So, I was a total MMA geek last night/earlier this morning, and I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning watching Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye 2013, which served as the traditional Japanese New Year’s Eve show. I’ve been watching the New Year’s Eve shows for years, whether it’s been PRIDE or Dynamite or DREAM or Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye, and I wasn’t going to let the fact the event started at 1 a.m. ET and ended at 4 a.m. ET stop me. So me, and a bunch of my Twitter pals, stayed up last night to watch the event, and you know what? It was a lot of fun. The event featured a mixture of pro wrestling matches, hybrid matches, and mixed martial arts fights. I don’t care much for the pro wrestling stuff, but I have to admit seeing WSOF president Ray Sefo and kickboxing star Jerome Le Banner in a tag-team match was pretty funny, although I have to admit I still don’t care for Bob Sapp. As for the hybrid match I mentioned, there was a fight that saw a dude with boxing gloves take on a dude with MMA gloves. I’m not joking. Funny stuff, and of course the guy wearing the little four-once gloves came through, but not with a knockout, with a kimura instead. As for the MMA fights, they were actually pretty awesome. There was five in total and I’ll recap all of them right now. The first MMA fight of the night featured Satoru Kitaoka against Ramazan Esenbaev. I didn’t know anything about Esenbaev before the fight and I thought the veteran Kitaoka would submit him, but Esenbaev showed he’s another serious prospect out of Russia as he knocked out Kitaoka with a beautiful uppercut in the second round. This guy reminds me a lot of Khabib Nurmagomedov, and I hope the UFC signs him ASAP. Next up was a heavyweight bout between Brett Rogers and Phil de Fries. I really thought that Rogers would KO de Fries quick, but the Brit looked great, going in for the takedown early on and then getting Rogers’ back on the ground, where he soon sunk in a rear-naked choke. A great win for de Fries, and I hope Bellator picks him up. Then it was a lightweight bout between Shinya Aoki and Toshikatsu Harada. As expected, Aoki won the fight with a submission early on as he was able to lock on an armbar and force the ref to step in to break it up before Harada’s arm fell off. A nice win for Aoki, but it doesn’t mean anything since he doesn’t want to come to the UFC anyways. Up next was a fight between Minowaman, a veteran of 100 MMA fights, and Atsushi Sawada, who was making his MMA debut. I think this fight may have been fixed, and you might think the same way if you saw it, but either way I have to admit it was a lot of fun to watch as Minowaman was able to knock Sawada to the ground before throwing a soccer kick that hurt him badly. Sawada tried to get up, but he fell down and the ref stopped it. A fun fight, but I highly doubt it was a legit fight, especially when considering what happened after the match (go and try and see a video of the fight to know what I’m talking about). And finally, in the main event Satoshi Ishii picked up a win over veteran Kazuyuki Fujita via decision. Ishii really dominated this fight with his striking, and while Fujita showed off the iron chin that made him so famous, he had absolutely nothing for Ishii and really, this fight was a total mismatch from the get-go. All-in-all it was a really fun way to end what was a great year in MMA, and I can only hope that next year is just as good.
