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Yoshihiro Takayama

Tales from the MMA jobber file, #13: Most of the time, when I write someone into of the jobber file, despite my respect for them there's an unavoidably implied insult. There is no insult here. Yoshihiro Takayama would be the first to tell you he was not a particularly good fighter, just a tough one, and the fact that he cultivated so much love from the MMA comunity in a career that spanned just four fights and 19 months is the greatest testament to who he was.

Takayama started competing as an athlete at a young age--tall people are few and far between in Japan, and at 6'5" he stood out figuratively and literally. He joined Nobuhiko Takada's UWFi in his twenties, and that was where the strange dichotomy of his career really started: Despite being a scary, 6'5" powerhouse in a realistic, shoot-style promotion, his goofy personality led to the formation of the Golden Cups stable--a group of comedy-based fighters who alternated between violently assaulting opponents and mocking them, sometimes through song. It's the kind of weirdness that set the tone for the rest of his life. After the death of the UWFi he'd find success in AJPW, but in 2001 he took a hiatus from wrestling to join Takada's new initiative: Pride.

As stated above, Takayama's career was just four fights long, but every one of those fights was against a monster. He debuted against fellow wrestler and 6-1 GP semifinalist Kazuyuki Fujita, then it was 6'11", 21-10 ace Semmy Schilt, then two-time UFC tournament champion Don Frye (don't worry, we'll get back to that in a second), and finally Bob Sapp--pre-embarrassment Bob Sapp, when he was still terrifying and fresh off of nearly breaking Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira in half. There were no easy nights in his MMA tenure.

But, really, his career is just the Don Frye fight. It's the greatest spectacle fight of all time: Two huge men, both pro-wrestlers who fully understood the power of theatricality, both possessing incredible heart and grit, both with genuine talents they elected to ignore completely in favor of rushing forward and simply punching each other in the face, over and over, as hard as they could. It was magic. It won Fight of the Year in virtually every MMA publication that year, it lived on in Pride's advertising until it folded, and it made Takayama, an 0-3 pro-wrestler with no martial background going on 40, a favorite of diehard MMA fans.

And that's the weird charisma of Yoshihiro Takayama, not just in personality but in life. He was a toughman wrestler who was also a comedian, a pro-wrestling MMA import who was also the toughest man on the planet. He released a music CD in the 90s and he showed up in a Martin Scorsese film. He's one of the handful of people to win the IWGP championship and the AJPW triple crown. And in 2017 he broke his spine doing a sunset flip. He's expected to be quadriplegic for the rest of his life.

Yeah, I wanted this one to have a happy ending too. Sometimes life is unfair.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (Pride 14 vs Fujita / Pride 21 vs Frye / UWFi attire / his Takan Hansen gimmick attire because I think it's hilarious).