the command of a Japanese comedian. The arena dissolved into a riot. Seat cushions rained down. And from the angry mob rose a chant for the man who wasn’t there. “Maeda! Maeda!”.

After months of speculation, magazine after magazine tracking the drama, the execution finally happened on Tuesday, March 1, 1988.

It was scheduled as a solemn affair at the Roppongi main office. Vice President Sakaguchi sat before the flashbulbs to read the obituary of the “New Leader” era.

“We had no choice,” Sakaguchi said. “Dismissal is unavoidable.”

But even the funeral was denied its dignity. In the middle of the recitation, 'Mr. Matsuda,' the manager of a gimmick faction known as the 'Pirate Army,' barged in with his henchmen. They weren't there to protest Maeda's firing; they were there to shoot a wrestling angle, demanding 'Official Entry' for themselves. It was a bizarre, carnival sideshow interrupting a corporate execution. The press conference descended into a brawl involving Inoki, turning the tragedy of the UWF into a farce.

Maeda, somehow, was starting to look like the grownup in the room.

As the spring issue of Weekly Pro-Wrestling hit the newsstands, the narrative shift was undeniable. The cover no longer showed Maeda in glorious, contemplative suffering. It showed him standing atop a mountain peak, pointing a finger at the limitless blue sky. The headline asked, “Is this the chance to become the Martial Arts King?”

New Japan thought they had fired an employee. They had accidentally liberated a prophet.

THE AWAKENING

The resurrection began not in a cathedral, but in a hotel restaurant. On April 8, at the “Grill Gondola” in Akasaka, six young men in suits stood before the press.

They were the “Newborn” UWF. There were no reserves, no opening acts. Just Maeda and five disciples—Kazuo Yamazaki, Nobuhiko Takada, Tatsuo Nakano, Yoji Anjo, and Shigeo Miyato. They were betting their careers on a radical concept: Pro wrestling without the lie.

“I want to pursue the kind of wrestling that is impossible for Baba and Inoki,” Maeda declared, finally stepping out of their shadow. “We are going to fix the system and finally make the sport a reality.”

The skepticism was high. A promotion with six wrestlers? It was another perilous undertaking, a mission perhaps destined for failure. But Maeda took his message directly to the people, bypassing the traditional wrestling press to appear on mainstream radio programs like “Yoshida Terumi’s Yaru-Mange” and STV Radio in Hokkaido. He cracked jokes, he sounded human, but his message was revolutionary.

He described his new organization not as a business, but as a “Citizens’ Rights Movement” for martial artists.8 Maeda had seen too many elite Judo and Karate champions graduate from university with nowhere to go. Their options were stark: retire to become a gym teacher, or surrender their dignity to become a “clown” in the theatrical circus of pro wrestling.

Maeda envisioned the UWF as a “Saucer”—a sanctuary where these lost warriors could earn a living without debasing themselves. “It is disrespectful to wrestling to have untrained guys,” Maeda argued. By creating a system where a fighter could win with their own techniques, without scripts or pantomime, he was offering them the one thing the giants could not: the right to be real.9

The strategy worked. On the morning of April 16, when the phone lines opened for tickets, the Tokyo telephone grid melted down. Seven thousand five hundred calls battered the switchboards for 1,500 seats. It sold out in 15 minutes. In Hokkaido, 3,000 seats vanished in a single day.

Maeda, holding the receiver in the UWF office, was stunned. “It’s scary,” he whispered. “Is this true?”

It was true. And on May 12, it became physical.

It rained that night in Tokyo. Outside Korakuen Hall, a line of pilgrims snaked around the block. Some had slept on the concrete for days, clutching sleeping bags, waiting for standing-room tickets.

Inside, the atmosphere was less like a sporting event and more like a mass. Karl Gotch, the “God of Wrestling” who had trained them all, stepped into the ring to sanctify the canvas.10 He didn’t just wave to the crowd. He read a proclamation, a “UWF Charter” that laid out the moral laws of the new territory. The rules were posted like commandments: No closed fists. No theatrics. 15 points to lose.

Before the first bell rang, Maeda stood in the center of the ring, a microphone in his hand. He wore a crisp white t-shirt and looked out at the faces of 2,300 believers. He didn’t cut a promo. He gave a sermon.

“Inside the anxiety and uneasiness, there were two feelings,” he told the hushed crowd before the bell rang. “’Will it work?’ or ‘Is it reckless?’”

It was reckless. But the main event—Maeda vs. Yamazaki—was a revelation.

Starting Over (5/12/1988)

When the bell finally rang, what unfolded wasn’t the fluid, operatic dance the fans were used to. It was jagged, halting, and often ugly—a prototype of a sport that hadn’t quite been invented yet. Karl Gotch, watching from ringside with the critical eye of a creator, grumbled that there were “too many kicks,” a sign that the delicate balance between striking and grappling was still being calibrated.

The rhythm was unfamiliar. There were no smooth transitions or cooperative Irish whips. Instead, there was the heavy thud of shin against thigh and the sudden, frantic scramble for a limb. It stopped and started, lacking the polished crescendo of a New Japan main event, but in those awkward silences, the audience found something far more compelling: the absence of a script.

Yet, if the mechanics were rough, the drama was electric. The new rules—where points were deducted for every knockdown—created a tension that rendered traditional near-falls obsolete. Maeda, the returning hero, was nearly humiliated, knocked down five times by Yamazaki’s punishing low kicks, left sprawling in a “Big Letter” shape on the canvas, one mistake away from losing his own revolution. But the finish, when it came, felt earned in a way wrestling rarely allowed. A desperate “Captured” suplex segued into a “Kata-Ha-Jime” choke, draining the life from Yamazaki not with a theatrical bang, but with a silent, suffocating squeeze. It wasn’t a perfect match, but as Maeda stood victorious in the center of the ring, it was clear that while they hadn’t reached the destination, they had finally found the road.

The crowd didn’t cheer like wrestling fans. They watched with the intensity of witnesses. And when Maeda finally choked Yamazaki unconscious, the roar that shook the hall wasn’t for a victory. It was for a validation.

The poster for the night read “STARTING OVER.” But as the faithful spilled out into the rainy Tokyo streets, buzzing with the adrenaline of the new gospel, they knew the truth. The era of the “Show” was over. The era of the “Fight” had begun.

EPILOGUE: THE LONG WAY HOME

The timeline that broke in 1987 did not heal quickly. For decades, the Mercenary and the Believer walked parallel paths, separated by a canyon of ideology and scar tissue.

Riki Choshu got exactly what he wanted: the Kingdom. After Maeda was exiled, Choshu didn’t just return to the fold; he conquered it. He eventually did the unthinkable—he pinned Antonio Inoki in a singles match, becoming one of the few Japanese wrestlers to cleanly surpass the God of the era. With Inoki fading into political office and more scandals, Choshu ascended to the role of “Site Supervisor” (Genba Kantoku). He traded his tights for a tracksuit and a whistle. He became the architect of the 1990s “Three Musketeers” boom, filling the Tokyo Dome not with “shoot” experiments, but with dramatic, heavy-impact professional wrestling. He proved that the “Business” could be just as profitable as the “Truth.”

Akira Maeda got exactly what he wanted: the World. He never stepped back into the traditional pro wrestling ring. With RINGS, he built a global empire that bridged the gap between theatrics and actual combat. He imported Soviet commandos like Volk Han and legends like Alexander Karelin. He created the stage where Fedor Emelianenko would eventually be born. Maeda spent the 90s seeking the “Strongest,” eventually retiring in 1999 after a colossal battle with Karelin. He had become the “King of Outsiders,” a man who proved you didn’t need the NJPW lion mark to be a legend.

It took thirty years for the ice to melt. The thaw began not in a ring, but in the quiet resignation of old age, two men realizing their battles were with ghosts of the past, not each other.

As the eras passed and the “Strong Style” they both fought for (in different ways) began to vanish from the modern landscape, the animosity seemed to evaporate.

The final verse of their song was written on June 26, 2019, at Choshu’s final retirement event, “POWER HALL 2019.” In the lead-up to the end, Maeda sat down for a magazine feature that felt less like an interview and more like a confession. The tension of 1987 was gone, replaced by the warm, gruff laughter of a survivor.

The man who once kicked Choshu with the intent to break him, offered a revisionist history that sounded like an apology wrapped in pride. “I tapped you on the shoulder,” Maeda insisted, laughing. “I gave you the signal. You just moved your head! If I had kicked you for real, you’d be dead. I did it because I knew you were sturdy enough to take it.” He admitted that the kick wasn’t just hatred—it was trust. He believed only Choshu was strong enough to handle the “Heat” he wanted to create.

“The best angle is one that even deceives the people involved in the scene. The tension of ‘they are really fighting, this is dangerous’ gets conveyed to the people around you, and then spreads to the fans. My greatest teacher in that regard was Inoki-san,” Maeda admitted. “I just followed the rules of what a pro-wrestler can say, shouldn’t say, can do, and must do—200%, as his top student. Nothing more, nothing less.

“There was a time when Inoki-san had Tiger Jeet Singh attack in front of the Isetan department store. That had real tension, didn’t it? That’s what I was aiming for. Pro-wrestling is a turf war over how many people you can drag into your own angle. The person who can do that becomes the top guy.

“The thing I can boast about is that I’ve never had anyone else think up my angles for me. I thought of them myself, initiated them myself, and created the tension. One of those instances just happened to be with Choshu-san.”

And Choshu, the man who had worn sunglasses to hide his broken face, simply smiled. He had won the war for the company, but he recognized that Maeda had won the war for the spirit.

In a touching final gesture referenced in the piece, Maeda was asked to write a message on a shikishi (autograph board) for his old enemy. He didn’t write “Sorry” or “Forgive me.” He wrote a message that acknowledged the burden they both carried as the men who had to carry the world after Inoki.

“To Riki Choshu,” the sentiment went, “You worked hard. Now, rest.”

When Choshu finally walked out of the ring for the last time, leaving his boots in the center of the canvas, the “Face Kick” was no longer a crime or a psychic burden. It was just a scar—a reminder of a time when wrestling was dangerous, when passion was real, and when two men loved the sport enough to break each other’s bones over it.

They were the North and South poles of the King of Sports. And in the end, despite the distance between them, they realized they were part of the same planet.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

April 15, 1990 – Hakata Star Lane

Masakatsu Funaki stood in the corner, looking across at Minoru Suzuki. It had been seven months since Funaki had been seen in a UWF ring. Seven months of silence. Seven months of “blank space.”1

Funaki looked different. The baby fat was gone, stripped away by stress and rehab. He was twenty-one years old, but he wore the face of a man who had seen too many losing tickets. He pulled a photo out of his bag—a snapshot from his European excursion just a year prior. He stared at the smiling kid in the picture.

“It feels like I’m looking at my younger brother,” he said, his voice quiet. “I look about 20 years older now.”

The crowd in Hakata was waiting for a show. Funaki had previously made waves with the "Bone Method" (Koppo), a controversial style utilizing palm strikes that KO'd Nobuhiko Takada and brutalized Bob Backlund.2 They wanted the fireworks, the “U-Style” flash, the ultra-violence Funaki had become famous for.

But Funaki and Suzuki weren’t selling fireworks this night. They were selling the truth.

The bell rang. They didn’t kick. They didn’t punch. They collided with a dull thud, locking horns in a silence eventually so thick you could choke on it, every catcall clearly audible.

It wasn’t necessarily what the crowd paid for. They wanted the noise. They wanted the crash. As the two men struggled on the mat, fighting for inches in a ‘monochrome’ stalemate, a voice rang out from the darkness.

“Do it seriously!” a fan screamed.3

Funaki didn’t flinch. He didn’t speed up. He knew what the fan didn’t: This was serious. This was as serious as a heart attack. The fan wanted a show. Funaki was giving him a fight. This was more than a grappling exhibition. It was a preview of the future.

See the match

The Rigged Game

April 1989 – One Year Earlier

A year earlier, Funaki and Suzuki walked out of New Japan Pro Wrestling. They were the “Young Shooters,” the defectors who told the world they were tired of the circus. They were coming to the UWF for the “Real Fight.”

The fans bought it. They lined up around the block, cash in hand, desperate to see the young wolves eat the old lions. But the UWF had a dirty secret. It wasn’t a meritocracy. It was a bureaucracy. It was sold as a revolution. Instead, it was plain old wrestling, just different faces sitting at the top of the poster.

The press knew it. The boys in the back room at Weekly Pro Wrestling had already figured out the scam:

“The UWF has an ‘invisible ranking’ exists. There is a hierarchy they cannot overcome. They hit a wall where power is strictly a matter of time served.

“There is a cold logic to why the ‘Class’ system in pro wrestling remains static: The Front Office is active, but the wrestlers are passive. Fujiwara, Funaki, and Suzuki were treated not as revolutionaries, but as outsiders who just got off the bus. Inside the UWF, the power dynamics are set in stone. The interesting part of the UWF—the chaos—was swallowed up by ‘UWF Politics.’”

Akira Maeda was the Boss. Nobuhiko Takada was the Underboss. And the kids? They were just extras. The Office didn’t want Funaki and Suzuki to take over. They wanted them to look good on the bottom of the poster, to capture the attention of younger fans before inevitability slotting into the right place.

The Front Office didn’t want an actual revolution. They wanted a marketing campaign. They took all that fire, all that dangerous energy Funaki and Suzuki brought to the ring, and they used it to sell tickets—not to change the hierarchy. They weren’t fighting for supremacy. They were just fighting to expand the brand.

Funaki and Suzuki hit the “Invisible Wall.”

They realized too late that you can’t fight your way up a ladder when your feet are nailed to the floor.

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The Desperate Bet

September 1989 – The Injury

Funaki, once thought to be a sure thing to go far in New Japan, got desperate. Even at 20, he knew that in this business, if you aren’t moving up, you’re moving out.

The Tokyo Dome show was coming up in November. “U-COSMOS.” The big time. The Front Office lined up a killer named Maurice Smith—a kickboxing champion who cut people apart with surgical precision. This was Funaki’s chance. If he could beat the outsider, he could break the Wall.

He started sparring with Suzuki. He pushed too hard. He threw a spinning backfist with bad intentions. Suzuki blocked it. Crack. Funaki’s left forearm snapped. A hairline fracture.

A smart man would have taken the time off. But Funaki wasn’t smart; he was terrified. He was terrified that if he stepped out of line, the Invisible Wall would close up and leave him on the wrong side.

Possibly forever.

Once established as a middle of the pack man, it was hard to push your way to the top. The fans already thought of you a certain way. So he did the unthinkable. Ten days after his trip to the hospital, he took a pair of shears and cut off his own cast.

“I want to separate the bone quickly so I can cure it faster,” he told himself. “If I don’t move it, it won’t heal.”

It was the logic of a junkie. Or a crazy person. He went to the training camp at Lake Yamanaka despite his injury. The whole crew was there, the kind of training that was part mandatory fun, part publicity stunt.

The cameras were rolling. He had to look strong. He lay down on the bench press. He loaded the bar. His arm screamed:4

For the UWF Tokyo Dome event, we decided to hold an intensive training camp in Yamanashi, and I participated as well. There was TV coverage, and I did the bench press there.

Usually, I was lifting 80kg, but because the cameras were rolling, I set it to 100kg. Since two weeks had passed and the pain in my arm had subsided, I thought, ‘It’ll be fine,’ and challenged myself.

At that moment, I snapped the bone that was in the process of healing. Crack.

Because of this, I missed the Tokyo Dome show and was forced into a long-term absence.

He had bet the house and busted.

The Fall Guy

November 29, 1989 – The Tokyo Dome

The Organization needed a body. Funaki was out. So they pointed the finger at Suzuki.

“You’re up, kid.”

The white arrow had landed with a thunk.5 Suzuki knew he was walking into a slaughter. He was a grappler, an amateur wrestling standout; Smith was a striker who later ate grapplers for lunch, even winning the Ultimate Fighting Championship in the sport’s dark ages. But you don’t say no to the Front Office, to opportunity when it knocks.

Suzuki walked into the Tokyo Dome wearing a brand new, pure white costume. It was a nice touch. By choosing pristine white, he likely intended to symbolize a fresh start or the purity of his fighting spirit.

After his crushing, one-sided defeat, however, the press seized on the darker symbolism. By wearing all white, they argued, Suzuki had inadvertently dressed himself for his own funeral. Historically, samurai would sometimes wear white beneath their armor—or dress entirely in white—before a battle from which they did not expect to return. It was a statement of resolve: “I am ready to die.”

Maybe he didn’t realize it, but the media did, calling his white gear exactly what it was— his ‘burial shroud’ (death outfit).”6

Before the fight, the young Japanese wrestler tried his hardest to look tough. He put on his best “Gonta” face—a thug’s sneer to hide the fear.7 It didn’t work. Smith picked him apart. In the fourth round, Smith put a right hand on his chin and turned the lights out. Suzuki lay on the mat, crying. Not because it hurt. But because he realized he was nowhere closer to his goal.

Early mixed martial arts (11/29/1989)

“Suzuki, his face crumpled in tears, looked up at the ceiling,” Weekly Pro Wrestling reported. “From the bottom of his heart, he hugged Smith.”

For the young heroes, losing wasn’t a mere setback. It was a call from the fighting gods to get stronger.

The Settlement

April 15, 1990 – The Finish

Back in Hakata, the two young bulls met in the middle of the ring, pointedly refusing to wreck the China shop. Funaki and Suzuki wrestled for eight minutes and fifty-three seconds. Wrestled. It wasn’t a performance. It was a receipt, a statement. Suzuki went for the leg. He got sloppy. Funaki caught the ankle and twisted. “It hurts! It hurts!” Suzuki screamed.

He tapped out.

Funaki got his hand raised. He took the microphone, but he didn’t brag. There were no histrionics. He spoke like a man who had looked into the abyss and blinked.

“Humans...do not know when they will die. If by some chance tomorrow I die, I want to have no regrets.”

Suzuki sat in the hallway afterward, smiling a bitter, crooked smile.

“Even though I lost,” he said, “I finally did pro wrestling.”

They packed their bags. Funaki had his win. Suzuki had his pride. But as they walked out into the Fukuoka night, the Invisible Wall was still there. The revolution was forestalled.8 Their ranking—that damn, invisible status—hadn’t moved an inch.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

Vale Tudo Japan, April 20, 1995

ACT I: THE IMPOSSIBLE MATH

Look at the numbers. Just look at the goddamn numbers.

Gerard Gordeau: 100 kilograms. 198 centimeters. A Dutch giant carved out of granite and bad intentions.

Yuki Nakai: 71 kilograms. 171 centimeters. A university dropout with a bad haircut and skin-tight red tights pulled up over his belly button like a 1950s acrobat.

The difference is 63.9 pounds. The difference is 10.6 inches.

In a civilized sport, this is a felony. At the Nippon Budokan on April 20, 1995, it is merely an early bout—a warm-up act for the carnage to come.

The crowd is buzzing with that peculiar electricity reserved for public executions. They know the rules, or at least the suggestion of them. No biting. No eye-gouging. But everything else? The “Official Rules” sheet distributed by Referee Ogata reads like a polite suggestion to a pack of wolves: “Rounds will continue indefinitely... until a conclusion is reached.” No time limit. No escape.

As the rules are read in the ring, one joker yelled “I thought this was Vale Tudo!” The crowd laughed. They were primed for violence.

The “Black Ship”1 had arrived in the form of Gracie Jiu Jitsu, taking the world by storm in the UFC and Japan, specifically, at the previous year’s Vale Tudo Japan event. It’s there that Shooto2 was disgraced by Rickson Gracie. It was there that Nakai launched his latest crusade—a redemption quest.

This night, Nakai stands in his corner, stripping down to his red tights. Beside him is Noboru Asahi, a fellow Shooto fighter, a little Easter egg for the hardcore geeks who know that Shooto is supposed to be the “thinking man’s” violence.

Across the ring, Gordeau is stoic in flowing white karate pants, looking for all the world like the thug who beats up the hero in the first act of a Van Damme movie. If he looks like a leg breaker for the Dutch mob or the kind of guy who would enforce what standards of decency exist in an Amsterdam-based strip club, well, that’s because he is.

Gordeau’s face betrayed nothing—not anticipation, not contempt, only the flat calm of a tradesman surveying his tools, a victory, a quick cigarette in the back, his main goals in the moment.

He is not here to think. He is here to end things.

The Dutchman did not care for the pageantry. He stood in the white pants of the Kyokushin and looked at the small man across the canvas. If his blood pressure rose even an smidgen, it was not clear by the look on his face. Boredom. Duty. Work. This was only a chore.

He had told them in the back that he did not believe in talent. Talent was a handicap. He believed only in the will to not cease. He had fought in the cages in America and the rings in Europe and he knew that the rules were just paper walls put up by men who had never tasted their own blood, let alone anyone else’s.

He watched the small man bounce on his heels. The Dutchman felt the vibration of the floor. He was 34 years old and his body was a map of old violences. He had a tooth from a Hawaiian sumotori embedded in his foot nearly two years ago.3 He carried it like a coin in a pocket into the post-fight party. He danced. He was that kind of man, the kind rarely found in the modern world.

He did not hate the small man. He simply needed to open the door to the next room, and the small man was the lock. He would turn the key. If the key broke, he would force the latch.

This was his way.

ACT II: THE THEFT OF LIGHT

Round 1 begins. The mismatch is immediate.

Gordeau stalks forward, a tower of white cotton. Nakai shoots—fast, desperate—his knee grazing the mat as he drives into the giant’s hips. He secures a body lock, but it’s like trying to tackle a redwood. Gordeau doesn’t even sprawl; he just leans back, hooking his left arm casually over the top rope.

“Rope Grabbing: The match will continue,” say the rules. So Gordeau continues. He stands there, anchored to the architecture of the ring, and starts popping short punches into Nakai’s face. Thud. Thud.

It is a stalemate. An impasse of physics. Nakai cannot drag the giant down; Gordeau cannot shake the tick off his waist.

And then, the waiting game ends.

Nakai digs his head into Gordeau’s chest, tensing for a heave. Gordeau, bored or perhaps just efficient, secures his leverage. He looks down at the head buried in his sternum. He sees the eye.

In the darkness of the clinch, Yuki Nakai smelled the starch of the Dutchman’s gi and the sour copper scent of old sweat. He was not fighting a man; he was fighting a continent.

He felt the Dutchman’s hand move across his face. It was heavy, like a stone being placed over a grave. He did not flinch. He was a craftsman of Shooto, and a craftsman does not complain about the tools. A warrior doesn’t allow the outside world to affect his focus. His was a singular mission, his body a finely-tuned universe unto itself.

Then, the universe split.

It was not pain, at first. It was a sound. The sound of a grape bursting. A wet, tearing sensation that bypassed the nerves and went straight to the soul. The thumb dug deep, seeking the soft jelly of the orb, pushing past the eyelid, past the resistance of the muscle, into the very seat of his vision.

“This shitty old man,” Nakai thought, the vulgarity floating like a bubble in a sea of red agony.

He felt the eye give way. The light in the right hemisphere of his world flickered and died, replaced by a hot, sticky darkness. The pain was absolute. It was a white-hot wire drawn through the center of his skull.

But he did not let go.

If he let go, the era ended. If he clutched his face, the dream of Shooto died here, in the first round, exposed as a fraud before the world. He was carrying the ghosts of the University Judo Club on his back. He was carrying the ghost of Yoshida.4

He clamped his hands tighter around the giant’s waist. He buried his face—his ruined, weeping face—into the Dutchman’s chest. He would not scream. He would accept this darkness as the price of admission.

Gordeau looked at the referee. The referee said nothing, not at first.

The Dutchman had warned them. He had told the referee in plain English: Stop this or I will do something not nice. The referee had let the clock run. The referee had let the small man hang there like a parasite.

So Gordeau did the work.

He pressed his thumb into the socket. He felt the resistance and then he felt the give. He did it without malice. He did it the way a man guts a fish. It was a simple mechanical necessity. The eye was a vulnerability, and he exploited it.

He waited for the scream. He waited for the referee to intervene. But the referee only offered a “Caution,” a word that meant nothing in the language of blood. And the small man? The small man did not fall. He did not cry out. He only held on tighter.

The Dutchman frowned. He pulled his thumb back. The eye was red and weeping. And still, the small man pushed.

He is broken, Gordeau thought. But he does not know it yet.

He clamped his chin down onto the small man’s nose, grinding the bone. If the eye would not stop him, perhaps the pain of the face would. The Dutchman had all night. He would dismantle this small thing piece by piece until there was nothing left but the will to quit. And if the small man would not quit, then the Dutchman would kill him.

It was all the same work.

ACT III: THE PURGATORY

The crowd in the Budokan is beginning to understand that they have not paid for entertainment; they have paid for a poetic lesson in pain.

Round 2 begins with an explosion of white. Gordeau closes the distance like a thunderclap, a lightning bolt of Dutch aggression. Nakai drops. He doesn’t fall; he vanishes beneath the sightline, a spider monkey snatching a single limb. He has the leg. He has the heel. For a second, the impossible math seems ready to balance itself.

But gravity is a stubborn thing. Gordeau stumbles, yes, but he stumbles toward safety. He falls into the ropes, his long arms draping over the top cable like vines. Nakai is attached to the leg, half-in and half-out of the ring, a precarious ornament on the giant’s frame.

And then the punishment begins.

Gordeau rains down punches—hard, flat sounds that echo in the rafters. Thud. Thud. Nakai, half-ejected from the ring, is saved only by the intervention of the referees who scramble like frantic nurses.

They restart. The “butt scoot”position.5 A humiliating term for a deadly strategy. Gordeau kicks at the prone Nakai. The bell rings. It is a mercy, but only a temporary one.

In the corner, the ice pack felt like a burning coal against Nakai’s face.

He did not know that his eye was swollen shut, purple and angry, weeping a clear fluid. He only knew that the darkness on his right side was absolute.

Round 3. He moved forward. He did not care for the audience. They wanted a show? Let them watch a circus. He was here for something older. He was here for the truth of the clutch.

He pressed his body into the giant again. The smell of sweat and blood was overwhelming, a ferrous perfume. He felt the thumb seek his eye again—a quick, sharp probe—but this time he turned his head. He would not give the darkness another inch.

He was fighting for survival. Not the survival of the flesh—that was already forfeit—but the survival of the idea. If he fell, Shooto fell. If he quit, the spirits of the seniors who had built this path would fade into the ether.

He transitioned to the back. A German Suplex? A hip throw? He yanked with every fiber of his being. The giant was a mountain, immovable, rooted in the center of the world. Nakai felt his own muscles strain, his own breath ragged in his chest.

Move, he commanded the mountain. Move, or kill me.

ACT IV: THE BREAKING

Round 4. We are twenty-four minutes into a real fight disguised as a sporting event.

The crowd is no longer murmuring. They are drivers slowing down as they pass a wreck. Gordeau pops a jab—heavy, a metronome keeping time for a song nobody wants to hear. Nakai pursues.

And then, the script flips.

Nakai shoots a double-leg—a dirty, beautiful, desperate wrestling shot that drives the Dutchman into the corner. Gordeau hits the turnbuckle, nearly goes down, but the ropes—those damned ropes—save him again. He shimmies up them like a sailor climbing a mast, resetting the status quo.

He punches. Nakai blocks, aware seemingly for the first time that this was an option. Nakai drops his hips, pulling guard, sliding down the giant’s body like rain on a windowpane. Gordeau snakes an arm under the neck—a guillotine—but he doesn’t commit. He drapes his arm over the rope. He is comfortable there.

But Nakai is not looking for the neck. He is looking for the foundation.

The world below the waist is a different country. It is a place of leverage and bone, far away from the punches and the thumbs.

Nakai slid down the giant’s flank. He felt the coarse gi covering Dutchman’s leg against his cheek. This was the answer. To topple the tree, one must attack the root.

He abandoned the high ground. He let his body become heavy, sinking into the canvas. He wrapped his arms around the ankle. It was thick, like the trunk of a pine, but it was mortal.

I am not fighting for points, Nakai told the darkness in his right eye. I am fighting for everything.

He felt the giant try to stand, to pull away, to use the ropes as a crutch for his weary soul. But Nakai was no longer a man; he was a vice. He torqued his hips. He poured every ounce of his suffering into the rotation of his torso.

It was a savage twist. A prayer of destruction.

He felt the giant’s knee ligaments scream. He felt the structure give way. The mountain did not crumble; it was felled.

The Dutchman felt the little man on his leg. He looked for the rope but the rope was far away now.

He felt the pressure in his knee. It was a simple mechanical truth. The joint goes one way. The little man was taking it the other way.

Gordeau did not panic. He did not cry out. He simply calculated the cost. He looked at the mat, only moments available to devise a plan. He felt the torque increase. The little man was trying to tear the foot off.

Enough, the Dutchman thought.

He slapped the mat with his right hand. Tap. Tap.

It was not a surrender of spirit. It was a business decision. The bill had come due, and he paid it. He lay back on the canvas and waited for the pain to stop. The night was over. He had done his work.6

ACT V: THE INTERMISSION

Yuki Nakai does not go to a locker room. He is ushered past the press, past the gawkers, into the back of a white paramedic van. He sits there, a 71kg stick of dynamite that has just been stepped on. He inhales oxygen from a plastic mask.

The doctor leans in. He shines a penlight into the right eye. The eyelid is swollen shut, a purple landscape of trauma. The doctor pries it open.

“Can you fight?” ask the handlers.

“Can you see?” asks the doctor.

He lied. Or perhaps, in the delirium of adrenaline, he simply refused to accept the evidence of his senses.

“I can see,” Nakai said. “I am fine.”

He could not see. The right side of the world was gone, replaced by a wall of muddy red fog. But to admit blindness was to invite the towel. If he said the words, the doctor would stop it. If the doctor stopped it, the sacrifice of the first round—the pain of the thumb, the twisting of the ankle—would be rendered meaningless.

He sat in the ambulance, sucking down the cool, sterile oxygen. He did not feel pain anymore. He felt a terrifying clarity. He was no longer fighting a tournament; he was fighting a war for the legitimacy of his existence. He thought of Pittman, the American giant waiting in the bracket.

“I will fight him until the last train leaves,” Nakai thought. “I will fight him for two hours if I have to.”

Craig Pittman is 130 kilograms of American beef. He is a Greco-Roman wrestler, a WCW pro, a tank with arms. He makes Gordeau look like a rhythmic gymnast.

Nakai steps back into the ring with a patch of white gauze over his eye. He rips it off before the bell. The crowd gasps. The face is lopsided, a Cubist painting of violence.

The fight begins. Pittman grabs Nakai and lifts him into the air like a child. He slams him down—a Powerbomb that shakes the dust off the lights in the ceiling. Boom.

Nakai hits the hard mat. For a second, he stops breathing. The impact rattles the fluid in his inner ear. But he does not let go. He is a tick on the back of a rhinoceros.

The slam drove the air from his lungs. An elbow struck him behind the ear—an accident of gravity—and his head rang like a temple bell.

The pain in the eye was excruciating every time the American’s skin brushed against it. It was electric, a raw nerve exposed to the air.

But the giant made a mistake. He extended an arm.

Nakai saw it with his one good eye. It was a gift. He snatched the limb. He applied the pressure. The giant’s strength was useless against the fulcrum of the elbow. The referee dove in. Stop.

The American protested. He claimed he did not tap. But as he left the ring, the giant caught the referee’s eye and bowed small. He knew. The arm was dead. The Samurai had taken another limb.

ACT VI: THE KING

While Nakai was dismantling giants, Rickson Gracie, the undefeated god of the tournament, was watching on a monitor. He was preparing to fight the Japanese man in the finals.

The room was tense. His brother Royler and his cornerman Sergio were screaming for blood.

“You’ve got to hit him!” Royler said.

“This guy is the worst enemy you’ve ever had! Punch him in the face!” Sergio yelled. “Don’t feel sorry for this guy!”

Rickson looked at the screen. He saw Nakai’s face—swollen, bloody, half-blind. He saw a man who had walked through fire.

Rickson shook his head.

“Not even a punch,” the King said. “I won’t do it.”

The Brazilian walked to the ring in a gi as white as a shroud. He did not look at the crowd. He looked only at the small man across from him.

He saw the damage. He saw the eye sealed shut like a tomb. He saw the courage of a lion in the body of a boy.

I will not break him, the Brazilian thought. I will not be a butcher of wounded men.

The bell rang. The small man came forward. He tried to grapple the King. But the Brazilian was water. He moved around the small man. He took the mount. He did not strike. He could have rained down punches that would have opened the face like a zipper. He did not.

He slid his arm under the neck. It was gentle, almost affectionate. A rear naked choke.

The small man tapped.

The Brazilian released him immediately. He stood up. He did not celebrate. He looked at the small man and nodded. It was a transaction of honor. You have suffered enough, the nod said. Rest now.

The “Gracie Myth” was intact.

As the crowd filed out of the Budokan, the story had changed. They had come to see Yoshihisa Yamamoto7, the pro-wrestling star, challenge the King. They had seen him fear to risk all.

Tarzan Yamamoto8, the erratic kingmaker of Japanese wrestling journalism, sat ringside. He looked at the small, broken fighter being helped out of the ring. He realized that the “fantasy” of pro-wrestling had died that night, killed by the cold reality of the Gracies.

But something else had been born:

The Vale Tudo Japan Open was a strange event... But amidst this, one man stood out. Yuki Nakai. He is a Shooter, not a Pro-Wrestler. But what he showed us was the very essence of ‘Pro-Wrestler Guts.’ He was the smallest man in the tournament. He was blinded in one eye... Yet, he never gave up.

Pro-wrestling fans have a complex regarding the Gracies. We are allergic to them because they destroyed our fantasy. But Nakai... Nakai saved us.

Rickson is strong. But tonight, the smallest man in the Budokan cast the longest shadow.

Nakai sat in the back. The swelling was worse now. The adrenaline was fading, leaving only the dull throb of the bone and the silence of the eye.

He did not know that his career as a fighter was over. He did not know that he would become a secret keeper, hiding his blindness to save the sport he loved.

He only knew that he had reached the finals. He had touched the King.

“It was fun,” he whispered to Asahi.

He closed his good eye. In the darkness, he could still see the ring. It was perfect. And he was the only one left standing in it.

ACT VII: THE SECRET KEEPER

The lights of the Budokan fade, but the real story is just beginning in the shadows of a hospital ward.

The day after the fight, Yuki Nakai walks into the Shooting Gym Center. He looks like a car crash victim who walked away from the scene. His forehead is a swollen shelf; his right eye is a dark, angry slit.

He finds Noboru Asahi, his cornerman, his brother-in-arms. He says it casually, the way one might mention a lost wallet.

“I can’t see.”

Asahi freezes. He takes Nakai to a local eye doctor. Then to the Red Cross Hospital in Omiya. The diagnosis is a sledgehammer: The artery is crushed. The retina is detached. The light is gone.9

Asahi stands in the dim hallway of the hospital. He cries. Not a polite cry, but a ragged, ugly sobbing. He asks the silent walls “Why?”

Nakai does not cry. He stays in the hospital for two weeks. He wears sunglasses to hide the dead eye. When a TV producer asks him to take them off for an interview, saying “Facial swelling is a fighter’s medal,” Nakai politely refuses. He smiles. He says nothing.

He made a pact with the silence.

If he spoke, the world would know. If the world knew, they would say that “Vale Tudo” was too dangerous for civilized society.10 They would say that men like him—men who sought the purity of the fight—were merely victims of brutality.

I will not let them kill the dream, Nakai vowed.11

So he buried the truth. He let it rot in his head, a secret tumor. He became the “Secret Keeper” of Shooto. He walked through the world with half a picture, bumping into doorframes, misjudging steps, smiling through the disorientation.

He could no longer fight in the ring. The Commission would never clear a one-eyed man. The door to his own glory was slammed shut.

But a Samurai does not need glory. He needs a mission.

If I cannot fight the world, he thought, I will teach the world how to fight.

Years pass. The “Secret” holds.

Nakai disappears from the limelight. He reemerges not as a fighter, but as a student. He puts on a proverbial white belt. He learns Jiu-Jitsu. He learns the language of the ground from the people who, if not invented it, perfected it. He does not ask for special treatment.

He climbs the ladder—Blue, Purple, Brown. He wins tournaments in Hawaii, competing against men who have no idea they are fighting a legend, let alone a blind one.

And then, the circle closes.

He receives his Black Belt. It is not handed to him by a friend. It is presented by Carlos Gracie Jr., the patriarch of the clan. The family that he battled so hard to share the ring with now honors him. It is a moment of supreme irony, and supreme beauty. The “Black Ship” of Gracie Jiu-Jitsu has not conquered him; it has adopted him.

Decades later. The Paraestra Gym in Tokyo.

Yuki Nakai stands on the mats. He is older now. His face is unscarred, but the eye remains dark. He watches his students roll. He sees Shinya Aoki, the “Tobikan Judan,” twisting limbs with a cruelty that Nakai understands all too well. He sees the next generation of Shooto fighters, boys who were in diapers when Gordeau stuck his thumb in the eye.

Sometimes, late at night, when the gym is empty and the smell of sweat hangs in the air like a ghost, he wonders.

“If I had two eyes...”

He thinks of the fights he never had. The rematch with Rickson. The bouts with Rumina Sato that the fans dreamed of. He thinks of the “Major Era” he promised to build, a kingdom he was exiled from just as he laid the cornerstone.

“I wanted to be a craftsman,” he whispers to the empty room.

But then he looks at the belts hanging on the wall. He looks at the calendar, filled with seminars and classes. He realizes that he did not build a kingdom of gold. He built a kingdom of technique, of strategy.

He turns off the lights. The darkness is total now. It is familiar. It is his friend.

“I am still fighting,” he thinks. “I have never stopped.”

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

Abstract

This manuscript serves as a formal indictment against the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, specifically focusing on the cultural abomination known as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). Authored by Ignatius J. Reilly, a medievalist of some standing and a critic of the modern age’s descent into chaos, this report analyzes the aesthetic, theological, and economic failures of “Mixed Martial Arts.” Through a rigorous application of Boethian philosophy and a study of geometry, the report contrasts the noble art of boxing (”The Sweet Science”) with the barbaric sprawling of the Octagon. It provides a detailed physiognomic analysis of the organization’s figurehead, Mr. Dana White, exposing the artifice of his dentition and the chemical enhancement of his physique. Furthermore, it chronicles the intellectual vacancy of practitioners such as Bryce Mitchell and Colby Covington, and exposes the feudal economic structure that reduces human beings to “independent contractors” in a serfdom of blood. The report concludes that the UFC is a primary symptom of the West’s decline, a farce enacted by mongoloids for the amusement of a depraved populace, and that its existence poses a direct threat to the pyloric health of any person of taste and decency.

I. Prolegomena: The Valve, The Tablet, and The Void

1.1 The Context of the Complaint

I am currently residing in the back bedroom of my mother’s house on Constantinople Street, attempting to bring order to the chaos of my notes, a cheese dip I consumed in a moment of existential dread lingering tragically on the corner of one page. My pyloric valve is currently in a state of violent rebellion, snapping shut with the ferocity of a steel trap every time I contemplate the subject of this report. It is a burden I must bear. The Muse of History demands this chronicle, and though my constitution is delicate, my spirit is fortified by the knowledge that I am the lone voice of reason in a wilderness of imbeciles.

The request for this report came to me—a request to analyze the “UFC.” I initially recoiled. Why should I, a man whose mind is occupied with the consolation of philosophy and the geometry of the early medieval period, descend into the muck of modern bloodsport? But then, I realized: is this not the perfect microcosm of the society I loathe? Is this not the very vortex of the “progress” that has stripped man of his soul and replaced it with a subscription to a third-tier streaming service?

I have taken up my Big Chief tablet and my no. 2 pencil. I shall endeavor to write this without vomiting, though the subject matter makes no promises.

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1.2 The Rota Fortunae and the Modern Arena

As a medievalist, I subscribe to the concept of the Rota Fortunae, or Wheel of Fortune.1 The blind goddess Fortuna spins us all. At the top, kings; at the bottom, beggars. The modern age, however, has broken the wheel. It has decided that the beggars—the spiritual beggars, the men of low character and high volume—should remain at the top in perpetuity, provided they can punch another man in the face with sufficient force.

The UFC is the institutionalization of this broken wheel. It is a celebration of the downward spiral. In a proper society, combat is ritualized, contained, and subservient to a higher code of chivalry.2 In the UFC, combat is a commercial for energy drinks and online gambling. It is the rota spinning out of control, flinging sweat and blood into the faces of a cheering, mindless mob.

II. The Geometry of Grace: A Lament for the Sweet Science

2.1 The Verticality of Man vs. The Horizontality of the Beast

To understand the grotesque nature of the UFC, one must first understand the sublime nature of its predecessor: Boxing. I am not a fan of violence per se—my delicate nerves could hardly withstand a physical altercation—but I appreciate form. Boxing is the Sweet Science because it respects the vertical axis.

Man is the only animal that walks upright with dignity.3 In boxing, if a man falls, the action stops. He has lost his station. He is given ten seconds to rise, to reassert his humanity, to stand once more between the earth and the heavens. It is a theological statement: “I am fallen, but I shall rise.”

Mixed Martial Arts destroys this theology. In the UFC, when a man falls, his opponent is encouraged to pounce upon him like a wild dog devouring a carcass. They roll about on the canvas, limbs entwined in a display of “grappling” that is aesthetically indistinguishable from a frantic, violent coupling in a mud pit.

The degenerate commentators on the wireless refer to this ground combat as “underpants snuggling.” While phrased crudely, the observation is accurate in its diagnosis of the indignity involved. There is no grace in the mount. There is no geometry in the guard. It is a chaotic tangle of sweaty flesh, a rejection of the upright posture that separates us from the quadrupeds. When I watch—through fingers splayed over my eyes to protect my sensibilities—two grown men hugging each other’s thighs while gasping for air, I wonder: Is this what our ancestors crawled out of the primordial soup to achieve? To return to the mud in spandex shorts?

2.2 The Architecture of Incarceration: The Octagon

Consider the arena. Boxing takes place in a “ring”—a misnomer, yes, as it is a square. But the square is a shape of stability. It represents the four elements, the four seasons, the four cardinal virtues (Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance).4 It is open. The ropes define the space but do not imprison the spirit.

The UFC takes place in an “Octagon.” An eight-sided monstrosity. And how is this octagon constructed? Is it bounded by velvet ropes? No. It is enclosed by a cage. A chain-link fence.

The symbolism is blatant. The cage is the architecture of the penal system. It is the architecture of the zoo. By placing the fighters in a cage, the promoters are explicitly stating: “These are not men; these are dangerous animals.” They are effectively incarcerated for the duration of the bout.

I have often felt that the modern world is a prison of the mind, but the UFC makes it literal. They lock these poor, deluded souls in a cage and tell them that freedom can be found by concussion. It is a lie. The only thing found in that cage is the degradation of the human image.

2.3 The “Evolution” Fallacy

Apologists for this barbarism claim that MMA is the “evolution” of combat. They sneer at boxing as “limited” or “unrealistic.” This is the classic error of the modern mind, which confuses “complexity” with “quality” and “lack of rules” with “freedom.”

A sonnet is strictly limited. A fugue is strictly limited. It is within these limits that art emerges. By removing the limits—by allowing kicks to the head, elbows to the face, and chokes that cut off the blood supply to the brain—the UFC has not “evolved” combat; it has devolved it. It has returned to the chaotic brawling of the dark ages, but without the excuse of a barbarian invasion.

My reading, when mother allows me the peace and quiet to do it, suggests that the “average viewing” public finds grappling “boring AF.” For once, the mob and I agree, though for different reasons. They find it boring because they crave the instant gratification of a knockout. I find it boring because it is geometrically offensive. It lacks the clean lines of a jab or the arc of a hook. It is a mess. It is the visual equivalent of a finger painting done in excrement.

III. The Physiognomy of the Impresario: Dana White

3.1 The Veneer of the Soul

At the center of this web of violence sits a spider, and that spider is Mr. Dana White. To look upon Mr. White is to look upon the face of modern avarice.⁵ But let us begin with the most jarring feature: the teeth.

Mr. White’s teeth are not of this world. They are veneers—porcelain shields cemented over the natural bone—that shine with a terrifying, artificial luminosity.5 In his earlier years, the ill-bred cretins who chronicle this sport indicate that his teeth were likely human, flawed, perhaps stained by the consumption of processed foods, as fits his station. But now? They are a monolithic white wall.

Why does a man acquire such teeth? It is a desperate attempt to mask the foulness that spews forth from the orifice. Mr. White’s vocabulary is a sewer of profanity. He speaks the language of the gutter. No amount of expensive ceramic can disguise the fact that he lacks the rhetoric of a gentleman. He cannot veneer his personality. He cannot veneer his soul.

The contrast is jarring. The face is red, vascular, often contorted in rage—a sign of a choleric humor imbalance.6 The teeth are white, static, perfect. It is the smile of a shark that has just visited a cosmetic dentist. It is “The Great Gatsby” meeting “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

3.2 The Chemical Golem

Mr. White has undergone a “body transformation.” Photographic evidence from the turn of the century depicts him as “obese” and looking like a “blimp”. Now, at the age of 56, he is “shredded.” He claims this is due to a “10X Health System” and the advice of a “human biologist” who told him he had 10.4 years to live.

Let us be frank. This is alchemy. Most likely it is the result of TRT (Testosterone Replacement Therapy) and perhaps other elixirs that are forbidden to the common man. Mr. White, if my eyes are to be believed, is pumping his veins full of synthetic vitality. He is trying to cheat the Rota Fortunae. He refuses to accept the natural decline of the body, the softening that comes with wisdom. Instead, he hardens himself.

He looks like a thumb that has been inflated with a bicycle pump. His head has expanded—a known side effect of HGH 7—until it threatens to eclipse his neck entirely. He is a “superhuman” only in the sense that he has abandoned the human condition in favor of becoming a biological experiment.

And for what? To stand between two men in their underwear and stare them down? To scream at journalists? There are no steroids that can make him literate. He can lift heavy weights, but he cannot lift the level of discourse. He is a meathead with a bank account, the most dangerous kind of dunce.

3.3 The Puppet on the Strings of Endeavor

Despite his posturing as the alpha male, the King of the Cage, Mr. White is a servant. Academics highlight his relationship with Ari Emanuel, the CEO of Endeavor. Emanuel is the true lord of this feudal manor; White is merely the bailiff.

When Mr. White was caught on video slapping his wife on New Year’s Eve—a despicable act that violates every canon of decency—Mr. Emanuel was silent. Why? Because White is “indispensable.” He is the “glue” that holds the operation together. He generates revenue.

This reveals the hollow nature of his authority. He is allowed to be a tyrant only because he is a profitable tyrant. He is a “fake frontman.” He acts the part of the rebel, the maverick who kept the sport going during COVID, but in reality, he is a corporate shill. He is a puppet who has been given a very long leash and a very high dose of testosterone. He dances for the shareholders of TKO Group Holdings, and his dance is a clumsy, violent shuffle.

IV. A Bestiary of Bashers

The roster of the UFC is a damning indictment of the American educational system. These are not warrior-poets; they are warrior-idiots.

4.1 Bryce Mitchell: The Peasant of the Flat Earth

Let us examine Mr. Bryce Mitchell. Here is a man who believes the Earth is flat. In the 21st century...

I, Ignatius J. Reilly, am a man of the past. I revere the medieval. But even the medieval scholars, observing the curvature of the horizon and the shadow of the earth on the moon, knew the planet was a sphere.7 Mr. Mitchell has managed to regress beyond the Middle Ages into a prehistoric darkness of the mind.

He argues that “gravity ain’t real” and that objects fall because of “density.” “That’s why hot air balloons float,” he says. This is the logic of a child, or a very confused duck. He denies the fundamental geometry of the universe. If he cannot understand gravity, how can he understand the gravity of his own situation?

But his ignorance is not merely physical; it is moral. Mr. Mitchell has stated that Adolf Hitler was a “good guy.” He claims to have done his “own research.” One shudders to imagine what this research entailed—likely hours of watching flickering YouTube videos in a darkened room while wearing only his camouflage shorts.

He fears that “demons” are sending women to tempt him.8 This is a level of sexual repression and paranoia that I find almost relatable, were it not for the fact that he expresses it by punching people. He plans to homeschool his son to prevent him from becoming a “communist” or “gay.”

Bryce Mitchell is the ultimate product of a society that has abandoned the trivium and quadrivium. He is a man with strong muscles and a weak mind, a dangerous combination. He is a serf who has been convinced that his ignorance is a form of rebellion. At least his proclivity for groin related power tool accidents likely precludes him from procreating.

4.2 Colby Covington: The Mummers’ Farce

Then we have Mr. Colby Covington. If Mitchell is the village idiot, Covington is the court jester who has forgotten that his jokes aren’t funny.

Mr. Covington wears a “Make America Great Again” hat and spews bile. He called Brazilians “filthy animals.” He attacks the families of his opponents. He is a caricature of a villain.

It is commonly known among the plebeians that it is all an act. He was about to be fired for being “boring,” so he invented this persona to save his job. He is “fake.” He is a “heel” in the wrestling sense.

This is the “idiot nature” of the modern fighter. They do not fight for honor; they fight for “clout.” They debase themselves, becoming cartoons of hatred, because that is what the market demands. Covington is a hollow man. He has no self; he has only a “brand.” He is a mirror reflecting the ugliness of the crowd back at them.

He admits he is playing a character. This makes the UFC no better than a soap opera for sadists. It is a farce. If the hatred is manufactured, then the violence is meaningless. It is just two men hurting each other because a script told them to.

V. The Serfdom of the Octagon: The Economics of Blood

5.1 The 16 Percent Scandal

If the aesthetics of the UFC are offensive, its economics are criminal. The UFC operates on a feudal model.9 The fighters are the serfs, working the land (the canvas) for the benefit of the lords (Endeavor).

The semi-literate hacks who chronicle this descent into barbarism say this: UFC fighters receive approximately 16% to 20% of the revenue. In the NFL and NBA—leagues which, despite their own flaws, at least possess strong unions—the athletes receive near 50%.10

Where does the rest of the money go? It goes to Mr. White’s veneers. It goes to Mr. Emanuel’s yacht. It goes to paying down the debt of the corporate overlords. The fighters, the men and women who actually bleed, are left with crumbs.

5.2 The “Independent Contractor” Scam

The UFC classifies its fighters as “independent contractors.” This is a legal fiction designed to strip them of their rights. They have no health insurance (unless they are injured in the fight itself, and even then, it is a battle). They have no pension. They have no job security.

Consider the case of Charles Johnson, a fighter who won a bout and a bonus, yet had to borrow money from his manager just to feed his family. This is not a professional sport; it is a poverty trap.

The entry-level pay is often $10,000 to $12,000 to show. A man trains for months, pays his coaches, pays his taxes, and steps into a cage to risk brain damage for a sum that wouldn’t cover the cost of a decent medieval manuscript. And if he loses? His pay is cut in half. He is penalized for failure in a way that no CEO ever is.

5.3 The Lawsuits and the Settlement

The fighters have tried to revolt. The Le v. Zuffa lawsuit exposed the UFC’s monopsony power. They bought up rivals to kill competition. They locked fighters into coercive contracts.

The UFC recently agreed to pay $375 million to settle these claims. Mr. White will likely spin this as a victory, or a nuisance fee. But it is an admission of guilt. It is blood money.

Fighters speak of “kidney failure” from weight cuts, of “permanent damage,” of “severe depression.” They are selling their lives by the hour.11 And for what? For the “opportunity” to be famous? Fame is a fleeting vapor. Brain damage is forever.

The UFC treats its fighters like human punching bags. They are disposable. When they are used up, when their chins can no longer take the impact, they are discarded. There is no “old fighters’ home.” There is only the long, dark slide into oblivion, accompanied by the ringing in their ears.

VI. The Amphitheater of Imbeciles

If the fighters are the exploited serfs and Mr. White is the venal bailiff, what, then, of the audience? Who are these creatures who finance this abomination? They are the “confederacy of dunces” writ large.

6.1 The “Just Bleed” Guy: An Archetype of Degeneracy

The patron saint of this mob is a figure known in the annals of internet history as the “Just Bleed” guy. At UFC 15, a man named James Ladner painted his chest with the words “JUST BLEED” and screamed into a camera while wrenching his body in a spasm of ecstasy. He was, the hostile inbreds who enjoy this so-called sport voluntarily tell us, an aficionado of cockfighting and dog fighting who organized unsanctioned brawls on his property.12

This is the quintessential UFC fan. He does not care for technique. He does not care for the “art” in martial arts. He wants blood. He wants to see the human form broken. He is a sensation-seeker, a man whose soul is so deadened by the modern world that only the sight of arterial spray can make him feel alive.

The demographics confirm this. The fanbase is dominated by “Gen Z” males who cite “action-packed” violence as their primary motivator. They have the attention span of a gnat. They find grappling “boring” because it requires patience to understand. They are the mob of Rome, thumbs pointed down, demanding death because they are too bored to demand justice.13

6.2 The Xenophobic Cacophony

When the circus travels, the mob becomes even more grotesque. In Brazil, a country that has produced some of the sport’s greatest technicians, the audience behaves like a pack of rabid hyenas. They chant “Uh Vai Morrer” (You’re Going to Die) at foreign fighters. When their own champions lose—as Glover Teixeira did—they do not offer a polite golf clap. They do not stay to pay respects. They vacate the arena, leaving a legend to retire in silence.

Worse, they hurl debris. They threw drinks at Brandon Moreno, a man whose only crime was winning a contest. This is not fandom; this is a riot with a cover charge. It is a display of such profound disrespect that it makes one yearn for the orderly conduct of a Visigoth horde.

6.3 The Sensory Assault of the Medium

And how is this violence presented to us? Through a medium that is a crime against both ear and eye.

The commentary team is a trio of barkers who scream over the violence as if they are witnessing the apocalypse. Mr. Joe Rogan, a man whose head has expanded in direct proportion to his ego, shrieks like a banshee at every punch. He does not analyze; he reacts. He is a hype man for brain trauma.

But the true horror is the commercialization. The broadcast is a relentless assault of advertisements. Even as a man is lying unconscious on the canvas, the announcer Mr. Jon Anik is contractually obligated to read an ad for a movie or a corn snack. They cut away from retirement speeches to show wide shots of the audience so they can squeeze in one more “ad read.”

The canvas itself is a billboard. It is plastered with logos for “Crypto.com“ and “Prime Hydration”—a beverage that is nothing more than expensive sugar water for children. They have even renamed the corners of the Octagon the “Prime Hydration Recovery Zones.” It is vulgar. It is the commodification of space itself. Two men are trying to kill each other, and we are forced to think about cryptocurrency and electrolytes.

6.4 The Gambling Addiction

Finally, we must address the vice that underpins the entire enterprise: Gambling. The broadcast is saturated with odds from DraftKings. The screen is cluttered with betting lines. They are not selling a sport; they are selling an addiction.

My retinas, though assaulted by the glare of the electronic hearth, have nonetheless confirmed that federal regulators are flagging fights for “abnormal betting patterns.” Of course they are! When you build a sport on the backs of underpaid, desperate men and market it to a nation of gambling addicts, corruption is inevitable.14 They are encouraging the mob to bet their rent money on the outcome of a concussion. It is a tax on stupidity, collected by the UFC and its corporate partners.

VII. The Final Indictment: A Farce of the Highest Order

7.1 The Collapse of Taste and Decency

The Ultimate Fighting Championship is the perfect sport for a dying civilization.15 It combines the cruelty of the gladiatorial games with the greed of modern capitalism and the stupidity of the internet age.

It lacks the grace of boxing. It lacks the geometry of sport. It is a chaotic, bloody mess, like my room when mother makes one of her ill-fated attempts to clean it.

It is led by a man who is a caricature of masculinity, a steroid-fueled tyrant with fake teeth and a foul mouth. It is populated by fighters who believe the earth is flat and that rudeness is a virtue. It is built on the backs of underpaid, exploited workers who are sacrificing their health for the amusement of a mob that drinks energy drinks and screams for blood.

7.2 The Call for a Return to Order

I, Ignatius J. Reilly, call for the abolition of this farce. Or, at the very least, a return to the principles of theology and geometry.

Let the fighters wear suits of armor. Let them debate Boethius before they strike. Let the arena be a circle, perfect and divine. Let the pay be fair, distributed by a benevolent king rather than a corporate shark.

But this will not happen. The wheel spins downward. The dunces have confederated, and they are watching the UFC.

I must end this report now. My valve is throbbing. I feel a gas attack coming on. I must retreat to my bed and comfort myself with the thought that, eventually, history will judge us all, and Mr. Dana White will have to answer for his crimes against taste.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

The Universal Wrestling Federation1 was a company born of spite and baptized in failure. It was a promotion of ghosts, a revenge-fueled venture built on the phantom capital of stars like Inoki and Choshu, men advertised on posters who would never come.

By all laws of commerce and logic, it should have been over before it began, destined to be absorbed back into the New Japan machine that had birthed it.

It was, in short, a dead thing, breathing but not whole.

And it was only in this corporate void, in this absolute, bankrupt nothingness, that a true idea could be born. For art does not flourish in comfort; it is born in the desperate, psychic weather of the schism and the storm.

The idea belonged to Satoru Sayama.2 The man who had been the god-child Tiger Mask, man who knew the truth—that his religion, pro wrestling, was a little better than a lie. He was the best anyone had seen, the most creative liar his world had ever known.

He hated it.

To understand the art he created, the new religion, you must understand the prophet. Sayama was a “once-in-50-years wrestler” the most graceful, athletic, beautiful performer the sport had ever seen. He was a genius who had created the “four-dimensional fighting style”, a man who captivated audiences in Mexico, England, and New York.

He was delivered to the ring right out of a comic book, a living cartoon, a human disguised as something more. But he was an artist in crisis. He was haunted by the lie he told in his own beautiful art.

As an 18-year-old in the New Japan dojo, he conceived of his third path, his manifesto that “true martial arts begins with striking, moves to grappling, throwing, and ends with submitting.”

He had, in short, invented mixed martial arts.

To give birth to this new, real art, he first had to murder his old one. He had to destroy the Tiger Mask the world loved. He had to show them that a real fight was not always a thing of beauty. He had to show them... ugliness.

“Please forget pro-wrestling,” he begged fans and media. “What we are trying to do is something different from pro-wrestling.”

He would create a new, terrible truth with the UWF as his laboratory. His was a vision, clear and true and he was its prophet and evangelist. It was only a matter of convincing others to come along with him for the ride.

And, so, on December 5, 1984, he proposed a new covenant, a “No-Fall Deathmatch” that whittled away at the rules and tropes of the religion he’d come to hate. The terms were an act of symbolic violence against the old, “phony” world. There would be no three-count pinfall, that comforting, theatrical lie. There would be only the undeniable, physical finality of the Knockout or the “Give Up”. The kubi-shime—the neck choke, the forbidden act—was now legal.

This wasn’t pro wrestling as anyone had previously experienced it. This was a journey into the unknown.

His opponent, the man who would argue the other side in a battle of wit and skill, was Yoshiaki Fujiwara. A representative of the old world. Not the one on television, all flash and sizzle. The real old world. The wrestling of Karl Gotch3, the grappling of Kano, the spirit of the ancients.

Of course, Fujiwara would not refuse him.

If Sayama was the Artist, Fujiwara was the Artisan. He was the shokunin, the craft itself. He was not a star; he was the spiritual pillar of the dojo. He was the man who, as a boy, rode a horse naked in the snow, believing that “the only way to be strong was to suffer.” He was the man who, while others practiced their fancy moves, was filling notebooks with technical drawings of Gotch’s joint locks. He was the guard dog, the enforcer who met dojo-stormers in real, crippling fights to protect the promotion’s honor.

He was the “Real One.” He was the past. He was the truth. He was the unyielding granite upon which Sayama had to carve his new, brutal vision. His weapon was grappling, the ancient, inescapable reality.

Watch the Match

In the end, there was only the ring, nestled in the Korakuen Hall, spiritual home of the religion that was pro wrestling.4 3,250 people5 came to see the thing they loved destroyed and rebuilt. They were the afición. They were the ones who knew. True believers, in search of the gospel. They came to see the new thing. They came to be moved.

The bell rang.

The Tiger was the new art personified; he used kicks, seeking distance, and despite his intentions, he was still beautiful. Fujiwara was the old art; he wanted the clinch, the master of close-quarters combat, Japan’s most dangerous man on the mat.

Tiger threw a kick and missed. Fujiwara pounced, gobbling him up. He took the arm and Tiger was desperate. He made the ropes. The afición saw this and understood. On the mat, Fujiwara was the master.

Then, ten minutes in, Fujiwara took his back. He put his arm under the chin. He squeezed and didn’t stop. This, the most visceral and brutal of all holds was now legal. Tiger lay flat. Fujiwara squeezed with the intention of a man ending a thing. The Tiger was drowning on dry land. He began to cough, foaming at the mouth—an awful sound, the wet, rasping gasp of a man being strangled. Awa o fuita, they called it. It seemed over.

But he was not finished.

He escaped, hurt and drained of stamina but alive. He could not quite stand straight, but his spirit was undaunted. Fujiwara smirked. The old art had seemingly won.

But the fight was not over.

Tiger threw a fast kick to the body, a good kick sound and true. Not a graceful, arcing crescent to the head, but a lightning-fast, brutal roundhouse to the solar plexus. Fujiwara was hurt. The Tiger followed it with a kick right to the head, toe-to-skull.

The match changed.

What followed was not a contest. It was a sermon. Tiger kicked him in the head. The crowd was quiet. Tiger kicked the downed man. He kicked him again. And again. Kneedrops followed when Fujiwara was on the mat, the kind that make you cringe a little bit.

He kicked the head of the man on the ground, his mentor and friend, 55 times. Savage. Brutal. Ugly. He used the ropes for his knees. He was a smashing machine, the old man’s head the wall. It looked wrong. It was not beautiful. There would be no manga dramatizing this. It was ugly.

But it was true.

Fujiwara, on his last good leg, stood. He was a brave man. He threw a big headbutt. It was his last good thing, but it hurt him too. He knocked himself loopy. Tiger kicked him again. Of course he did. What else could he do?

The novelist Baku Yumemakura6, an original super-fan, wrote that the crowd, usually hard of heart, didn’t know what to think:

---Stop it.

---This is horrible.

---This is cruel.

---Is this okay?

---Is it okay to kick this much?

Even such whispers filled the air.

Is it okay to go this far?

I thought, my body stiff, as I continued to watch the match.

It is okay, Sayama seemed to answer, and still, he continued to kick Fujiwara.

Fujiwara was a heap in the corner. He could not get up. The referee counted. The old man did not move.

It was over.

This was the masterpiece. This was the invention of the future.

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A Japanese reporter, shaken, wrote that the match “lacked a certain sawayakasa.” A freshness, or clean feeling. He wrote this as a criticism. He, like everyone, was still trapped in the old aesthetic. He had come to see the prophet of the ichigeki hissatsu—the “one-hit, certain-kill.” He expected the clean, beautiful, cinematic KO.

He did not get it.

He got something far more honest. Sayama, the genius, was showing the world the very thing he felt they needed to understand: a real fight isn’t always pretty. A real win is not always a thing of beauty. Sometimes, winning is this. It is a grinding, vicious 55-kick execution. It is mercilessly kicking the opponent until they can no longer physically continue.

It is sadism.

To show the world his vision, Satoru Sayama had to first destroy theirs. He had to take Tiger Mask, the most graceful, athletic, beautiful wrestler the sport had ever seen, and he had to make him ugly. He had to perform the art of ugliness. The lack of sawayakasa was not a flaw in the masterpiece. It was the masterpiece.

There were no moonsaults. There were no piledrivers. There were just the kicks and the holds. It was the match that proved a fight, stripped of the old, comfortable lies, could create something new, terrible, and compelling.

On this day, the two men made something new from the ancient texts. The prophet had delivered his sermon of 55 kicks.

And it was true.

This was not a finished product. They were building this new religion in real-time, inventing new tropes and conventions as they went. Sure, this match deviated from the traditional rules of pro-wrestling. But would it always need to? Even Sayama wasn’t sure.

“The 3-count pin is one of the great things about wrestling, you know? A 3-count from a big move like a German Suplex or a Dragon Suplex... we have to allow those,” he told Weekly Pro Wrestling. “But things like a rolling cradle or a reverse rollup...I think we’ll get rid of those. Besides, when you’re battling for a submission, sometimes you have to go to your back to apply the hold. If the ref starts counting a pin in that situation, it’s just ridiculous, isn’t it?”

There was plenty of time, it seemed, to figure it all out.7

That night, it was enough to merely survive. Sayama, wearing a mask of exhaustion, stood over the broken form of his friend. He had taken his first step. It was the end of the beginning. Or perhaps the beginning of the end. This was the match that, in its profound and terrible ugliness, served as the bridge from the fiction of the old pro wrestling to the reality of a new kind of work.

The shoot-style had been born.

After the match, the audience was so shaken that Sayama decided to do an interview explaining to the wrestling audience (and Sci-Fi author Haruka Takachiho)8 exactly what he was up to.

Is Pankration Possible in the Modern Era?

Satoru Sayama & Haruka Takachiho

A “hard-line” New Year’s discussion about the future of “Shooting” and the brutal realism of the December 5th Super Tiger vs. Fujiwara match.

Takachiho: To be honest, that day was the first time I’d ever seen a UWF match live. I had some idea of what to expect from magazines, so I was fine—I “got” it. But my friend, who was a complete first-timer, started to get really confused partway through.

Sayama: In what way?

Takachiho: Well, if you think of pro-wrestling as entertainment that’s supposed to get you really excited, that match with Fujiwara was just too... raw. After it was over, it left us feeling kind of... bleak.

Sayama: The old way of thinking is, “Of course you have to entertain the fans, that’s what a pro does.” I just don’t want to have those kinds of matches.

Takachiho: So you’re saying you only want people who already understand and accept that to come and watch.

Sayama: No, it’s just that the match happened to turn out that way. If I fight [Akira] Maeda or one of the other guys, it will be a completely different kind of fight. It became what it was because my opponent was Fujiwara. That match isn’t the be-all and end-all.

Takachiho: So the specific qualities of the fighters created that specific result.

Sayama: That’s right. It’s a sport. You can’t calculate what the spectators will think about it.

Takachiho: I’m all for changing the name to “Shooting.” The second you say “pro-wrestling,” it makes people think of the American style that’s been around since the days of Rikidozan.

Sayama: That way of thinking was born from the fact that we wrestlers have the confidence to have a real fight at any time, and we have the pride of knowing “We are the strongest.”

Takachiho: When did you start thinking that fighting wasn’t about putting on a show, but about showing a real clash of human strength?

Sayama: It started when I first joined New Japan Pro-Wrestling, sparring with Fujiwara and being coached by Karl Gotch. I just became possessed by this idea that “Wrestling is incredible. It’s not a show.”

Takachiho: But there are other wrestlers who don’t get possessed by that feeling, right?

Sayama: Exactly. In my case, I just got lucky that I happened to run into Gotch and Fujiwara. That’s the only reason. Frankly, I feel sorry for anyone who became a wrestler without ever experiencing how compelling a real fight can be.

Takachiho: When did you first start thinking about your current style, the one based heavily on kicks?

Sayama: Probably around the time I started training at a kickboxing gym. In New Japan, I learned submissions, and they are incredibly strong. Any real combat sport is ultimately going to end with a joint lock or a choke. But what comes before that? The standing game.

In a real fight, you don’t just quietly square up and start grappling. Before that, there’s the “world of striking”—punches and kicks. I realized that unless you master the world of striking, you can’t possibly have a complete fighting system (sogo kakutogi).

Takachiho: But even in ancient times, “punching and kicking” was deemed too dangerous. To bring that back and try to do it every day on a regular pro-wrestling tour... is that even sustainable? Can the human body take that?

Sayama: No, it can’t. That’s why we have to be protected by the rules. If we just squared off and started really hitting each other, someone would end up dead.

Takachiho: It means you can’t fight every three or four days like a normal tour.

Sayama: You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But it’s not just striking. In our world, we have grappling. Once you tie up, you enter a phase where you can’t strike. It’s not like kickboxing, where you’re just trading blows the entire time, so the damage doesn’t accumulate in the same way.

Takachiho: So, does that mean you might be better off with 3-counts?

Sayama: That’s irrelevant. Look, about that December 5th match with Fujiwara... a lot of people are misunderstanding it, so I’m just going to say it: That was just pro-wrestling. A certain magazine that knows nothing about martial arts wrote it up like it was some kind of street fight, but all it was... was a pro-wrestling match with the 3-count rule removed.

Takachiho: So you’re saying that even if you had standard pro-wrestling rules, the match would have been identical?

Sayama: One hundred percent identical. It was, simply, pro-wrestling.

Takachiho: So you’re definitely going to keep using the name “pro-wrestling”?

Sayama: Of course. It’s pro-wrestling. “Shooting Pro-Wrestling,” I guess.

Takachiho: What felt so fresh about watching the UWF was that when the ref said “Break,” you actually broke. You weren’t needlessly throwing each other out of the ring or forcing spots at the ropes. I thought, “Wow, this is a real match.” But that’s exactly why I wondered if you should even be using the name “pro-wrestling” for it.

Sayama: We have wrestlers who say, “I don’t even want to call this pro-wrestling anymore.” But we can’t give in to that. We have to make all the fans across the country understand that what we are doing is pro-wrestling. We have to teach them that “wrestling” includes striking and kicking.

Takachiho: But the only thing that worries me is... we’ve seen “Pro-Karate” and “Pro-Judo” pop up and disappear without ever succeeding. Even kickboxing is basically dead right now. As much as I hope this new thing you’ve created will grow, I’m also just as worried it will end up failing just like they did.

Sayama: The truth is, there’s almost nobody else who can do “Shooting.” The few people who can are all gathered here in the UWF. So this really is a battle to see who’s number one. Everyone tells us, “You can’t succeed without famous wrestlers.” But as “shooters”—if you’ll call us that—our attitude is, “What’s the point of bringing in some famous guy who can’t even do this style?”

Takachiho: The scary part is that as soon as you get any traction, the “businessmen” will show up and try to take over.

Sayama: But even if the money-men show up, we just won’t listen to them. [Laughs]

Takachiho: In the old days, wrestlers were so naive. If you told them to “look right,” they’d just stare right forever.

Sayama: That’s true. But we all lived through that, so those days are over. At least, as long as we’re around. Fundamentally, at its very root, what we are doing is a sport. It is not a show (kōgyō).9 The UWF has forgotten all about the conventional pro-wrestling of Inoki-san and Baba-san.

Takachiho: I know you have a difficult road ahead, but please, do whatever it takes to make “Shooting” survive.

Sayama: Absolutely. For us, this is just the beginning.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

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BY JONATHAN FOYE

Back in 2005, a friend I met at a pro wrestling show put me on to a website full of free-to-download matches from Japan. Ditch Wrestling was a gateway to bouts I had never heard of, but that were raved about online. It was here I first encountered 1990s All Japan Pro Wrestling, and a new product featuring many of the same wrestlers, called Pro Wrestling NOAH.

I had briefly read about the year 2000 roster split when it happened. The split and the events leading up to it were covered in the Apter magazine I read in high school, so seeing these matches now, after a few years, was a godsend. A gateway to professional wrestling done in a very different way. At first, I didn’t really get what I was seeing. I needed to relearn how to watch wrestling, a kind of second naivete.

To fast forward a few years, I eventually got into puroresu in a big way after my wife and I traveled to Japan for the first time. The show we saw live, New Japan’s Destruction in Kobe, was a regional event on a post-G1 tour, the kind of show that’s so often relegated. Yet being part of the live experience and soaking up the atmosphere was a tantalising thing. Something that invited a little deeper digging.

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Some years later, and going deeper still, the world was hit by COVID-19. While many people struggled with lockdowns and uncertainty, for me, the time at home was a godsend. As a new father, I had time at home with my wife and son, and with the hours to fill, I doubled down on my hobbies. After years of reading about professional wrestling, I figured it was finally time I wrote about it. I had been surprised that there was no English-language book about the split, so I decided to research it. What I found was fragmentary, parts of a story filled in with assumptions. Reaching out to Fumi Saito, a journalist with decades of experience covering professional wrestling, I learned quickly there were several ‘stories underneath the story’ of Japanese pro wrestling, and that many things we took for granted about the industry in the West were mistaken.

I told the story of the year 2000 roster split from All Japan’s perspective in my first book, Ganbaru. Something I quickly discovered was a fascinating struggle on the other side. A company that started out of Mitsuharu Misawa’s desire to pursue his own concept of what pro wrestling was or could be. An idea of freedom and faith, where wrestlers could be free to wrestle how they wanted, if they took responsibility for their actions. There were elements of the hero’s journey here, with the central characters leaving their home to pursue adventure. There were unexpected events, including the company becoming the top promotion in Japan for a time, defying gravity when all others were hit hard by the JMMA boom. There was also a darker side to NOAH’s story, with the company financed by loan sharks and eventually embroiled in a business arrangement with the Yakuza. There was tragedy and inexplicable loss as some of those who first boarded the ark passed away.

As someone who can never really get away from my other writing interest — religion and theology —I’m drawn to an interesting parallel between NOAH the company and the story it takes its name from. While I’m sure Misawa took the name to invoke the image of getting on a boat to safety and new beginnings, in the same way the Genesis flood narrative reinterprets the older Epic of Gilgamesh and subverts it, Misawa’s promotion took the old puroresu formula, popular since the days of Rikidozan, and reinterpreted it as something new. The matches built slowly and were hard-hitting, and the product took its booking approach from what worked in the old days, combining it with cutting-edge production values and new, innovative moves. Then there were the ungodly bumps the wrestlers added...

Freedom and Faith is my third book, my first published through an actual publisher. I’m hoping people who read it will experience Pro Wrestling NOAH’s story for the first time, either again as that second naivete experience, or genuinely from the beginning, because the book somehow draws in readers outside the wrestling bubble. In keeping with an old trick used by career hacks like Kanye West, I have collaborated with people far talented than myself to elevate the work, including the artist Mushkilah and my editor Jonathan Snowden. I have also had the opportunity to interview some of the wrestlers and crew responsible for NOAH over the years, and, again, through their stories, I have experienced the old story anew.

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Jonathan Foye is the Editor of Insights Magazine for the Uniting Church in NSW and the ACT. He holds a PhD in Communications and tutors part-time at the University of New South Wales. Jonathan lives in the Blue Mountains with his wife, Sarah, their son James, and their Labrador, Walter.

Before the UFC, before Mixed Martial Arts was a global phenomenon, a holy war for the soul of combat was fought in the professional wrestling rings of Japan. This is the story of the young heretics who rejected the theatrical world of their forefathers to create something terrifyingly real—and how that rebellion forever changed the landscape of martial arts in Japan.

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There was a foul, electric stink hanging over Tokyo as 1989 dawned, a city already choking on its own success. It wasn’t the usual smog from the endless rivers of traffic or the fish-gut perfume of Tsukiji at dawn. This was something else. The smell of fear. The smell of a dying empire.

A holy war was brewing, one fought not with guns but with shins and submissions, in the sweat-soaked rings of professional wrestling.

The sickness was coming from the center of the world, from the gilded throne of New Japan Pro-Wrestling. NJPW. A corporate monolith built on the granite chin of one man, Antonio Inoki, and his brutal gospel of “Strong Style.” For years, if not the only game in town, certainly the biggest one, a roaring spectacle of theatrical violence that held the nation in a trance on Friday nights. But the trance was breaking. The king was old, his kingdom was decadent, and there were wolves at the gate. Hungry wolves with a new and terrifying religion that took his mantra further than he’d ever imagined, creating an even more stripped-down version of wrestling called “shoot style” that they presented in the competing UWF promotion.1

You couldn’t understand the panic without understanding the ghosts. The whole enterprise was built on a mass grave from 1984, a “cursed year” when the company had torn itself apart in a fit of greed and ego. First, a stone-cold young killer named Akira Maeda took his ball and left the nest, joining the legendary Tiger Mask in forming a splinter cell called the Universal Wrestling Federation—the first UWF—a place for true believers who felt Inoki’s vision had gone soft. Then, another warlord, Riki Choshu, staged a mass exodus of his own, gutting the roster and leaving the company for dead in a ditch as he departed for the loyal opposition, Giant Baba’s All Japan.

Into that abattoir walked the children. A generation of “Young Lions,” teenagers with shaved heads and lively eyes2 that contrasted greatly with the dead ones all around them, young men who were told to save the kingdom their fathers had nearly destroyed. Keiji Mutoh, Masahiro Chono, Shinya Hashimoto—the so-called “Three Musketeers of Fighting Spirit”—and with them, a prodigy from Aomori, a 15-year-old kid named Masakatsu Funaki. They were forged in that crisis, baptized in the company’s blood. They were supposed to be the saviors, the future.

But forcing a child to save you is a dangerous business. It teaches them that the kingdom is theirs to burn.

And so, five years later, the ghosts were back. They’d returned to the fold, unbowed, then left again in a flurry of violence, Maeda launching the group to renewed reknown with a shoot kick that shook the Japanese wrestling world. The UWF was reborn, this time led by Maeda and his top lieutenant, Nobuhiko Takada, who had peeled off five of NJPW’s best men the year before. They preached a new sermon: a hyper-realistic, strike-and-submission style that made NJPW’s Strong Style look like a kabuki show. To the purists, it had the clean, sophisticated aroma of truth, a “professional taste” (pro no aji) that exposed NJPW’s product as cheap wine.3

The king’s response was not to adapt, but to descend into madness. Inoki, the living god, began appearing in the opening matches, a spot usually reserved for rookies. He stalked the ring not as a legend, but as a demon, an oni from some forgotten folklore, his face a mask of pure malice. At times he filled the sacred space with a palpable, murderous aura—a sakki, they called it, a killing intent so thick you could taste it on your tongue.4 After brutalizing young up-and-comers, he stood at ringside, a bamboo shinai in his hand, glaring at the ring as if to say, This is my church. And in my church, the only sacrament is pain.

It was a terrifying spectacle, but it was also a confession. He could no longer claim to be the most real. So he would become the most violent. It was the desperate howl of a cornered beast, trying to scare away the future with the sheer force of his own legend.

The paranoia was everywhere. April was contract renewal season, and the whispers grew to a roar. Roster cuts. Pay cuts. Who would be next to jump? The whole rotten structure was trembling, and all eyes were on the savior generation.

All eyes were on Funaki.

Part II: A Diarrhetic Vision in the Liverpool Rain

The revolution didn’t start in a smoke-filled dojo or a corporate boardroom. It started in a damp hotel room in Liverpool, England, with a 19-year-old kid shitting his guts out.

Funaki was on his kaigai ensei, the traditional overseas excursion designed to turn a young Japanese wrestler into a man.5 NJPW sent him to the drizzly heart of the British Isles to learn the ropes, to get seasoned, to come back stronger and more loyal than ever. It was a catastrophic miscalculation. By ripping him out of the rigid, day-to-day hierarchy of the Noge dojo, they gave him the one thing a revolutionary needs: the time and solitude to think his own thoughts.

“In Japan, you’re always caught up in the day-to-day, and there was never time to think deeply,” he confessed later. “But here, I’ve been able to quietly look at myself and really think.”

And what he thought about, constantly, was the UWF. He was alone, wrestling low-grade palookas in half-empty halls, his only connection to home a stack of Weekly Pro-Wrestling magazines. In those pages, he saw a different world. He saw photos of the UWF fighters—and their eyes were alive. They weren’t “just going through the motions” like the aging stars back in New Japan. They were fighting for something real. To the lonely kid in Liverpool, the UWF wasn’t just another promotion; it was “The Wilderness” (kōya), a raw, untamed frontier that promised a kind of savage purity he couldn’t find anywhere else.

The decision tore him apart. Not figuratively. Literally.

“For this entire past year, I have always, constantly been thinking about the UWF,” he said, his voice raw with the memory of it. “This last week, especially, I was so sick with worry that I couldn’t stop having diarrhea.6 The only other time in my life I’ve been this tormented was right before I joined pro wrestling against my mother’s wishes.”

This wasn’t some casual complaint. This was a vision. A physical manifestation of a spiritual crisis. His body was violently rejecting the poison of his old life, purging itself to make way for the new faith. The message was clear: stay, and you will rot from the inside out. Go, and you might live.

He saw the rot in New Japan clearly from his exile.

“I believe someone has to break down the walls of New Japan Pro-Wrestling as it is now,” he declared. “I think everything needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.”

He was the voice of a generation that had been forced to save a company, only to realize the company wasn’t worth saving. On the eve of his 20th birthday, alone in a foreign land, he made his choice. He would not just leave New Japan; he would renounce its entire philosophy. He made a sacred vow, a pledge of allegiance to the new reality.

“Things like my salary... that doesn’t matter to me,” he said. “It’s not a question of money. It’s about wanting to do the matches I want to do.”

And then, the final, irreversible declaration: “I will absolutely not take off my shooting shoes.”

The shooting shoes. The lace-up boots that were the symbol of the UWF’s shoot style. It was a baptismal vow. He was shedding his old skin, renouncing his old gods. He was choosing his “second life.” The kid they sent to England to become a loyal company man had become a heretic. The system had created its own destroyer.

Part III: The Desperate Howl of the Cornered Beast

Back in Tokyo, the NJPW machine sputtered and groaned, trying to crush a rebellion it couldn’t comprehend. Their tactics were not those of a cunning empire, but of a cornered, wounded animal: clumsy, brutal, and ultimately pathetic. They were operating on an old-world frequency of loyalty and obligation, while the kids were broadcasting a new signal of individual ideals.

The first victim of their desperation was Minoru Suzuki, another young lion with the same fever in his eyes. Suzuki, less than a year since his debut, was one of the novices thrust into an unexpected singles match with the legendary New Japan founder. Showing no fear, he took a page from his senior’s book and slapped the old man right in the face.7 But, even in that moment, which should have meant so much, he felt nothing.

“It’s been nine months since my debut in June of last year,” he told Weekly Pro Wrestling Magazine. “Thinking back, my debut match against Takayuki Iizuka was my best bout. Since then, I’ve just been wrestling in the opening matches, and honestly, I feel like I’m just going through the motions. I’ve had the chance to wrestle Antonio Inoki-san, which was a huge learning experience, but when I look at myself now, I feel like I’m in a rut. I’m just doing the same things over and over.

“For a while now, I’ve felt that what I want to do with pro wrestling and what I’m actually doing are different. I’ve been thinking about the UWF and their style, and I realized, ‘This is it. This is what I want to do.’ The way they carry themselves, their entire stance… it’s what I’ve been looking for.”

Suzuki handed in his resignation, his mind set on following Funaki into the wilderness. The company accepted it, but not before Vice President Seiji Sakaguchi, a hulking remnant of the old guard, shoved a piece of paper in his face. A non-compete clause, a two-month gag order designed to kill his momentum. When Suzuki hesitated, Sakaguchi deployed the last weapon of a bankrupt authority: emotional blackmail. “What? You can’t even write something like this?” he bellowed. “Don’t you feel any gratitude towards New Japan?”

Gratitude. The currency of the old world. Suzuki, shamed and cornered, signed the letter. It was a petty, vicious move, but the UWF’s response was swift and cold. Their lawyers fired back a letter citing Article 17 of NJPW’s own player contract. New Japan had missed the 30-day window to present new terms, thereby voiding their “first-priority negotiation right” and rendering the non-compete clause invalid.

The old guard was grappling with guilt; the new guard was navigating contract law.

It was a slaughter.

But with Funaki, New Japan went for the throat. When money and persuasion failed, NJPW summoned what they called their “final trump card” (saigo no kirifuda). They flew his mother down from the family home in Aomori to Tokyo. They sat her down and explained the situation, hoping to leverage the sacred bond of family to break the rebellious son.

In the rigid, honor-bound world of Japanese business, this was not just an escalation; it was a declaration of total war. It was a deeply dishonorable act, a sign of absolute desperation. And it backfired spectacularly.

The news reached Funaki in Liverpool. The company he had given his youth to, the men he had called his seniors, had dragged his mother into their dirty little war. The response was not a negotiation. It was pure, righteous fury.

“I can’t forgive them for using my mother...” he raged. In that moment, New Japan didn’t just lose a wrestler. They created an enemy for life. They had confirmed every dark thought he had about them, validating his rebellion, giving a face to the rot he had only previously felt.

And then, just as the chaos reached its peak, a tremor shook the very foundations of the earth.

Yoshiaki Fujiwara.

The “terrorist.” Inoki’s grizzled, terrifying right-hand man, the master of submissions, the living, breathing embodiment of NJPW’s Strong Style. The rumor was that Fujiwara, the soul of the company, had not signed his new contract.

When a reporter called his home on April 1st, Fujiwara brushed it off. “Contract? Yeah, I signed. Which promotion? Shin-Nihon, of course”. But the denial was too quick, the date too suspicious. April Fool’s Day. And his name was conspicuously absent from the card for the upcoming Tokyo Dome show. The Funaki problem was a headache, a mutiny in the officer class. But the idea of Fujiwara leaving... that was the high priest renouncing his faith.8

It was a sign that the temple itself was rotten to the core and on the verge of collapsing on everyone inside.

Part IV: A Summit of Savages and the Price of Freedom

On April 6th, the prodigal son returned, not in glory but in chains. Funaki landed at Narita Airport and was immediately swarmed by four NJPW officials who bundled him into a black minibus and sped off toward the concrete canyons of Roppongi. A UWF executive was there, watching from a distance, a vulture waiting for the body to drop.

What followed was a 72-hour psychological siege, a “kyōsōkyoku“—a frenetic symphony of madness—conducted by Antonio Inoki himself. The first day was a grueling six-and-a-half-hour marathon in the President’s office. Inoki, the aging patriarch, preached his gospel, invoking the “spirit of Rikidozan,” the ghost-god of Japanese wrestling, trying to bind Funaki with the chains of history and duty.

Funaki, exhausted and jet-lagged, took it all in. “Today I just listened... my mind is a blank slate,” he mumbled to the jackals from the press afterward.

Day two was more of the same. Two and a half more hours of sermons from the mount. By day three, Funaki had heard enough. “Today, I told Inoki-san my feelings,” was all he would say. He was no longer listening. He was delivering his ultimatum.

The NJPW machine had failed. Their strong-arm tactics, their emotional blackmail, their appeals to a history that no longer mattered—it had all turned to ash. They were left with one final, humiliating option: to negotiate with the enemy.

On April 9th, at the NJPW dojo in Noge, the unthinkable happened. A “chōjō kaigi,” a summit meeting, was held. Not a term for business, but for world leaders, for warlords.9 On one side of the table sat Antonio Inoki, the king of the old world. On the other, Akira Maeda, the fiery leader of the UWF rebellion. And between them, the 20-year-old kid who had brought them both to this precipice.

It was not a negotiation. It was the formal surrender of a kingdom. By agreeing to meet Maeda as an equal, Inoki was legitimizing the UWF not as a splinter group, but as a sovereign power. He was admitting that the war was over, and he had lost.

The result, announced on April 10th, was a masterpiece of Japanese corporate face-saving. Funaki was granted an “enman taisha,” an “amicable departure.”10 A polite, clean, professional term for a bloody and brutal defeat. New Japan got to pretend they had graciously allowed their young star to follow his dreams. Funaki got his freedom. And everyone agreed to pretend that the last three months of threats, rage, and familial warfare had never happened. The price of freedom was a collective lie, and it was a price everyone was now willing to pay.

Part V: The First Taste of Blood in the Holy Land

April 14th, 1989. Korakuen Hall. The “Holy Land” of Japanese combat. The scene was charged with a strange mix of grief and savage anticipation. The show began in darkness. A single bell, tolling ten times into the silence. A salute to Kazuo Horiguchi, a UWF trainee who had died during a sparring session just days before. It was a grim, shocking reminder of what this was all about. The UWF sold realism, and that night, everyone involved was made brutally aware that realism had a body count. This wasn’t a show; it was a blood ritual.

Then the lights came up, and Akira Maeda stood in the center of the ring. He introduced the two new members of his tribe, the refugees from the NJPW war. First, Minoru Suzuki, a raw nerve of a kid who looked like he’d just been uncaged. “I came to the UWF because I want to be strong and I don’t want to lose to anyone!” he barked, his voice cracking with pure, uncut ambition. Then came Funaki, the prodigy, the revolutionary. He was more polished. “I came to the UWF for the development of the pro-wrestling world and for my own development,” he announced.

The UWF faithful, a cult of fanatics, roared their approval. They had their new saviors, the young blood every revolution requires.

Funaki watched the night’s card from the back of the arena, and when it was over, he delivered his first sermon as a member of the new church. It was pure heresy.

“To be honest, watching it made me tired,” he told the press, his words like daggers. “I don’t want to make the audience tired; I want them to have fun... I don’t think women and others can enjoy this.” He even questioned Maeda’s judgment in the main event. “My way of thinking is different from his.”

The kid hadn’t just jumped ship—he was planning a mutiny on the new one. He hadn’t come to join the UWF. He had come to conquer it.

The opening shots of this new war were fired in the ring. Suzuki’s debut was against Yoji Anjo, an original UWF disciple. It was a clash of styles, a collision of worlds: Suzuki’s NJPW-honed grappling against Anjo’s UWF kickboxing. Suzuki dominated on the mat, tying Anjo in knots. But the moment that shook the hall was when Suzuki, a supposed convert to the pure shoot style, launched himself across the ring with a corner dropkick—a move straight out of the traditional “pro-wrestling” playbook.

The crowd roared. It was an act of beautiful blasphemy. It was a declaration that the newcomers were not here to assimilate. They were here to create something new, something dangerous.

Anjo eventually won via submission, but it didn’t matter. Suzuki had lost the match but won the night. He was the “shigeki,” the “stimulant” that would force the old guard to evolve or die.

Then came the main attraction of the next big show, May 4th in Osaka. Funaki’s debut. And his opponent, in a stroke of genius booking, was not the UWF young ace Takada, but his own legendary mentor, the man who had just followed him into exile: Yoshiaki Fujiwara.

Funaki walked to the ring, not in the stoic, uniform black trunks of the UWF, but in the flashy green ones he had worn during his UK excursion. It was a flag of rebellion, a splash of vibrant color in a monochrome world.

He was his own man.

From the opening bell, he showed no deference, no respect for the grizzled master across the ring. He attacked Fujiwara with a ferocity that visibly flustered the legend. The match descended into chaos—a mistaken disqualification by the referee, a furious demand from both men to restart the fight.

In the end, the master caught the student. Fujiwara locked in a vicious kneebar, and Funaki tapped out. He had lost. But as he limped back to the locker room, the 23,000 stowaways11 at the Osaka Baseball Stadium knew what they had just seen. The student had met the master on equal terms. More than that, he was clearly on another level.

The torch had been passed, not with a handshake, but through sheer, unadulterated violence. A “terrifyingly scary young man” had arrived, and the Warring States Period had begun.

Although they would co-exist for several years, even provide some outstanding moments and memories, it was already clear that, whatever the existing UWF wrestlers were, Funaki and Suzuki were something different entirely. And that difference, that insatiable hunger for a purer reality, would prove to be both the Newborn UWF’s greatest asset and its ultimate undoing.

Part VI: Epilogue: The Road to Hybrid Wrestling

The fire that Funaki and Suzuki brought with them burned bright, but it burned fast. The “Warring States Period” they ushered in made the Newborn UWF the most exciting, dangerous, and talked-about promotion in Japan.12 But it was an unstable kingdom, built on the egos of its stars and the inflexible vision of purists. The same fierce individualism that fueled its rise guaranteed its fall. Akira Maeda, the ideological father, refused to compromise his vision of pure shoot-style, clashing with businessmen who wanted to co-promote with other, more theatrical federations to stay afloat. By December 1990, the money was gone, the dream was fractured, and the Newborn UWF collapsed under the weight of its own revolutionary fervor.

The tribe scattered. Maeda went on to form Fighting Network RINGS, a venture dedicated to pure shoot-fighting. Takada and the majority of the roster founded UWF International. And Funaki and Suzuki, still joined at the hip, followed their mentor, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, into a new promotion that bore his name: Pro Wrestling Fujiwara-Gumi.

For a moment, it seemed like a homecoming. But the snake was eating its own tail. The cycle of disillusionment began anew. Fujiwara, facing the same financial pressures that had killed the UWF, began sending his wrestlers to appear on shows for other promotions—SWS, W*ING, companies that represented the very “pro-wrestling” showmanship that Funaki and Suzuki had rebelled against in the first place. To the two young purists, it was the ultimate betrayal. They had not come this far, burned this many bridges, just to end up back where they started.

In December 1992, they walked out. Funaki and Suzuki, along with a few other true believers, including a terrifying American gaijin named Ken Shamrock, broke away for the last time. This time, they would not trust their vision to an older mentor.

This time, they would build the church themselves.

In 1993, they founded Pancrase. The name was a call back to the ancient Greek sport of Pankration, the original “total-fight.” Their philosophy was simple, radical, and absolute: “Hybrid Wrestling.” A fusion of every effective martial art—wrestling, judo, karate, sambo, boxing—with one crucial difference: no predetermined outcomes.

This was it. The final destination. The purest expression of the vision that had given a 19-year-old kid a case of nervous diarrhea in a cheap hotel room four years earlier.

Their first show, on September 21, 1993, was titled “Yes, We Are Hybrid Wrestlers.” It was not a question, but a declaration. The audience, expecting the long, dramatic battles of shoot-style, was shocked. The five matches on the card were over in a combined twelve minutes, ending in brutal, decisive knockouts and submissions.

It was violent, it was confusing, and it was undeniably real.

The savage journey was over. The dream Funaki had chased from the sterile dojos of New Japan, through the rainy streets of Liverpool, and across the fractured landscape of the UWF, had finally found its home. He had torn down the old world and, with his own two hands, built a new one. A world of pure combat, where the only script was survival.

He had found his wilderness.

And it was beautiful.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

In honor of Jonathan Foye’s new book Freedom and Faith: Pro Wrestling NOAH Beyond the Green Mat, I’ll be writing about some of my favorite moments in NOAH’s history.

When people think about Kenta Kobashi, they often imagine him at the height of his powers, the young bull with the impossibly graceful moonsault. Me? I’m drawn to him in times he looked more human—like this match, from a moment in history where it was unclear whether he’d ever regain his place in the industry.

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Let’s posit, for a moment, that almost every heroic comeback story, the kind we’re constantly sold before games across all sports, is a lie we agree to believe. It’s the third act of a movie where the grizzled quarterback with the bad knee throws the winning touchdown, or when the band you loved in high school reunites for one last perfect show, their voices somehow untouched by two decades of cigarettes and bad decisions. We buy into it because the alternative—that no one can truly abate the passage of time, that the knee can only survive so much, that the singer’s voice is shot—is an unsatisfying, realistic bummer.

Pro wrestling, an enterprise built on pre-determined artifice, should theoretically be the ultimate purveyor of the perfect comeback. The hero is supposed to win. It’s written in the code.

Which is why Kenta Kobashi’s return on February 17, 2002, remains such a fascinating cultural artifact. Here was a man who wasn’t just playing a hero; he was arguably the living embodiment of the puroresu ideal, an “Iron Man” forged in the fires of the greatest in-ring decade imaginable.

And then, he broke.

Not figuratively. Literally. For 395 days, his world wasn’t the roar of the crowd but the “cold, white ceiling” of a hospital room.1 His knees, once described as belonging to an 80-year-old, were reconstructed with so much hardware that calling him human felt like a stretch. He was a cyborg held together by willpower and surgical steel, a man whose intense rehabilitation literally changed the color of his hair. He was driven by something beyond mortal, refusing a fate that didn’t include wrestling. The regimented rehabilitation, the long stints in the hospital, the mornings when he simply didn’t want to get up. He did it anyway.

What drove him?

“The feeling that I had to get back in the ring one more time,” he said. “…It’d be a lie if I said it wasn’t hard.”

But feelings can’t help you when you enter the ring against the best in the world, competing against both younger opponents and the ghost of who you once were. The question before the match wasn’t just “What does he have left?” It was, “Is the Kenta Kobashi we remember even in there anymore?”

Wrestling’s Napster Moment

The industry itself was grappling with its own version of the heroic comeback myth—could wrestling resurrect itself through collaboration when the old certainties were crumbling? Pro wrestling was having its Napster moment, the status quo challenged by a new way of thinking. For years, the major promotions existed as walled gardens, profitable, self-contained universes that pretended the others didn’t exist. New Japan Pro Wrestling was the major label, NOAH was the hot new spin-off project.

But the market had changed, and the time-tested ways didn’t work as well as they used to. The rise of Pride and K-1—legitimate combat sports presented with Super Bowl-level pageantry—was the disruptive technology that made the old model feel quaint. The ecosystem was dying. Wrestling was dying.

Suddenly, it seemed evident to all—the walls had to come down.

Antonio Inoki attempted to create a dialogue with the new martial arts leagues, inserting pro wrestlers into organizations that already had the sport’s ethos in their DNA. To say success was mixed was an understatement. Ultimately, his creation and the product of his heart and mind, New Japan Pro Wrestling, decided a different kind of collaboration worked better for them.

The industry leader, New Japan found itself in absolute chaos when its biggest stars, Keiji Muto and Satoshi Kojima, abruptly defected to a nearly-dead All Japan. This was like Pearl Jam and Nirvana leaving Seattle in ‘92 to go start a new scene in Delaware. In a panic, New Japan did the unthinkable: it sought a stronger working relationship with NOAH, its ideological rival.

This wasn’t a cool crossover event for the fans. It was a desperate business decision, which is infinitely more interesting.

The result was Yuji Nagata—a New Japan loyalist to his core—suddenly appearing in a NOAH main event. The multiverse was collapsing. The age of the cross-over was upon us.

Analog Heart in a Digital World

This rapidly changing ideology, one constructed in the what might have otherwise been death pangs for the industry, set the stage for a tag team match that felt like a referendum on wrestling itself. On one side, you had the analog warmth of Kenta Kobashi and Mitsuharu Misawa.2 They were the vinyl record—the sound of 1990s All Japan, rich and powerful, even with the pops and scratches of age and injury. They represented a past that was becoming less commercially viable but remained the critical gold standard.

On the other side was the digital future: Jun Akiyama and Yuji Nagata. Akiyama was the reigning GHC Champion, the man tasked with leading NOAH in Kobashi’s absence.3 Nagata was the outsider, the guest feature on the album, creating a new, hybrid sound. They were cleaner, sharper, and maybe lacked the nostalgic “warmth,” but they were perfectly suited for this new, chaotic environment. Nagata had already been a Guinea pig in Inoki’s failed MMA experiments. Now he was more in his element.

The match asked a fundamental question, one wrestling battles with in every generation as stars fade and Big Bangs occur to put others in their place: In a world demanding newness and crossover appeal, was there still a place for the old gods?

The Unskippable Track That Ends Quietly

Before he even appeared on screen, fans were chanting his name. Budokan Hall4 had sold out quickly when his return had been announced. Those few tickets held back to be sold the day of the show went just as fast. Many who’d turned up to see the match were just as quickly turned away. The place was packed. If they weren’t hanging from the rafters, it was only because the law didn’t allow it.

“I always pictured myself walking down the ramp amidst the ‘Kobashi’ chants, telling myself I would definitely return,” he told Weekly Puroresu magazine. “I was so happy that it became a reality.”

The match, by all accounts, was an instant classic. It had that big match feel from the opening bell, that indiscernible, indescribable feeling that it just mattered more than most. It was Kobashi’s return, yes. But it was also a story about four masters of their craft, each attempting in his own way to either remind or convince fans that they were still King Shit.

For 27 minutes, it delivered everything a fan could want: Kobashi’s defiant spirit, Nagata’s smug-technician heel work, Misawa’s stoic strength and protective spirit, and Akiyama’s unsentimental, relentless attack on Kobashi’s surgically-repaired knees, an indication to fans he was willing to do whatever it took to assert himself as the industry’s top wrestler.

It was a stew that combined perfectly, its flavor evoking both childhood comfort food and unexpected spices from an unfamiliar world. At the center of it all, of course, was Kobashi. His strength, as always, was undeniable. Weighing 20 pounds less than he had before his departure, a concession to his ailing knees, he still looked like a powerful force, especially early in the match. It was later, however, that his true genius emerged. His selling made you feel right alongside him, a man telegraphing a universe of pain while refusing to submit to it.

And then came the ending. The part of the script where the hero typically overcomes the odds. But NOAH made a different, more artistically daring choice. They chose reality. After a furious closing sequence, Akiyama hit his finisher, the Wrist-Clutch Exploder, and pinned Kenta Kobashi. Clean.

The hero lost.

In a lesser promotion, this would be a catastrophic booking failure. But here, it was a stroke of genius. It was the logical finish. The most compelling lie is one that feels true, and the truth is that a man who hasn’t competed in over a year shouldn’t beat the reigning world champion in his prime.

“It’s not easy,” he said after the match. “It was tough and it was heavy. The result in the ring is everything. It’s frustrating, but this is reality.”

The loss validated Akiyama’s title reign and respected the intelligence of the audience.5 It was the pro wrestling equivalent of the shocking, unceremonious ending of a 1970s neo-noir film—it’s not what you wanted, but it’s something you knew in your heart was right.

The match was, according to Weekly Puroresu editor Masayuki Sato6, a triumph not just for Kobashi and NOAH, but for the very concept of pro wrestling itself, embattled but far from dead:

Right now, it is said to be an era where it’s difficult to feel pride in pro wrestling. Indeed, pro wrestling is under external pressure in various ways. But as long as there is a man like Kenta Kobashi, there is no reason for fans to lose confidence in wrestling. His fight, filled with an endless love for the sport, heals a pro wrestling wounded by outside forces and gives courage to the fans.

Here, I want to write about the influence Kobashi’s return had on NOAH. His partner, Mitsuharu Misawa, and his opponent, Jun Akiyama, clearly had a chemical reaction. Akiyama, after Kobashi’s absence, had led NOAH from the front. But there were surely times when Akiyama couldn’t just be Akiyama. To energize the promotion, he had to make sacrifices, focusing his energy on creating themes for tours and developing younger talent. But the moment Akiyama can truly be himself is when he is facing none other than Kobashi. It is Kobashi who ignites Akiyama’s cool heart.

It was a statement that this wasn’t just a story—it was a sport. In its own way, it blurred the lines between the two as much as Inoki ever had.

The Start of a New Chapter

The fans weren’t asked to buy into another heroic comeback fantasy. They were witnessing something even more ephemeral, something truly glorious—a man whose authenticity transcended victory or defeat.

The comeback, in theory, was a bust. Except it wasn’t. Because as Akiyama and Nagata stood tall, the 16,500 fans in the Budokan began to chant. Not for the winners, but for the loser.

“Ko-ba-shi! Ko-ba-shi!”

They weren’t cheering for the result; they were cheering for the man. They saw the effort, they saw the heart, and they affirmed their belief in him, win or lose.

The immediate aftermath was cruelly ironic. Kobashi re-injured his knee in the match and was told he’d need another year off. Being a superhuman, he was back in five months. But it would be more than a year before he competed once again for singles gold.

It turned out the loss and the subsequent injury weren’t the end of the story. It was the prologue. It was the quiet, acoustic B-side that set up the explosive, chart-topping A-side to come. Fans, one Weekly Puroresu writer said, were with Kobashi because of how he responded to adversity, not because he was invincible, unbeatable:

The story of Kenta Kobashi has always been a story of climbing back up. We, the fans, have gone wild for Kobashi as he fought his way up, cheered him on, and in the end, were always moved. That’s why we believe he will overcome this harsh reality.

This painful, imperfect return was the narrative foundation for his 735-day GHC Championship reign, an epic run that would define NOAH’s golden era and go down as one of the greatest in the history of the business. He had to lose. He had to prove he was breakable one last time before he could become the “absolute champion”. He had to fail to give his eventual success meaning. When asked why he endured all of it—the surgeries, the pain, the heartbreaking loss—Kobashi’s answer was the simplest, and therefore the most profound, explanation possible.

“I just love pro wrestling.”7

Here was the truth that made most other comeback stories feel like hollow theater. The crowd’s chant wasn’t for mythic invincibility—they were witnessing gaman. Kobashi was enduring the unendurable with quiet dignity. What drove him through 395 days of hospital ceilings and learning to walk again wasn’t the promise of inevitable victory.

It was the love of the craft itself.

It was fighting spirit.

This was ganbaru—the cultural imperative to persist despite failure.

Kobashi’s humility in defeat revealed a more authentic heroism than any scripted triumph could ever provide. The story we agreed to believe became unnecessary when we were presented with a narrative conceit even more rare than a good lie—something real.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

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I discovered the broader world of professional wrestling at the same time I found the internet. I’m not really sure how that came to be. Perhaps, if nothing else, it was because the early web was one of the first places you could unapologetically pursue interests that would have made you look like an impossible weirdo if voiced aloud in polite society.

You searched for wrestling on the internet because you could, without fear of ridicule or rejection. Your friends might not understand the depth of your new obsession. But, somewhere online, some people would. In those early days, that was like found family, a new world of our own making, a world that didn’t require pretending to be normal.

We weren’t normal. We were wrestling fans.

I had become intrigued by ECW in college, stumbling home late to find mesmerizing images of Sabu crashing through tables, of Shane Douglas all but breaking the fourth wall, of Dean Malenko and Eddie Guerrero doing their best version of Brisco/Funk match that used to tour the country. I wanted to know more—but in those days books about wrestling were few and far between. And so, like many of my generation, I took my first delicate steps into the world of Usenet and an early version of what we now rightly despise as the “Internet Wrestling Community.”

I can only imagine that this is what crack feels like.

Soon, that relatively normal interest was morphing into something else. Suddenly, packages were arriving from all over the world, VHS tapes on SLP mode packed with six or eight hours of wrestling. Some of it was familiar, nostalgia already creeping into my life despite being barely more than 20. But others? They came from lands only imagined, narrated in a tongue I didn’t understand. It took some getting used to. But the action? That was universal.

And nobody did action like All Japan Pro Wrestling.

Of all the wrestling I fell in love with in those early days, nothing hit the spot quite like the mid-1990s heyday of the Four Pillars. Misawa, Kawada, Kobashi, even the awkward but excellent Taue—nothing in my experience had come close to their sports-oriented excellence, wrestling that looked and felt like real athletics. Nothing about it insulted your intelligence. There were no evil villains sneaking weapons to their compatriots while the referee was otherwise indisposed. There were no strikes missing by miles, no embarrassing foot stomps to cover up punches with no real impact.

There were just blows. Real ones. Hard ones. With suplexes to match.

Anyone could enjoy this wrestling. Its technical excellence spoke for itself. But it rewarded those who paid attention, as previous bouts foreshadowed what would come in ways I’d never experienced in my youth, watching Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes. These wrestlers learned over time, adjusting strategies and techniques in response to their opponents. This was a first—wrestling for the pseudo-intellectual, not the mere meathead.

It was wrestling that allowed you to look down on other enthusiasts, wrestling for the smart fan. As a recovering egoist, it was perfect for me.

The communities that allowed me to discover this bold new world are gone now. Like most everything that came before, they’ve been swallowed by social media. For better or worse, the gatekeepers and know-it-all assholes who took young fans by the hand and guided them through this weird hobby are gone, replaced by podcasters and influencers who not-so-secretly barely know anything themselves. It’s the blind leading the blind out there.

That’s part of the reason we formed Hybrid Shoot, to create a place where old heads and people willing to put in the work could help provide the context new fans so desperately need. The books we build here are extensions of the work people in the community have been doing for years, only, as befitting our topic, on literary steroids.

I recall sitting in a law school class, making lists of great wrestlers, with the All Japan quartet always near the top. But the greatest, most dramatic story All Japan ever told wasn’t one that played out in the ring. It was the one that happened when the cameras went off, when loyalty was tested and an empire split in two. That exodus, led by the stoic Mitsuharu Misawa, created Pro Wrestling NOAH in 2000. It was the ultimate sequel to the King’s Road era—a story of freedom, faith, and the tragic consequences that followed.

Chronicling that saga is a monumental task, and that’s why I was so pleased to work with Jonathan Foye. With Ganbaru and The Muto Years, Foye has established himself as the promotion’s leading English-language chronicler. We’re proud to help him continue that journey with Freedom and Faith.

This isn’t a simple retelling of five-star matches. Freedom and Faith is the kind of deep, unflinching history that those old internet communities would have dissected for months. Jonathan Foye goes beyond the green mat, deep into the backroom deals that led to the exodus, the Yakuza scandal that nearly crippled the company, and the heartbreaking tragedy of Misawa’s death in the ring. It is an unauthorized account, but rich with research and firsthand interviews nevertheless, one that treats the subject with the seriousness it deserves—exploring not just the glory, but the controversy that defined NOAH’s incredible voyage.

Hybrid Shoot isn’t an imprint of a Big Five publisher. In fact, we have no institutional support at all. These are books by people who love combat sports for people who love combat sports. We are funding this book with your help. To be frank, we make more money selling them directly to you. No need to make Jeff Bezos or Messieurs Barnes and Noble any richer. Instead, why not help fund independent artists and writers, people devoted to preserving the history of the niche and the weird?

We’d love it if you were part of the movement. Support our Indiegogo campaign today.

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Hybrid Shoot is an independent publishing company founded on a deep passion for combat sports and a commitment to preserving its history with intellectual honesty. By focusing on niche and sometimes weird subjects within wrestling and MMA, Hybrid Shoot aims to produce definitive works that respect the intelligence of dedicated fans. This model allows Hybrid Shoot to tackle ambitious, historically significant projects that larger publishers might overlook.

I’m supposed to be part of the loyal opposition. A card-carrying Dana White hater, a proponent for better fighter pay, a consistent critic of watered-down fight cards that can feel about as exciting as scrolling through your spam folder.

As the founder of the UFC Haters Hating Club for Hate, no one knows better than I that it’s against the unofficial rules of the organization to be excited about anything the Ultimate Fighting Championship is up to. Is Jon Jones fighting? Meh. A 720-degree spinning knee knockout? Whatever.

But may the Lord and Fedor help me—I’m all for the UFC’s proposed invasion of Washington D.C.

The howls of protest are predictable: it’s a crass spectacle, a desecration of the People’s House. They’re missing the goddamn point. The White House has never been a sterile museum of high-minded ideals. It’s a living, breathing monument to the American spirit—and its history is soaked in more chaos, booze, and blood than any preliminary card. A cage fight on the South Lawn isn’t a betrayal of that history. It’s a homecoming

You’ve undoubtedly heard about this? Planned as part of the nation’s 250th Anniversary on July 4, 2026 (what’s the normal gift for this occasion? An annexation of Poland? I’ll need to brush up on my history), it’s suddenly become a mega-event potentially on par with UFC 100 or a Conor McGregor spectacle. It’s a celebration of both America and the UFC’s ascension as a “big time sport”, an extravaganza guaranteed to generate millions of dollars in earned media coverage and become part of the national conversation in a way most sporting events struggle to manage. That’s because the UFC will build its iconic Octagon right there on the South Lawn, usually home to more stately activities, such as the annual Easter Egg Roll and the arrival of foreign dignitaries.

“My vision for this thing is we have this big arch, as you can see, with the lighting grid,” White told Fox News. “Because what I want is the White House in the back. And then when you shoot, when the fight goes around to the other side, you’ll see the Washington Monument in the background.”

I’m sure over at The MMA Draw, Kid Nate1 and his brigade of rhetorical warriors are explaining that this is the influence of Ari Emanuel and the UFC’s proximity to a political power is part of a grand plan to take over the world—or at least the latest escalation in a scheme to sell its shows to the highest bidder.

I’m equally as sure that personal politics are the not-so-secret source of much of the persistent pushback and negativity surrounding this event in many MMA circles.

But even adamant opponents of both the Donald Trump administration and the UFC have to admit the truth when it’s this indisputable. Sometimes the other side has the winner of an idea, whether it’s Social Security or mixing the martial arts. And a glow up like this is almost too extreme to believe. You can still think that the fighters who populate the card deserve a bigger cut of the pie, while acknowledging that it’s pretty impressive to shine beneath a national spotlight of this size.

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When I first started covering the UFC, it was a sport that hosted fights in places like Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, inside the ballroom of a riverside casino that Hurricane Katrina swept away. To be featured prominently at the People’s House, in front of the world’s most important personages, is, frankly, incredible. Even skeptics must concede that staging cage fights on the White House lawn represents an undeniable milestone—transforming a niche combat sport into a must-see American spectacle. To much of the world, it’s a sad dumbing down of the culture. For us? It’s a sign of mainstream acceptance that would have been rejected as a ridiculous pipe dream in the days when John McCain called the sport “human cockfighting” and tried to ban it around the country.

Personally, my life has taken me on a similarly unlikely path to many interesting places. One of them? The White House. I worked there for two years as part of the White House Communications Agency, a military-run force responsible for all the audio-visual needs of the President and his staff on the White House grounds (insiders call it “the 18 acres”). Working on-site, I’ve seen events of all shapes and sizes, from personal birthday parties to a Black Music celebration that saw the President sitting next to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, both men bobbing along as B.B. King ran through the hits. The largest public event, every year, was the White House Easter Egg Roll. We even took my son Sean when he was just a toddler, one perk of a job that was mostly thankless and exhausting.

Working at the White House, you learn its history. It’s there in front of you daily, from the Indian Treaty Room in the old Eisenhower Building (where the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed to outlaw wars of aggression)to the East Room in the White House itself, home to everything from weddings and funerals to the signing of major legislation, historic treaties, dancing girls and, yes, martial arts demonstrations.

Teddy

By the turn of the 20th century, the American political animal had grown fat and soft, a creature of backroom deals and smoke-filled parlors. Then came Teddy Roosevelt, a high-powered refugee from some forgotten, more savage epoch.

This was a man forged in a crucible of childhood sickness, a wheezing, asthmatic boy whose father built him a private gym to beat back the specter of weakness. So he built himself into a monster of physical will, a lifelong devotee of the “strenuous life” who boxed and wrestled his way through Harvard and into the governor’s mansion, a primal force of nature who saw physical combat not as a hobby, but as the only honest expression of a man’s soul.

When he stormed the White House in 1901, he brought the whole damn circus of pain with him. Down in the basement of that great white tomb on Pennsylvania Avenue, while the gears of empire ground on overhead, the Bull Moose (as he was called) was building a temple of pain. He’d ripped out the floorboards and put down mats, turning the foundation of the Republic into his own personal Thunderdome.

Goddamn, to hear tell, these whey-faced diplomats would be stumbling out of a state luncheon, their heads full of tariff law and colonial maps, and Teddy would grab one—at one point the Swiss minister, for Christ’s sake—and dump him on his head just to demonstrate some godforsaken judo throw he’d learned from a Japanese master named Yamashita. The guests would applaud, a nervous tittering sound, as their host, the leader of the free world, stood there sweating and grinning, a vein pulsing in his forehead like a fat, purple worm.

Roosevelt craved the impact, the raw, ugly truth of a fist meeting flesh. He’d drag anyone down there—his wife, his cabinet, some poor bastard of a military assistant who made the terrifying error of landing a clean shot. That punch turned the President’s left eye into a useless orb of jelly, a permanent monument to a vigor so pure and savage it had to start eating itself. And the terrifying part? He didn’t even seem to mind. He just switched his focus to wrestling, a man blinded, both in life and by his own savage light.

In transforming the White House basement into his personal dojo, Roosevelt established a precedent—the People’s House as a stage for America’s most primal instincts, a legacy that makes cage fights on the South Lawn feel less like desecration and more like destiny.

Old Hickory

The heart of any complaint about the UFC’s White House adventure is all about propriety. There’s a level of discomfort with that kind of visceral violence, especially when conducted in such rarefied air (never mind, of course, the number of lives lost to decisions made on those very grounds, missiles launched, funds misappropriated, and sundry other cases of the most grotesque awfulness).

But the White House has never been completely clean. After all, they built the damn thing on a swamp, you know. A malarial hellhole on the Potomac, fit for little more than mosquitoes and miserable ambition. George Washington, that old land-grabber with wooden teeth, had a vision for a “President’s Palace,” a monument to the glorious new republic. What they got was a big, white house, a blank canvas for the savage soul of American politics.

And nobody, I mean nobody, splashed that canvas with more color than Andrew Jackson.

That’s right, Old Hickory himself. The hero of New Orleans, the scourge of the Creeks, the man who carried a bullet in his chest from a duel and another in his arm from a barroom brawl. He was a true American animal, a beast of the frontier unleashed on the powdered-wig sensibilities of Washington D.C.. And his inauguration on March 4, 1829, was a spectacle that would have made Caligula blush.

The city was crawling with Jackson’s people. Farmers, mechanics, laborers, a great unwashed mob that had swept their man into power—now they were here to claim their prize. They surged up Capitol Hill, a human tide breaking against the marble steps, to see their hero take the oath. He was one of them, a man who spoke their language, a man who hated the bankers and the crooked politicians as much as they did. After the swearing-in, the mob followed him down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, their White House, and all hell broke loose.

It was a scene of pure, unadulterated chaos. They poured into the mansion, thousands of them, muddy boots on the carpets, climbing on the furniture to get a better look at their champion. Barrels of orange punch were brought out, but the crowd was too thick, too wild. Glasses were smashed, liquor was spilled, and the whole affair devolved into a drunken, brawling mess. Women fainted, men fought, and the fine satin chairs were slashed by the boots of frontiersmen standing on them to get a glimpse of the President.

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Jackson himself was nearly crushed, pinned against a wall by the adoring mob, until his aides formed a human chain to get him out. They finally had to lure the crowd out onto the lawn by placing tubs of punch out there.2 It was a goddamn riot, a beautiful, terrifying spectacle of democracy in action.

The political establishment was horrified, of course. They saw the “reign of King Mob,” barbarians at the gates. But they missed the point. Jackson’s inauguration was a changing of the guard, a raw, and vital display of the power of the common man. It was a scene that echoes down to our own time, to the age of Trump, another populist hero who rode a wave of resentment against the elites to the White House. The same furious energy, the same “us against them” mentality, the same feeling that the people were finally taking back their country from the corrupt insiders.3

The White House has seen it all. It was burned to a blackened shell by the British in 1814, a fitting symbol of a young nation’s vulnerability.4 It was rebuilt, a testament to American resilience, with James Hoban, the original Irish architect, brought back to raise it from the ashes.5 It has been expanded and renovated by nearly every President, each one leaving his mark, from Jefferson’s low-lying wings to Truman’s gut-level renovation that saved the old house from collapsing in on itself.6

But the soul of the place, the savage, beating heart of the American experiment, was never more on display than on that wild March day in 1829. It was a reminder that this country was born in a storm, and a calm has never suited it. And in the center of it all, then as now, stands the White House, a gleaming white monument to our best and worst impulses, a place where the American dream and the American nightmare dance a frantic, eternal tango.

It will survive the UFC too.

So let them howl, the hand-wringers and the pearl-clutchers, the whole damn chorus of propriety police who see a cage fight on the South Lawn as the final, irrevocable sign of the apocalypse. Let them shriek about the desecration of hallowed ground.

They’re missing the point.7

The White House has never been a pristine temple of enlightened discourse. It’s a living, breathing monument to the savage, contradictory soul of America itself. To pretend it’s too pure for the visceral ugliness of UFC is to ignore the blood, sweat, and chaos that are baked into its very foundations.

An octagon on the lawn isn’t a betrayal of the White House’s history—it’s a perfect and long-overdue homecoming. Even loyal opposition must admit this contradiction, this mixture of high and low culture, feels perfectly American. It’s a raw, televised spectacle that reminds us the People’s House has always been there waiting, an ideal stage for the beautiful, grotesque pageantry of the American animal in its natural habitat.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.

With apologies to the great Conan Doyle.

Over the weekend, my good friend Lee Casebolt presented me with a most singular problem. And not just any old mystery, mind you, but the very best kind: a martial arts mystery. Many of you may know Mr. Casebolt from the various social media platforms, where he curates a veritable museum of esoterica related to the grappling arts. Obscure Judo competitions from the 1980s? A forgotten Sumo basho? He is, without a doubt, your man.

But I digress.

Mr. Casebolt, in his perpetual quest for pugilistic knowledge, was viewing a recording of the thirteenth Ultimate Fighting Championship, held in the year of our Lord 1997.

As one does.

In the course of his study, he discovered a peculiar anomaly. Guy Mezger, a standout from the notorious Lion’s Den and the eventual victor of the lightweight tournament that evening in Augusta, Georgia, entered the competition wearing two gloves. One on each hand.

As is the custom.

But when he returned for his final bout, a championship contest against a young upstart by the name of Tito Ortiz, Mr. Casebolt observed a curious alteration in his attire. Mezger, it appeared, was performing an impersonation of the late pop god Michael Jackson.

For those of you of a certain vintage, you will know what that means—the man was wearing but a single glove.

What had transpired? The commentary team made no mention of it, and while Art Jimmerson’s one-gloved escapade at the inaugural UFC had been the subject of endless commentary and ridicule, this particular incident had, for the most part, escaped the notice of the public.

So, why was Guy Mezger wearing just one glove (on his left hand, for those who are sticklers for detail)?

The question, once posed, was a burr in my mind. I had to know.1

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It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. And so, before venturing a hypothesis, I endeavoured to refamiliarise myself with the principal actors in this curious drama.

First, there was the matter of the victim—or, in this case, the man at the centre of our mystery, Guy Mezger. He was a man of impressive pedigree, a product of the infamous Lion’s Den, a veritable Spartan academy of combat led by the formidable Mr. Ken Shamrock. The Lion’s Den was known for producing fighters of a particular constitution: hard, relentless, and possessed of a ferocious will to win. They were, to a man, athletes of the highest calibre, and Mezger was no exception.

But there was more to Mezger than mere brute force. Like his teammate, Frank Shamrock, who stood in his corner that fateful night, he was a harbinger of a new era in combat sports. Mr. Mezger was not merely a wrestler, nor a striker, but a true mixed martial artist, a man who had mastered a multitude of disciplines. He possessed the striking acumen of a kickboxer, the grappling prowess of a catch wrestler, and the strategic mind of a chess master. To watch him in the ring was to see the future of fighting unfold before one’s very eyes. He was a man of science in a world of savages, a thinking man’s fighter. And ever so handsome, if we are being honest. One might even call him an Adonis of the arts, though he had wisely shorn his flowing locks, lest they be used against him by the less civilised denizens of the Octagon.

And then there was the other principal in our little drama: the challenger, Tito Ortiz. His was a different story altogether. Born not to privilege but to poverty, he had navigated a treacherous youth, the product of the hard streets of Huntington Beach, a world away from the disciplined dojos of the Lion’s Den.

For young Ortiz, salvation came not in a formal education, but on the wrestling mats of his high school gymnasium. There, he discovered an outlet for his prodigious physical gifts, a path out of the darkness that had threatened to consume him. He was a natural prodigy, possessed of a raw, untamed power and an indomitable spirit. He found his way into the world of no-holds-barred fighting through an association with the notorious brawler, Mr. David “Tank” Abbott, a man whose approach to combat was as subtle as a runaway locomotive.

Yet, for all his rough edges, there was no denying Ortiz’s talent. He was a wrestler of the first order, a man who could impose his will upon his opponents with a ferocity that was both terrifying and awe-inspiring. He was driven, ambitious, and possessed of a swagger bordering on arrogance. And, as fate would have it, he found himself in a training camp that was the sworn enemy of the Lion’s Den. The stage was set for a clash of titans, a battle not just of individuals, but of philosophies.

To fully appreciate this encounter, one must understand the precarious position of the Ultimate Fighting Championship at this juncture in its history. The organization was under siege, beset on all sides by politicians and cable companies who sought to extinguish its flame. It was decried as “human cockfighting,” a barbaric spectacle unfit for civilized society. The political winds were blowing cold, and the very survival of the sport hung in the balance.

And yet, for the men who stepped into the Octagon, it was the biggest game in town. It was a chance to prove their mettle, to test their skills against the best in the world. It was a trial by fire, a crucible in which warriors were forged. For all the controversy that swirled around it, the UFC remained the undisputed pinnacle of the fighting world.

To triumph there was to achieve fistic immortality.

And so we come to the fight itself, the final piece of our puzzle. The contest was a short, brutal affair, a testament to the unforgiving nature of the tournament format. Mr. Mezger, it must be remembered, had already fought his way through a formidable opponent to reach the final. It was in his first bout against judoka Christophe Leininger that the seeds of our mystery were sown.

In the heat of battle, a blow was struck, a bone was broken. Mr. Mezger, in the course of his first victory, had fractured his hand, banging it time and again against Leininger’s hard skull. A lesser man would have withdrawn from the competition.

But such was not the way of the Lion’s Den.2

“My hand was broken and swelled up in my glove,” Mr. Mezger told me when sought for comment on the matter. “I had to cut the glove off because it was cutting off my circulation. Gloves were optional back then.”

Think of it, my dear reader! To continue in a contest of such a brutal nature with a broken hand—it is a feat of almost superhuman fortitude. And yet, for Mr. Mezger, there was no other choice.

“I thought about pulling out,” he confessed, “but the whole team put a lot of time and effort into getting me ready and I didn’t want to let them down.”

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It was a most perilous beginning for the veteran, Mr. Mezger. The young Ortiz, a man of untamed aggression, met his advance not with finesse but with blunt force. When Mezger attempted a tackle, seeking to bring the contest to the mat where his superior grappling might hold sway, Ortiz simply overpowered him. From this entangled position, Ortiz delivered a series of punishing knees, one of which landed with such force as to open a grievous cut upon the back of Mezger's head. For a moment, it appeared the fight might be stopped, a brief flutter of Mezger's hand suggesting he might capitulate.3 But the stoppage came from the referee, not the fighter, and in that brief respite required to check the cut, the tide of the entire encounter was to turn.

And so, Mr. Mezger returned to action bloodied and with one hand still compromised, a wounded lion facing a hungry young challenger. The broken hand, despite his courage, presented a significant impediment, particularly when it came to the intricate art of submission grappling. A firm grip is essential for securing a submission hold, a task made all the more difficult with a fractured limb.

But Mr. Mezger was a man of ingenuity, a fighter who could adapt to the ever-shifting tides of combat. He found his opportunity, a fleeting moment in which his opponent left himself vulnerable. It was a guillotine choke, a hold that relies more on leverage and positioning than on raw gripping strength.

“It wasn’t like I was planning on using a guillotine in the first place,” he would later admit. “It was not like a go-to move for me.”

But in that moment, it was the only move that mattered. With his one good hand, he secured the hold, squeezing the life out of his opponent’s challenge. Ortiz, caught in the vice-like grip, had no choice but to submit.

And so, the mystery was solved. The case of the one-gloved fighter was not a matter of fashion or affectation, but of grim necessity. It was a testament to the indomitable will of a warrior, a man who would not be denied his moment of glory, even in the face of debilitating injury.

Mr. Mezger’s victory was a triumph of mind over matter, a victory for the thinking man’s fighter. But it was more than that. It was a single battle in a much larger war, a war that would come to define the early days of mixed martial arts. The feud between Tito Ortiz and the Lion’s Den was far from over. It was, in fact, just beginning. And it would become one of the great rivalries in the annals of the sport, a saga of blood, sweat, and tears that would captivate a generation of fight fans.

The game, as they say, was afoot.

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Jonathan Snowden is a long-time combat sports journalist. His books include Total MMA, Shooters and Shamrock: The World’s Most Dangerous Man. His work has appeared in USA Today, Bleacher Report, Fox Sports and The Ringer. Subscribe to this newsletter to keep up with his latest work.