what happened to pride?

ufc baught them

 

I miss Pride...and not because all the fighters did roids. Damn, their presentation was just so damn cool.

 

Yakuza and shady dealings that went public.They got found out UFC bought them and raped the best parts of the roster.The rest are milling around in minor org`s or flirting with the M-1 or Hero`s.Presentation wise it blew all over the UFC theres not even a comparison.PRIDE fights were well planned events.

 

I'm so shocked that the owners of Pride sold the company to a foreign one, the Japanese are normally very xenophobic about selling anything Japanese to 'Gaijin'

 

Money talks. UFC is a bigger deal by far.

 

Of course it is.Thats why PRIDE events were literally just that EVENTS! There live gates blew all over the UFC.But then it was a diffrent type of fan.

 

I miss them quite a bit.

 

They didn't really have much of a choice, because no Japanese company would touch them or be associated with them after their illegal ties to organized crime were made public.

 

The UFC wont ever be big in the East unless they change there format to cater for the fans there.Theres a big power vacuum there just waiting to be filled..

 

Yakuza messed them all up. After the owner of K1 committed suicide a few years ago - it seemed to bode ill for the future of Pride in Japan as the two were often so closely linked. The whole thing reminds me of the fall of WCW. Both Pride and WCW were playing to sold out houses and mega-pay-per-views on a regular basis - so it doesn't make sense that they would just go belly up without warning. . . There's a great back story behind all of this.

 

I believe Mr. Morishito, who comitted "suicide", was the owner of Dream Stage Entertainment, the parent company of Pride, not K-1. The story is pretty interesting around that, he met with yakuza in a hotel room, later they left and when they came to clean the room found Morishito hanging from the ceiling by his tie. The next day Sakikibara became Pride President. I believe the official story was he killed himself because he found out his wife was having an affair or some bull****.

 

Thanks for clearing that up! This is verrrry interesting.

 

UFC could still learn a lot about presentation from PRIDE, imo.