PRIDE's Death Complete

[Hawkius Maximus 0]

Title pretty much sums it up. I've posted about this before, but PRIDE was never going to come back under Zuffa for quite a few reasons. Zuffa claimed it was due to how PRIDE was structured, but there were fundamental issues that would have never panned out. Namely that the Japanese market is so amazingly different that Zuffa would have been lucky to get one show off.

 

Today, they fired everyone they had in the PRIDE relaunch program by phone. PRIDE is dead.

 

HOWEVER, now it gets interesting. Months ago, I posted about how the former PRIDE employees were milling around, possibly to work on something...Well, there's been a rumor going around on the Japanese blogs. The rumor is high ranking PRIDE officials have been trying to work with Hidehiko Yoshida with the sole purpose to relaunch PRIDE under a new name on New Years Eve this year.

 

With this happening, many former PRIDE personel have come out and are accusing Zuffa of betraying Japan, and the PRIDE fans for how they handled this. Japanese fans are ANGRY. In essence, Zuffa lied to them about PRIDE. They have been betrayed.

 

The basic point of this, is the shit has hit the fan. I fully expect within a few weeks, maybe a month, that a NEW MMA Promotion will be announced in Japan, ran by many of the former PRIDE executives and headlined by Hidehiko Yoshida. There is such an amazingly huge gap in MMA over there right now, that they could litterally almost just walk back into the #1 spot with Yoshida on board, who has just been sitting around waiting for PRIDE. K-1 has done litterally almost nothing to take over the gap.

 

This should be highly interesting.

[Hawkius Maximus 0]

Calllled it.

 

"A press release was sent out to members of the Japanese media today (not on a public scale, but specifically addressed to members of the Japanese press) for a new company called World Victory Road Inc. in Japan. The press release states that there will be a press conference on the 2nd floor of Tokyo’s Prince Hotel on the 15th (this Monday at 3 PM JST). The press release states that representatives from Don Quijote (one of PRIDE’s former sponsors and current sponsor of Kazuhiro Nakamura) and FILA are expected to be in attendance. The most interesting name listed as a guest for the press conference is Chairman Fukuda of the Japanese wrestling association. He was a figurehead that PRIDE tried to recruit before that organizaton hit troubled times. Also on the guest list is Mr. Kinoshita of the Kinoshita Group, a construction company.

 

Interestingly enough, the cell phone number at the bottom of the private press release belongs to an employee of J-ROCK, the management group of Hidehiko Yoshida.

 

One media source claims that a top figurehead for the new organization is former UFC-Japan promoter, Akira Sakata."

 

WORLD VICTORY ROAD~!

 

MMA just got ten times more interesting.