Enson Inoue and Chuck Liddell reveal how Japan’s MMA culture—rooted in Pride FC’s 90,000-strong arenas and fighters like Wanderlei Silva—collapsed under Yakuza influence and corporate pullouts, though underground "gangster fights" now thrive. Inoue’s 21 Fukushima visits exposed radiation spikes (25,000 microsieverts in 1990) and Japan’s energy dilemma, while his 20-gram marijuana arrest sparked a 9,000-signature deportation protest. Both critique modern MMA’s rushed rules and dishonorable "works" matches, contrasting them with Brazil’s passionate, sportsmanlike fans and New Zealand’s stubborn resistance to the sport’s growth. Inoue’s legacy—from "Yamato Damashi" battles to radiation advocacy—underscores MMA’s clash between tradition and commercialization. [Automatically generated summary]
It's kind of fucked up because the videos of the tsunami was, you know, we've all known about tsunamis for, you know, hundreds of years, if not thousands of years.
People have been aware that that happens when the ocean goes out, that you got to get the fuck out of there because something's going on.
We've never really seen it on video.
We've never captured it the way it was captured in Fukushima.
I mean, I hate to talk to Americans, but man, sometimes I go to my brother's gym and you got to tell guys to do a couple more rounds.
But in the Japanese guys, you got to tell them, stop.
Or they'll keep going.
You teach them a technique, they'll keep doing it.
I mean, I'll do a seminar in Japan, teach them a technique, I'll forget about it and start talking to someone and look back and they're still repeating the technique over and over.
But when I go and do something in the States, it's like...
For folks who don't know, when a guy in a fight gets a broken nose, they always tell you don't blow your nose because there's some sort of pressure buildup.
Yeah, he fought Tony Halma, and then he fought that big black kid, who had a lot of promise, but after that Randy fight, we never really saw him again.
That kid was pretty good.
But you did one thing in that fight that we hadn't seen up until that point.
It was like in the Royce Alger fight, it was like we were just starting to get accustomed to what techniques were really effective in MMA.
And we'd seen Hoist, Gracie, of course, armbar a few guys.
But we hadn't seen him take on one of these big-name wrestlers that was just starting to enter into the game.
So when you caught him with that armbar, that was a big deal.
That was like, oh, okay.
You can't just be a wrestler.
You got to know what the fuck is going on when a guy throws his legs up like that.
We were just talking in the car on the way here about, I remember going down, there was a Cobra Challenge in Temecula and having to muscle the guy to get my guys paid $100 and $100.
I was like, we didn't make any money on the show.
I'm looking at him like...
I don't care.
We don't have a kid at the gate and the guy's getting $200.
When you guys were competing back then, when you came in and UFC 18, 13?
I started working at 12, so you were 17. So when you guys were back there, and when you look back at that now, where the UFC is now, it's so fucking crazy.
It's like, did you ever think that it could ever get this big?
Well, basically, what people don't understand is my...
Well, I went into my fights with a little deeper thing.
I was thinking of growing as a person.
And I didn't really worry that much about the win-losses because in my types of fights, I never, ever was pressured on winning and losing because my fights were always fun.
Well, it was basically for me, I wanted to learn something.
MMA, for me, was a stepping stone in my life as a man to grow.
I mean, when are you going to ever be put in a willingly walk into an area that you possibly might die that day?
You know, I mean, the stress and the fears and the anxieties you've got to overcome in that moment is not something you're going to ever gain in a day-to-day, daily lifetime routine.
I mean, we're lucky as fighters to grow spiritually and grow in our heart as far as facing that fear every day.
Basically, when I got it, I didn't know how big the word was.
And from being, okay, that's Kukanji, to, whoa, they named me that, to now I'm actually trying to live my life to be as close as I can to that way of life, which is hard.
Yeah, at first I didn't know what it meant, and then when I found out what it meant, I was really questioning myself, like, do I? You know, I mean, I show it in the ring, I mean, it's not just about being in the ring, and I have my fears in the ring, too.
I mean, if you watch the Igor fight, the first, I faked a tackle, I threw a right, and from there I was going to stand toe-to-toe with him, but all of a sudden I found myself clinching.
You know, so I got my fears, and everyone doesn't see that.
If you look back at the video, you'll see that.
I had fear took over me for a moment.
And I beat that battle.
I released and I threw down.
But, you know, I fight that fear too.
You know, so as far as, you know, people say Yamato Damashi, the undying spirit, you know, never taps and never gives up.
There's so many times in the fight, if you really look at it, that I'm fighting that myself, and I'm standing there thinking, am I justified to carry this, man?
Yeah, I mean, for me, when I say Yamato Damacy, the summer spirit, to have an experience to grow your spirit to that level, every time you have an opportunity to do it, it's not exactly, I can't tell you that, okay, Doing this is going to be a Yamatha experience because it depends on the person.
You know, like a phone driver, if you tell him to get in the car and take a hairpin turn at 200 miles per hour, it wouldn't be an experience for him to build his heart because he does it.
But if I were to do that, hell yeah, I'd be freaking shit in my pants, you know?
So for me, I mean, when I go into the ring, you know, it's like, it's the situation that happens.
So it was perfect for me, for Igor's fight, because if I went and stood in and just threw down, and just threw down from the beginning, it'd be like, cool.
I conquered that anxiety and the fear, but it wasn't really a Yamato Damish experience because it wouldn't have been if I didn't clinch.
So what happened, what made me happy was I actually had that fear take over me, you know.
So for me, I did some growing in my heart because I clinched and I actually hesitated in thinking of trying to take them down instead of getting top position.
Do you think that when you look at that attitude towards fighting and you look at how that attitude towards fighting was sort of a part of that era where there wasn't that much money to be made and there wasn't that much on the line to win, do you think that those days are gone?
It's not exactly the best thing for, you know, if you want to find sponsors and televise it and get people attracted to it that don't understand the sport, you know, it's...
I think at the top level, I'm all for letting it go a little longer.
I complain a little bit about guys.
I mean, I understand stopping real quick at the lower levels, but at the higher levels, these guys, that's their career, their life.
They've been there.
You've got to give them a chance to pull the way out of it because we've seen fights with Big Nog almost holding on and coming back and winning the fight.
Yeah, we got a real problem with referees that have itchy trigger fingers, and referees that get involved too much, and, like, they're telling guys to fight, and, like, when they are fighting...
They just make their presence known too much.
There's too much intervention by them.
They need to learn how to step back.
Too many fights get called where you have to look at the instant replay.
Like the controversy this weekend about hitting the back of the head.
And I don't know if the guy was complaining what happened, but he hit him once with an elbow to the ear, clean elbow, and then punched to the side of the head.
And, you know, he's saying, watch the back of the head, watch the back of the head.
And I don't know if the dude on the bottom was saying something, but it was bad.
It was a terrible, terrible call.
That's happened in Brazil a couple of times.
That happened with the Eric Silva fight when Eric Silva got the same thing.
Mario Yamasaki called it a no contest from shots to the back of the head.
When you see someone looking for a way out and looking for an excuse, like, listen, man, there's a fucking camera there, and there's a camera there, and there's a camera there.
Everyone can see where those shots land.
Like, I don't know what you're...
You can't just pretend that it hit you in the back of the head.
I don't know what happened there, but refereeing, bad refereeing sucks, but bad judging is even more prevalent than bad refereeing.
And they don't really understand, you know, when a guy's working for something, or like, I mean, you know, you guys, oh, you got to count that attempted submission.
Well, hey, throwing your legs up into a triangle like this is not an attempted submission.
You know, it's got to be closer than that if you want to call it an attempted submission.
So is it a case a lot of times of a guy trying to conserve energy or trying to figure out when to explode, like when he gets taken down where he'll hang on for a second and then start moving, whereas you would...
As soon as your back touches the ground, you're scooting, you're fighting for underhooks.
Scott Adams taught me how to roll the knee bar this way.
I kind of figured out how to do a push-pull thing with the guys.
And I just change something right at the end of each thing to get, because instead of going to roll that knee bar, I get halfway there and just stand up.
If I get halfway there, so I get people off balance and I can go, I do a push-pull and make it so I try to get you to push real hard to stop this one, I go the other way.
But it's kind of fascinating when you think about it because you had to kind of figure all that out.
You came along in 97. I mean, there wasn't a lot of dudes who had already done that before you where there was like...
You look at a guy like Rory McDonald who's training at TriStar.
He's got George St. Pierre in his camp for us.
They got fucking charts and graphs and dry erase boards where they're writing down every day's workout where they're trying to break it down to each individual technique and skill.
And now you got guys, like you said, and you'll see guys get better and better because you got guys that now they're learning mixed martial arts from the start.
I don't know if I'm going to get into all the coaching guys to fight, but I always like working with guys that are fighting.
I always like working with different things and showing them things I like or I do different than what they're used to doing.
And seeing someone use it.
You know, if you've got a guy at that level, I show a guy, I think one of my favorites, I remember teaching Forrest how to find point to something he'd done forever.
And he said, I thought that was a bullshit move, it never worked.
And he's like, oh, that's what I was doing wrong?
Because now it just, it worked, it was just a guard, you know, guard, guard pass thing.
But it was, he's like, oh man, damn, that's what I was missing.
Yeah, I've been working with Glover over the last two fights.
After he got back in the U.S., I mean, he'd been away from, you know, he was training with us for a long time and then he went back to, got stuck in Brazil for a few years.
I'm just working with him with stuff that we used to do.
Some of the stuff that he's forgotten.
Oh yeah, that's why that's not working.
Little fine points.
I had the same thing.
I come back from having done that movement in a while.
Yeah, it's fascinating how much when you look at athleticism and you look at just sheer strength and size, that's all well and good, but it's really fascinating how much actual technique is involved and just subtle variations and changes in that technique make all the difference in the world.
And that's something that the layperson doesn't understand and that's something that it's a shame when judges don't understand that.
They might as well be working for the DMV. They got a gig and they went in and they learned how to, you know, this is a triangle, this is an arm bar, this is a kick, this is a punch.
I think people make errors as referees, and that's just a part of being a human being.
But I feel like the referees, for the most part, know what the fuck is going on.
There's standouts like Big John or Herb Dean who, like, you know they're always going to – Josh Rosenthal, you know they're always going to ref a good fight.
And even if they make an error, it's rare and few and far between.
But some of these fucking judges, man, you've got to think they're just flipping a coin.
They don't know what's happening.
There's no way they know what's happening.
They're just taking a guess.
It's really a shame, man.
It really is a shame.
When you see guys that are competing in the highest level of the game, and they've trained for six to eight weeks, and they've given every fucking ounce of their soul, and here they are, and they edge it.
You think they won.
You think they pulled it off.
And then, you know, 30-27 for the other guy, and you're like, what the fuck?!
Nonsensical score.
So you threw away two months of this guy's life.
Two months of fucking, you know, eating the right food and getting up in the morning and drinking a gallon of water every six hours.
And you threw it all away because you're an incompetent judge.
But anyway, you know, when I got out, you know, when I would go to bars and stuff, people would say, oh, some people would say, like, oh, I seen you on TV. And I'm like, fuck.
And I'm thinking to myself, is that the one with me handcuffed walking with police?
Or was it an old fight?
Yeah, I'm like, oh God, I hated that.
So I figured the only way to make it up to my fans, let them know that I'm back.
We get drug tested in Japan.
Marijuana is a big thing now in Japan.
We get tested for marijuana.
If you have any marijuana in your blood in Japan, you're not going to be able to fight.
Well, I went in there and it was good for me, actually.
I mean, I always think back and think, okay, I should have done this, I should have done this, if I didn't put the roast in that.
And I keep thinking that and I catch myself and think, wait a minute, this is probably one of the best things that happened to you.
Because the biggest thing that happened to me in that was I learned how important my freedom was.
I mean, everyone takes a grand every day, wake up, but what are you going to do today?
And it's like, shit, I got nothing to do.
It's freaking overcast, a shitty day.
What I'm going to do is like, ah, damn, it's a shitty day, you know?
But, man, just the fact that you can choose to stay at home, you can choose to eat McDonald's, or you can choose to just hang out, or you can choose to be bored, you know?
You know, dealing with a situation like that, especially over something like weed, where it's so nonsensical and crazy, they could take away your freedom for fucking years.
Yeah, the thing about that is, I served the time, went to the court, I got three years probation, where I couldn't leave Japan for three years.
I didn't even get to go to my grandmother's funeral.
And I figured, okay, I gotta be good these three years, and I'm gonna start up again.
And then, next thing I know, I get a letter from him.
The immigration.
Telling me that I just lost my green card because of infringement and I gotta leave Japan.
And I'm like, whoa, wait a minute.
I've been here for 20 years.
My whole life is here.
I bought a house there.
I got gyms here.
I can't leave Japan.
So I called them up and they had this real generic answer.
Okay, if you're contesting it, you're going to start an investigation.
You have to come down to Immigration Center and blah, blah, blah.
I went down.
It was an eight-month I mean, it was ridiculous.
I had to go down there numerous times and just like all day interrogations and it would start from the beginning, the name of your mom and dad, what do they do?
I'm like, what the fuck does that have to do in anything, you know?
And I'm just going along with the role and it's like the next week I go in for another interrogation, they start all over again, a whole new investigator.
I'm like, what the fuck's going on?
I just told the other guy, you know?
And it got to a point, it was so bad that I got so frustrated in there.
As much as I needed to be in Japan, I looked at the guy, I said, you know what?
I love Japan.
I made this place my home.
And if fucking Japan doesn't want me, I don't want to fucking be here.
I told him straight up like that.
And I said, oh shit, I just screwed myself, man.
But I thought, you know, I got so frustrated.
I said, you know, I serve my time, man.
And I'm trying to do, I'm doing good things for Japan.
You guys are going to try and kick me out.
If you guys don't want me, you know what?
I don't want to fucking be here if they don't want me here, you know?
So, you know, the interrogation went on and there was one guy that was a fan of mine.
When he was interrogating me.
And then he kind of did something illegal where he told me that between these two red markers, he said, look at those two papers.
He said, he flipped it open.
He said, this is all petitions coming in for you not to get kicked out of Japan.
And I saw the papers like this thick.
I was like, oh shit, that's a lot.
He said, yeah, you got like 4,000 in there already.
And the petition in Japan isn't just names.
You got to leave your name, your phone number, your address, and everything.
You know, so you...
It's not a bullshit where you can just get people to sign their names.
And all he needed was something behind him that he felt confident with.
Where he would have his confidence.
When he has...
When Kid has his head on right, man, nobody can beat him.
But that guy...
That guy can be broken, man.
I've seen him break so many times and he needs that something behind him that gives him that little extra confidence that puts him past that barrier, but he doesn't have it now, man.
He was like that the whole time when he first came in from wrestling.
I mean, he's defending jiu-jitsu moves, just being a wrestler, not even understanding jiu-jitsu, just on a natural instinct, which you don't see much in wrestling.
You know, wrestling has this bad habit of stretching their arms out, using their arms, and getting locked up a lot.
But he was just, so happened, was defending from the armbars, took him to Thailand, he started picking him up in the standing right away.
I mean, that guy was natural.
It was...
I mean, I still think he has it today, but he just doesn't have that confidence.
Yeah, when he first fought in the UFC against Kid Yamamoto, or against Demetrius Johnson, and then against Von Lee, I was telling everybody, I was like, man, wait till you see this guy.
But then by the time he got into the UFC, he had already lost some of his momentum.
He lost some of his fire.
You know, the fire that he had when he knocked out Hoyler Gracie, the fire that he had when he was in his prime.
Oh, man, he was a bad motherfucker.
When he was in his prime, it was like, you know, He was just a freak.
If I went and started training with him, I could get him right back.
I believe I can get him right back to what he was, but I don't want to deal with the father and I don't want to deal with the loyalty issues that he runs.
That's why I try to keep them out from my sleeve so it comes out from there, but after that I stop because I don't want to walk around and be kicked out of places.
I just got denied to go in a hotel last week when I was in Japan.
You've got to figure, when you have a gang, there's two or three top men.
Those men are awesome people.
And then you got the rest of the hundreds and thousands that are punks.
And that's the ones that you see.
So basically a gangster, someone with tattoos, which equals Yakuza, would mean trouble.
And if you go into a sports gym and you're working out next to a guy and you're working on, say you take his weights by accident because he's in the middle of a set.
And if you're doing it to someone that's a normal person, he'll just say, hey, I was using those weights.
Oh, sorry.
Okay.
But it might be different for the Yakuza.
And people would rather not work out in the area if there's a Yakuza guy working out there.
The UFC, when they went in and bought Pride, it's kind of a crazy story, but they paid $65 million, they bought Pride, and they thought, you know, hey, we're going to run Pride as well as the UFC. The same way they did with Strikeforce, when they bought Strikeforce.
They kept Strikeforce going for years.
They thought they were going to do that.
But meanwhile...
It turned out all of their contracts were illegal.
They really didn't have anybody under contract.
They spent $65 million and all they really got was a video library.
And then while they had offices in Japan and they were hiring these people and paying for them, they were starting up Dream.
They were starting up their own organization, organizing everything.
And then the UFC, it took years before they could come back and do a UFC there.
For me, I guess I grew up in America, so for me, the Mafia just scares me way more.
I mean, I have this image that you screw with the Mafia.
You better change your name.
You better move, and you better hide who your family is, and you better get the hell out of, just disappear.
But when you get in trouble with the Yakuza, I've been in trouble with them before, and it's like you can kind of pretty much deal with them the way you want to deal with them.
It depends on how much you're willing to sacrifice.
When I, this guy, this Yakuza guy wanted to open up a gym, And I agreed to open up a gym with him called Purebred Tokyo Killer Bee.
And I just told him that the only thing you have to do is you have to hire two of my fighters so they can make a living through fighting.
And I wanted to help them out.
I want no money.
You can use my name of my gym, but you have to hire my two fighters.
They hired Kid and they hired Ryan Bull.
And those two fighters and everything was good.
And what happened was Kid started, I guess from the influence of his father, he started being, the loyalty issue on him was getting, was swavering, where he wasn't telling me stuff.
He was hiding stuff.
He was lying to me.
And then I put that Yakuza guy in charge of him that ran the gym.
So I told him, I called him and said, what's going on, man?
You got to take care of it.
He goes, I'll take care of it.
I'll take care of it.
He's told me that.
And it got to a point he didn't take care of it.
So I called him and I was pissed already by now.
And I called him and said, you know what?
Call me.
He avoided my calls for three weeks.
And I'm sitting there.
This guy's running from me.
I'm thinking, this is ridiculous.
So I'm thinking, okay, this guy's running from me.
I'm not going to look for him.
He's going to pop up.
These guys that try to run, they pop up all the time.
So I'm sitting there watching the Uno kid fight.
And kid wins the fight, and this guy's in the ring jumping and hugging him.
I'm thinking, motherfucker, this guy's hiding from me.
He's on national TV, hugging me, saying, hey, Anson, I'm here.
So I guess this is it.
So I called my students to find out where the after party is.
I went out to the after party and I was literally going to walk in there, grab that guy with a hair and pull him out of the party.
But my students felt it was going to be a problem.
It was going to make too much commotion.
Cops are going to be called.
So they decided to get him in.
They brought him up and brought him to the park.
And pretty much beat him for like 20 minutes.
Which is something you shouldn't do in Japan.
Because in the Yakuza world, they work by face.
They work by being tough, being scary.
To collect money and stuff.
And if you've got a black eye and bruises on their face, it kind of goes against the fact that they're tough people.
So I beat him up pretty bad.
But see, the thing is, I never did pick on anyone.
I never did do anything without a reason.
And I believed that I would die for my beliefs tomorrow.
And I believed that I was right.
And this guy really deserved that shit.
So if they didn't like it, if the top guys didn't like it, then they can...
They know where to find me and so what happened was it was going on for 20 minutes and when I went down I let people and some people my friends know and they were all worried so they made calls and we had two other Yakuza guys come down to the scene to try and stop me to kind of get in between not stop me physically but to ask for forgiveness for this guy.
And they're kind of like bowing in the middle of me and the guy and I'm getting around and just giving him whacks at a time.
And if he were to fall from a hit, I'd grab him and stand him right back up.
And you are never, ever, if you're on the illegitimate side or you have an illegitimate problem, you are never, ever allowed to go to the other side to get help.
If you're going to stay, you're going to get other guys to help you on this side and retaliate, that's fine.
But if you ever go to authorities, then you lose face and you never can ever work in that world again.
If you're someone from the outside and you're like a regular businessman and these guys come and bother you, the best thing to do is go with authorities.
Because the police are just waiting to grab the yakuza.
So it's like a real...
It's like kryptonite to the yakuza.
If you say you're going to the police, they'll back off.
But if...
I live my life in that side pretty much, you know what I mean?
A lot of my friends are part of those groups and a lot of my beliefs run really deep with their beliefs.
See the thing is, when you hear about the Yakuza, they get a bad rap because you talk about child pornography, drugs, extortion.
What is that?
When they steal money from people, you know.
But the thing that they don't see, that's all the things in the media.
But the things that they don't see, which I feel is really unfortunate, is the honor and the loyalty they have for each other.
And that's where me and them click really well, you know.
I mean, they will die for anyone in their group tomorrow.
They'll go to jail for 10 years for their boss tomorrow if they have to.
I mean, you don't see that type of loyalty around nowadays, you know.
Well, right now, like I said, it's at the number four right now.
There's people that are real hesitant.
There are not many sponsors that want to put money into it.
On the flip side, the big thing that's happening is gangster events.
Where they allow gangsters to fight in the ring.
And yeah, it's crazy, dude.
It's like, I attend all those.
I'm like a guest in most of them.
They pay me just to be there and to judge sometimes, to make a speech in the ring, maybe in the beginning, because I'm so respected in that world that to have me there A lot of these gangsters tone down.
When they want to riot, they don't riot.
I mean, you go to an event and it's not unusual to see a picture of two stick figures fighting and have a big X on it.
Don't fight!
It's like, isn't that given?
unidentified
You never see any signs of the UFC saying, please don't fight in the audience.
Yeah, and it's like these guys, it's become, it's a good trend because it's become where these guys just came off the streets thinking they're tough, gassing on in one minute from these guys actually spending time in the gym now and being off the street.
So it's actually a good movement.
A lot of there's about three or four gangsters already now that's actually made their pro debut in deep.
So these guys are actually gonna run gangs and start selling drugs and you know doing illegal activity.
They're now training and having a future in fighting which is awesome.
As far as the legitimate side of MMA, I see it.
I can see it picking up again and it's all due to the UFC. So the UFC's done a couple of events there now.
Yeah the last one they did when I went to that it was it's huge man that's so big I mean As much as the Japanese fans are kind of losing hope in Japanese MMA because a lot of productions were floating.
When I went to the UFC, I felt that energy again.
When I was fighting in Pride, that energy that they had in the audience.
Especially when Rampage came out with the Pride music.
It gave me goosebumps because when he came out to that, I looked around the arena.
And I was like, damn, this is just like a pride.
This is a pride.
And it's the first time since that big incident with the Yakuza movement and pride that I've actually seen that again.
It was surreal to me, actually.
And I was like, this is gonna be the ticket back, is the UFC coming to Japan.
That goes in there and takes the fight in two days and is just having fun and does this weird ass, dumb ass entrance coming in with this riding a scooter and, you know, and actually literally having fun in the fight.
Well, the thing is, if you watch the video of the fight, when I was done, I remember laying down thinking, oh shit.
Got over, got through the first, you know, the big 10-minute round, you know, I said, okay, got best at round.
Second round, I know I cut him.
So I'm thinking, we're going to stand, go start standing again.
I'm going to stand toe-to-toe and I'm going to open that cut up.
And I remember Egan leaning over to me and looking at me and saying, I'm going to stop the fight.
And I was like, whoa.
No, no, no.
You're not stopping in the fight.
And we have a rule that you don't throw a towel.
You know the towel that we have?
Yeah.
In the ring engines, I always throw it into the fans.
They give us that towel.
I throw it off.
And when Egan told me that, I said, shit, I wanted to lay down at least another maybe 10 seconds to kind of recollect and everything.
And And he said that I said, oh shit, I gotta get up because Egan's gonna stop the fight.
So I started getting up and I remember getting up and walking to the corner but my legs weren't under me.
And it was the weirdest feeling because I felt like below my waist was a whole different machine.
I mean, I was dragging on me and I was saying, oh shit, my legs.
And then when I sat down in the corner, when you see the video, I mean, everyone says, you know, that I'm screaming, no, no, no, because this guy's trying to stop the fight.
But we got two minutes between rounds.
And he comes in 10 seconds after I sit down and saying, looking at me, saying, I'm going to stop the fight.
And I didn't realize how bad I looked, you know.
So I was saying, no, no.
I'm saying, no, no, meaning that there's two more minutes.
Give me two more minutes.
Check me after two minutes.
And then we give your assessment then.
And I'm screaming, no, no, no, no.
And they called the fight, you know, and What so happened was that I had a perfect eardrum and I lost my balance.
So basically I couldn't, unless I had like two days or three days between the rounds, I probably couldn't have done the second round anyway.
So I didn't know that.
But the thing that made me really happy about that is when I saw the video on the fight, my heart and my spirit didn't die.
As much as punishment I was taking, it was never an issue.
Which really made me realize that if I take any more in the beating, I'll probably die.
And I think to myself that in MMA, as far as a test in my heart and a strong hands as a man, it's probably not going to go any further than that.
You see, the thing is, this is a thing that people always ask me.
They think that not tapping is about being tough and being macho and being someone who can't feel pain.
But the truth of the matter is, I have this saying that I always refer to as, a strong man feels no pain, but a man with the samurai spirit, Yamato Damashi, feels pain, but can continue through the pain.
When you read the first part, the strong man feels the pain.
Oh, that's cool.
That's what I want to be.
And when you read the second part, it's like, it's not really that real.
I mean, but the real man is the one who feels the pain but works through the pain.
The strong man fears no opponent, but the man of Yamatomashi fears the opponent and sees it as a challenge and takes it on head-on.
That's my belief in my fighting.
When I fought, that's what it was all about, you know, facing those fears.
Yeah, it was all, you know, it was so funny because it was all a thing of my way of saying goodbye to fighting, you know, because when I fought...
Igor, I thought, okay, I could retire today.
But I thought, you know, after all MMA has done for me, I want to give him a fight.
And so I said, the hearing.
And Pride knew I was going to retire after the fight.
But they didn't want to give me the mic.
And no one knew.
No one knew that I was going to retire.
And I just grabbed the mic at the end and I said, this is the last of Yama Tlamashi.
And everyone freaked out on that.
And the reason why I fought Nagara was because when 9-11 happened, I had a friend die in the second tower.
And I felt, I really felt that I was being hypocritical because I would look in the, see the special stuff in the TV of the building collapsing and really literally feeling like shit, you know, and pretty much really downing my day.
And I can actually switch off the TV and walk to the game center and laugh without a problem with my friends.
And I felt like a real prick, you know, like, oh, there's no honor.
I mean, if you really feel shitty about what's happening, do something about it, you know?
So I thought to myself, what am I going to do?
And I felt really shitty every time I had that wave of change.
And I was thinking, I got to be freaking real to myself, man.
I'm going to lose my honor if I don't take care of this shit.
So I thought I'm going to enlist in the army.
So I decided I'm going to enlist.
And I tried to enlist.
I was 36. The cutoff age is 34. And the biggest thing I couldn't get around was the tattoos out of uniform.
The head and the palm tattoos.
So I couldn't enlist.
And my thing was okay.
If I'm going to enlist, I didn't know I couldn't enlist.
I thought, I'm going to enlist.
I want to fight.
One more fight.
Because I don't know if I'm going to die there.
I don't know if I'm going to come back mentally deranged where I'll never be able to fight again.
And I figured I wanted to say a farewell fight.
And I asked for Vanderlei.
And they gave me Vanderlei.
It was $200,000 to fight Vanderlei.
And I was like, you guys just fucked up.
I would've fucked Van Der Le for free.
Because that's one guy I figured at the end of my career with a bang.
We'd stand toe-to-toe, dust clear, someone's going to be standing.
If it's me, fine.
If it's Van Der Le, fine.
I'm good with it.
As long as I threw toe-to-toe to the very end.
So it was cool because I was saying, this is awesome.
This is like picture perfect.
I'm going to fight Van Der Le, I'm going to war.
I die there, I'm fine.
And all of a sudden, two weeks into the fight, they call me and tell me that they want me to fight Norgara.
And I'm like, you know, I got my ass kicked by a lot of heavyweights.
You know, I kind of want to fight at my weight now.
And I'm not interested in Norgara.
He was a pride champion at the time.
I thought it was more real for me to fight Vanderlei.
Yeah, my whole thing about fighting Vandele was to push him backwards.
Because every time he gets caught in every one of his fights, and I always notice that he's had such fast recovery that as he's going down, he recovers and shoots for a single or a double.
And he'll recover then.
But I figured if I even move like Vitor did, if you move Vandele backwards, you hit him going backwards and he falls backwards and you can end the fight.
Yeah, and I went public on that and I tried to be nice about it.
I mean, for a fighter who's willing to die in the ring, that's total disrespect.
To go into our ring, that we're dripping our real blood and sweat in, and willing to die in, and these guys are pulling works in there, that's totally disrespect.
And when he did that, it was such a big thing that the MMA magazines in Japan actually interviewed me about that.
And I didn't be blatant and be a dick about it and say, you know, he fought a fake fight, he's a dick, he's a faggot.
I just said that the rules that Takara fought and the rules that I fought are two different rules.
And I believe the rules that he fought should be in a different ring.
So pretty much painting it out that it was a bullshit fight.
So I just stated that way and Takara got pissed off at it and he banned all interviews with me and Sakuraba together because Sakuraba was fighting under Takara.
And yeah, he was kind of pissed off about it, but you know, he can go suck my eggs because you know what?
And of course, he probably would have toyed me when I was a black belt, but he toyed me when I was a white belt and just kind of went through the whole school.
You know how he lines over and spars with everybody?
The Japan Valley Tudo days, you know, when you saw him, you know, like right after Hoist had made his mark in America, Hickson had made his mark in Japan.
Really amazing.
That documentary, Choke, if you've never seen it, folks, if you're an MMA fan, ah, it's a classic.
Yeah, it is.
Really shows you what Hickson's all about.
And, you know, a very similar philosophy to you was where, you know, he was willing to die in there as well.
And, you know, he was fighting with honor.
He would have never thrown a fight.
So you saw Takata setting up a fight with Hickson, and you're like, well, he's going to have to fight this one.
But again, somebody wrote this thing about fighters where you look at fighters from the time they entered into high-level MMA competition to the time they started to fade.
And with almost all of them, it's like seven to nine years.
Between seven and nine years, you see the transition where it drops off.
I love listening to him give advice in the corner because you'll hear like sometimes in the corner like a fighter will have his friends in the corner or it's like you'll hear stupid advice like go kick his ass!
Come on kick his ass!
You'll hear Matt Hume, like, you gotta check that leg kick.
Move to the left.
You gotta do this.
When he's shooting, when he's shooting, that's when you're punching.
When he's, you know, he'll give you, like, real technical shit.
You know, you'll see, like, what the guy, applicable to what's going on inside the cage.
Like, real point-for-point instruction to deal with his very specific situation that he's facing.
I mean, the American public where they're screaming like idiots, you know, they're screaming at the every punch thrown when they stop brawling, start booing, you know, I mean, it's that animal atmosphere is also pretty good for the event, you know?
He was bowing to everybody, waving, and everybody was like, fuck you.
There were kids, like, 16-year-old little kids, like, fuck you, like, yelling, screaming, giving him the finger, and he stepped out of the cage, and he's like, hey, what can I do?
And they're like, get him to the back, get him to the back.
The whole place was chanting, you're a faggot.
Wow.
Brazil's the most vocal.
But they lightened up about that, the nationalism.
Because I think the first time I was there was only the second event that the UFC had done in Rio in many, many, many years.
So it was a big thing to have the UFC there.
And they were like super, super nationalistic and charged up.
But then after we did two more events in Brazil, they kind of relaxed a little bit on that and would even applaud fighters that showed sportsmanship and won who were foreigners.
You know, even if they beat a Brazilian, you know, they, you know, they, they showed, they, they, they clap for people like Rich Franklin.
Perfect example.
When he beat Vanderlei, they actually clap for Rich Franklin and he tried to address them in Portuguese.
He had something that he had prepared and learned.
You know, so it was kind of cool.
It was cool to see that even though Rich had won and beaten Vanderlei.
Yeah, they liked him.
They were happy.
But I guess, you know, he had also shown like a massive respect of Anderson, you know, when Anderson had beaten him.
And, you know, I think a lot of people had a lot of respect for Rich there.
But as far as the sound they make, though, no one's louder than Brazil.
When I first started doing post-fight interviews, it was like 97, and I was on the TV show Newsradio, and I would tell people I was going to fly to Dothan, Alabama, to go work at an Ultimate Fighting Championship event.
They're like, why are you doing this to yourself?
Like, what are you doing to your career, your reputation?
It was like I was gonna go do some porn.
Like, yeah, I'm gonna go fucking film some porno films.
Like, what the fuck are you doing?
Like, why are you getting involved in cage fighting?
And I was like, well, I think someday it's going to be bigger than football.
Because mixed martial art has made me who I am today.
Everything that I have, the reputation that I have, the people I know, is all due to that.
And just to see how big it's become.
I mean, I don't even have this envious thing where I wish I was fighting this time with more money.
I'm really happy with what I did and where I was and the opportunities I had.
And I just, you know, as much as some people like to rip on Dana, man, I got nothing but good words to say because it's what he's done for the sport, you know what I mean?
One of the most impressive fights that I ever saw, where a guy lost the fight, but I'm like, damn, this motherfucker is trying to win this fight, was when Uriah Faber broke both his hands on Mike Brown.
He had no hands.
By the second round, he broke both his hands.
He broke his thumb on one hand, he broke his knuckles on the other hand.
So he couldn't punch with either hand.
So he's throwing elbows and he's throwing kicks, and he did it for five fucking rounds.
He couldn't grab a hold of him, couldn't hold on to him, couldn't grapple, couldn't, you know, all he could do was try to throw elbows and try to take him out with kicks.