The Chronological History of MMA
Chapter 3: Akira Maeda (RINGS) ASTRAL STEP 1st SPIRIT-U 5/11/91 Yokohama Arena
By Michael Betz & Mike Lorefice 12/15/19

When we last convened, we had just witnessed a truly cataclysmic moment in the space time continuum, as the forces that kept the UWF together fractured into several directions and are each spiraling towards their own path to nobility. Now we get to behold the beginning of what is in this humble scribe's opinion, the finest of the Pre/Quasi Shoot Leagues, Fighting Network RINGS. While Nobuhiko Takada's effect on the sport of MMA is undeniable (due to his shenanigans with Rickson Gracie being the impetus behind Pride FC), the total influence that RINGS had on what is now MMA is probably far deeper than most casual observers have initially perceived. As we continue through this series, we will see events unfold, stars rise, and narratives form from the most unlikely of sources. An outfit that seemingly would never be more than a pro wrestling farce, wound up evolving into a home for many of the personalities that created an impact that's still felt to this day. For example, where would modern MMA be without Frank Shamrock meeting Maurice Smith and Tsyoshi Kohsaka, thus starting one of the most bleeding edge teams of it's day and becoming the prototype for what a modern mixed martial artist should be? What would our current landscape look like today if Fedor Emelianenko (under the watchful tutelage of Volk Han and the rest of the Russian Top Team) didn't have a place to hone his brutal craft in his formative years? How would current striking theory look without all the various Dutch/European kickboxers that were closely connected to RINGS, and had a training system/platform to hone their abilities in-between local events and K-1 competitions?

We are at first greeted to a plug from the WOWWOW network, while a hard drum machine beat that wouldn't be out of place on an early Boogie Down Productions album plays in the background as a montage of the tonight's bouts (FIRE, WATER, EARTH, and UNIVERSE respectfully) is displayed. Thankfully, Akira Maeda quickly shows up in a suit, otherwise I may have accidently thought I was relapsing into my old Captain Planet addiction (no I shouldn't have to apologize for wanting a green mullet, it's totally ok). After some routine pleasantries, we are greeted to prior footage of judo ace Chris Dolman giving an exhibition with Dick Vrij (who as legend has it once gave 6x time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates a stiff beating for organizing a bodybuilding competition in the Netherlands without"permission). Cold as Ice by Foreigner blasts through the speakers during this display, and yes, it's every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. After this, Maeda starts kicking some pads while a lowly (and surely underpaid) lackey holds them in fear and trepidation. Dolman beholds all of this in disgust, knowing that surely such an underling isn't worthy of Akira's ministrations. After the entire ensemble comes out to the Hip-Hop version of the RINGS theme, which manages to be the very quintessence of '90s positive rap spectrum, and makes me wonder if Maeda spent his free time proudly wearing Cross Colours t-shirts, while breaking out his vinyl copy of De La Soul's 3 feet high and rising.

After this tasteful foray, we are now ready for business, in this case: Herman Renting vs Pieter Smit. Renting was a Dutch heavyweight fighter, who is perhaps best known for losing to Akira Shoji via Armbar at Pride FC #11 (there is, of course, no shame in that, as last I heard Shoji is forever eligible for Grand Cordon status due to his being considered a national treasure in Japan). Smit was a Dutch judoka who was best known for not being the legendary Dutch kickboxer Peter Smit. After both fighters start off with some weak striking attempts, Renting gets the first takedown with an awfully genteel throw where he just sorts of lifts his opponent with no resistance that immediately shows the worked nature of this bout. The fight is a very grappling heavy affair, with a lot of position changes and leg lock attempts, but it's readily apparent that they really haven't figured out this style yet. Compared to the standard show wrestling of the day, the fight is amazing in its own way, but after witnessing the debuts of PWFG and UWFI, we see that it may take some time for this outfit to really find it's tone, as the competitors so far seem unsure of exactly how stiff they need to be when they strike and change positions on the ground way too often. This has the effect of neither having the dry realism of PWFG or the high-octane fun of UWFI, kind of landing somewhere in the uncomfortable middle of the two. This match was mostly a meandering affair as the competitors spent most of the time playing footsie. The two redeeming takeaways are the tachi-waza of Peter Smit (he hit a couple of nice Harai-Goshi throws) and the finish. After a rather sloppy armbar attempt, Smit hits an Omoplata/straight armbar variation, which would probably make this the first appearance of such a submission in the shoot-style spectrum.

Next up is Willie Peeters vs Marcell Haarmans in the WATER BOUT. Peeters, who in later years would become known for his cheating antics and steroid assisted physique, is looking surprisingly fresh-faced and horsemeat free here. The action starts off with a couple of stiff knees from Peeters, who immediately goes for a hip throw, only to fail and get deflected into a very nasty looking Bully Choke (think of how Carlos Newton beautifully finished off Pat Miletech at UFC 31). This is already leagues better than the last match, and is making me wonder if this card is about to turn around from its lackluster first match. Peeters manages to explode and twist out of the choke and answer with a very stiff elbow to his downed opponents' midsection. This is an odd sight, as RINGS become notorious for not allowing any striking whatsoever on the ground, but apparently that rule hasn't gone into effect yet. Peeters kicks his downed opponent some more before the ref intervenes and allows Harrmans to stand up. They engage in a clinch and trade some hard knees before Peeters executes a very explosive headlock takedown, which leads to Haarmans taking a rope escape, and both getting stood back up. Peeters then channels his inner Shane Douglas with a belly-to-belly suplex that sees its momentum quickly reversed by Haarmans and causes Peeters to flail like a fish, which grants him a break from the ref (without having to use a rope escape). After some terse striking exchanges, Haarmans catches one of Peeters kicks, and makes him pay by taking him down and doing what any self-respecting wrestler would do, assault his opponent with a single-leg Boston Crab! This most fearsome of submissions costs Peeters his first rope escape, and perhaps his dignity. Peeters continues to land a lot of stiff shots in the exchanges, even while his opponent is on the ground, before winning with what appears to be a very stiff high kick. While this match is clearly a work, and the kick did seem to be the intended finish, it does seem like Peeters is prone to taking some liberties with how hard he hits. I'm beginning to think the stiffness just stems from Peeters being a jerk (which we will see much more of in his actual shoot career). In any case, this was a fun match and a a nice change from the first bout, even if perhaps due to Peeters unprofessional antics.

Now he have the EARTH BOUT, which starts off with a rather dapper Dolman saying that no American professional wrestler wants anything to do with Kazmaier, apparently to show us that only he has the requisite courage to face such a monstrosity of a man. Kazmaier was a best known for his achievements in powerlifting and strong man competitions, but he tried his hand at pro wrestling in the late '80's/early '90's, his most notable success being a short stint in WCW in late '91 where he chased Lex Luger for the U.S. Heavyweight title. This bout will be seven 3-minute rounds, as opposed to 1 30-minute match, perhaps owing to Kazmaier's cardiovascular limitations. Round one was fairly uneventful outside of a nice hip throw from Dolman. Dolman's credentials were never in doubt as he was a multiple champion in both Sambo and Judo, but even at this early stage, he was well past his prime and moved like molasses. Things picked up a bit in round 2, with Kazmaier going into full Zangief mode and throwing some super-slow, super-heavy hands, forcing a knockdown after a gut shot to Dolman. The action proceeds a brisk pace, as brisk as these two can move, and the round ends in the midst of Kazmaier trying to neck crank/choke Dolman into submission. Nothing interesting happened in rounds 3 & 4, and all were thankful in round 5 when Dolman ended this tripe with an armbar. The finish was actually neat, as Kazmaier tried a modified powerbomb to get out of it, but Dolman held on before eventually securing the submission.

Hopefully the UNIVERSE BOUT will cleanse our palate, and take us all into the shoot-stratosphere that we so long to abide in. First we get Dick Vrij, who looks like he would have been an excellent ending boss to a Double Dragon game. Then Maeda goes out before the match, finds another underpaid young man, and proceeds to kick him, which was always my preferred method of warming up. If we learn nothing else today, at least we go away knowing that Maeda was OVER. The crowd is totally into this/him, and it probably shows us that Maeda was important to MMA history, if for no other reason than by his simply existing, this promotion not only existed, but got attention and a lucrative TV contract. This will be 1 round with a 45 min time limit, which is hysterical as neither man could probably put in half that time. The match gets underway after an intense staredown, with Maeda feeling out Vrij with a few kicks before taking him down and attempting an armbar, which Vrij escapes. They then proceed to slug it out, and with Maeda actually taking some rather stiff kicks from Vrij, it would appear he is really wanting to put this show over and is willing to take some punishment as a result. The fight is well paced, with plenty of back and forth striking action, and when it did hit the ground, they didn't spend all day looking for a reverse toe hold but moved things at a fast clip. The match ends with Maeda catching a kick, and doing the only thing that one would do in such a situation, breaking out the single-leg Boston Crab to secure the win.

This show, other than the surprisingly entertaining last match, was pretty weak sauce, as much as that pains me to say it. Maeda has definitely nailed the best presentation in terms of positioning his promotion as a legitimate sporting contest, using real martial artists and doing a much better job of giving the show an international flavor, even if he's just subbed Dutch fighters for the random jobbers from the most obscure corners of American professional wrestling circles that we saw in UWF-I & PWFG. Still, the actual execution is lacking. It's to be expected though, as they have positioned themselves to be the trailblazers, but will, of course, have some growing pains trying to figure out what path to actually take. The most fascinating thing about all of this is to know that they eventually morph into a full blown MMA promotion, and we are ever so fortunate to be able to take part in the journey.

Mike Lorefice's thoughts:

Maeda had been a lone wolf throughout his career, always being at odds with anyone who had creative power whether it be in traditional pro wrestling or shoot style, and not being afraid to express that displeasure in the ring, consequences be damned. He always had an entourage behind him, but in this second UWF split, he truly branched out on his own. While Maeda maintained the connection to the Netherlands contingent, which wasn't very important in the grand scheme of UWF being mostly a native vs. native company, the lone native on his roster is Mitsuya Nagai, who trained in UWF but never actually wrestled there due to the doors closing before he returned from a training injury. Maeda not only didn't have a roster per se, but still didn't even have a name for his league. We can say what we want about Maeda as a person or a fighter, but make no mistake about it, he was by far the biggest name & top draw in shoot wrestling at this point. While PWFG & UWF-I ran small shows at Korakuen Hall, mixing in a few 5,000 seat arenas shows as the year progressed, with UWF-I finally getting the courage to run a major year end show at Ryogoku Kokugikan, Maeda literally just put his name on the marquee at Yokohama Arena and came up with 11,000, which may only be 3/4 full, but still is close to 3 times the combined attendance for the UWF-I & PWFG debut shows.

RINGS wasn't very good in 1991, particularly compared to later on when Tamura, Han, Kosaka, & Yamamoto would lead them to being one of the most exciting promotions in the world, but it was drastically different from the other "shoot" leagues because the cards were filled with foreigners who were presumably good in a specific martial art - judo, kickboxing, or sambo - but had very little training working fights. While RINGS wasn't exposing what really works and doesn't due to the cooperation, it's perversely fascinating to see how a judo guy goes about putting together a match with a kickboxing guy when neither has a base in traditional pro wrestling from the New Japan dojo. This first show was all across the board, you had guys hitting way too soft and others hitting way too hard, but while they may not really know what they're doing on the ground & change positions too often by MMA standards, you were generally seeing a style with more activity, movement, and footwork that was less built around cleanly executed traditional UWF highspots, particularly big upper body kicks.

Renting vs. Smit was a poor match because most of the strikes barely connected, but helds some interest for the odd judo based takedowns where they almost twisted each other to the mat, as well as for Renting using low kicks to work kick combinations. The finish was just odd. It didn't strike me as an omoplata, but rather two guys who simply didn't understand that there's no finishing leverage on the armbar when the guy applying it is on his side and the guy receiving it shifts to his stomach. You felt like Smit needed to go belly down also, but there was really no way for that to even work because he was just scissoring his legs on Renting's bicep.

Peeters was the most interesting of the original roster in that he more or less really went at it, and his matches were extremely intense and sometimes baffling because of that. The match wasn't a straight up shoot, but they often didn't work with each other either, and Peeters always seemed to be at the center of this. Peeters might not have been actively trying to knock Haarmans out, but he wasn't really pulling his strikes either, which made for an odd constrast given Haarmans was, and I kept looking for Haarmans to complain about the way Peeters was laying into him. What's actually more interesting though, and makes the match look very much ahead of its time, is the lack of cooperation on the throws and various attempts to get each other down resulting in a style where both guys exploded and whatever happened, happened. Seemingly Peeters would sort of cooperate by not specifically resisting the lockup or immediately trying to get back to his feet in the grappling, allowing Haarmans to toy around with crabs, but he wouldn't necessarily cooperate with the throws and transitions. There was a lot of flash though, mostly from Peeters with spinning kicks and belly to belly suplexes since Haarmans was much more obliging, but they both made each other work for things & didn't sacrifice the essence of the fight for entertainment value.

Maeda's idea to broker talent from all corners of the world was a solid one, but one of the major problems of doing this in a worked league that pretended to be a shoot league is he was somewhat at the mercy of the leaders of these various gyms who were always going to be above their underlings despite current ability and marketability. In his prime, Dolman was likely the best real fighter on this show, and even in these days, the Gracies were still regularly ignoring his challenges. Unfortunately, he was pudgy 46-year-old when RINGS started and should just have focused on his role of running his gym & training the Netherlands stable for their actual real and worked fights rather than being Maeda's first big rival and winning the inaugural Mega Battle tournament. Given none of these guys were probably capable of having a good match with the fighter who would more aptly be dubbed Dullman, I suppose feeding him legendary strongman Kazmaier wasn't the worst idea. This match should have been 5 minutes or less though, but that's a tough go when you are running a major arena with a 4 match card. The real value of a guy like Yoji Anjo is he could give you an entertaining half hour, thus allowing time to be shaved matches that were never going to be MOTYC. The first half had some moments, but they were both blown up in the second half. Certainly, it was much better as a "shoot" than as a work, by that I mean it was fairly credible, it just wasn't slickly performed. I have no problem calling it more believable than anything on the PWFG or UWF-I debut shots, but graceful it was not. Kazmaier actually did a good job of striking as though it were a kickboxing match rather than his usual pro wrestling match, and generally came off as a real RINGS fighter even though this was a one off, but his muscles got in the way of his actual striking technique. Similarly, Dolman had the right footwork & movement, but his actual blows were performed with action figure flexibility.

RINGS was a lot more believable than UWF because the card was filled with martial artists rather than pro wrestlers who trained other pro wrestlers in a martial arts oriented pro wrestling style, but unfortunately Maeda himself hadn't evolved. Maeda vs. Vrij could have taken place on any UWF show, in fact it was probably less realistic than Vrij's three UWF matches. Vrij had a good intimidating look as the icy musclebound cyborg who was a lot more charismatic than that description suggests, and was capable of being an entertaining striker when someone built a match around that and pulled the match out of him, but he wasn't much of a worker on his own. Still, given what they had, he was a good option to be Maeda's initial rival, held back mainly by having failed previously in UWF (he beat Anjo in between loses to Fujiwara). Thematically, this was the expected match with the kickboxer Vrij winning the standup and the grappler Maeda winning the ground, but there wasn't much interplay, which was disappointing given Vrij had progressed a lot since his initial mixed match with Fujiwara where he wore gloves to being willing to challenge Anjo & Fujiwara in their domain in his '90 matches. Generally, you had Vrij standing there with his right arm tight and his left arm fully extended, fist clenched, landing strikes until Maeda got him down & mostly just held him in some loose positions that beared some resemblance to amateur wrestling except nothing was actually being done to keep Vrij in place. The primary reason the first Fujiwara vs. Vrij not only worked, but was so much more intense is anytime Fujiwara got a hold or Vrij or took him down, Vrij would immediately try to scramble back to his feet, with Fujiwara desperately grasping & clutching for dear life to keep Vrij from getting another opportunity to work him over on his feet. Against Maeda, Vrij did a decent job of mixing in low kicks and body blows to keep Maeda guessing, but Maeda was still really just standing totally relaxed in front of him, and Vrij wasn't hitting all that hard compared both to some of the stuff on the undercard and his own later bouts. Much of Vrij's illusion was shattered when Maeda inexplicably scored the first knockdown, though Vrij did a good job of playing heel within the rules to regain the intensity and generally seem pissed & out of control. Though it was easily the least credible bout on the card, the length was right, containing enough action and entertainment value to please Maeda's fans without becoming too unbelievable. Still, it's the kind of match that looks worse with each passing year, particularly due to the hokey finish that would surely make clown prince Angle proud where Vrij landed some kind of jumping movie kick then Maeda ate a high kick, but caught Vrij's leg on the recoil and somehow twisted and turned into an ankle lock then continued into a 1/2 crab for the victory.

In other news:

We are excited to announce that Bart Vale is now offering his vast wealth of shootfighting knowledge via instructional tapes and seminars, contact him today to increase your skills.

On April 1st 1991, Koji Kitao was supposed to have a standard pro wrestling match with "Earthquake" John Tenta at an event for the Japanese SWS promotion. However, booker The Great Kabuki put Tenta up to provoking Kitao in hopes of getting Kitao expelled from the promotion, so from the outset Tenta didn't really cooperate with Kitao's attempts to engage, provoking him by making him look too slow & deliberate. Kitao threw a fit on the outside after Tenta took him down hard, and stopped cooperating with Tenta, who hadn't been cooperating with him in the first place, taking a two fingered posture and trying for an eye gouge when Tenta grabbed his arm. No one really connected with anything before Kitao got himself disqualified for kicking the ref, but Kitao made things public afterwards, grabbed the microphone on the outside and breaking kayfabe by telling the crowd that pro wrestling is fake, and that his opponent Tenta, also a decorated sumo who was undefeated in his brief career, is fake. Kitao and Kabuki were promptly fired after this incident.

Martial Artist and film star Steven Seagal, along with Marked for Death's producers and credited screenwriters, Michael Grais & Mark Victor, appeared before the arbitration board of the Screen Actors Guild. Seagal, who argued that he actually rewrote 93% of the script for the film that topped the US box offices for 3 weekends, lost the lawsuit to be credited as a co-author.