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Yoshihisa Yamamoto

Tales from the MMA jobber file #14: It's time for maybe the luckiest man in the meat grinder.

Yoshihisa Yamamoto was a teenaged judoka and one of the original veterans of Fighting Network RINGS--the early, 1991 pro-wrestling version--who stuck around for its semi-legit reformation in 1995. This makes a lot of his early career hard to accurately gauge: All but two of his first 24 fights came from Rings, and separating the real from the fake in the Rings revival is always tricky--one moment you'd have Ricardo Morais very legitimately brutalizing him in a minute, the next you'd have a worked 13-minute grappling exchange with Tsuyoshi Kohsaka. But all questions about Yamamoto's legitimacy are redeemed by his third opponent, as at just 1-1 in MMA, Yamamoto entered the 1995 Vale Tudo Japan tournament as the first-round challenger to reigning champion Rickson Gracie--and became the one and only man in Rickson's career to take him out of the first round, going 14 minutes and threatening him with repeated chokes before finally succumbing in the third round. That he lost was inconsequential: The fact that he stood his ground against the best legitimized him. That, and his reaching the semifinals of the 2000 Rings: King of Kings tournament, got him invited to Pride.

His Pride tenure was a back-and-forth with the meat grinder--every fight was unbalanced, more often against him than in his favor. Yamamoto would go from being dominated by Assuerio Silva, Bob Sapp, Guy Mezger and Heath Herring to getting a gimme fight against Jan Nortje or a freak injury against Alexander Otsuka and his trick knee. But the greatest lucky break of his career came in 2004 against Mark Kerr, whom Pride was trying to rehab after the first two-fight losing streak of his life: He needed a win, and Yamamoto was a notable but mostly unthreatening Japanese fighter Kerr could ragdoll. Instead, in one of the most famous Whoops moments in the sport, Kerr wrapped Yamamoto up in a body lock, elevated and slammed him--and limply rolled to one side, having thrown himself headfirst into the mat and knocked himself out. It was the biggest win of Yamamoto's career, and one he hadn't had to do anything to attain. It would also be his last.

...which probably sounds like this is going to get ominous and tragic like some of these stories do, but nothing tragic happened, Yamamoto just wasn't really that good at fighting. He was tough as hell, but in the changing world of MMA, that wasn't enough anymore. Yamamoto fought from 1995 to 2012, but his last strong win was the Nortje submission in 2001--Otsuka and Kerr both TKOed themselves, and in the 8 years between the Kerr fight and his retirement, Yamamoto wouldn't get lucky again. (In fact, he had the misfortune of being a victim in the initial Cro-Cop MMA Celebrity Beatdown Tour.) He retired at 14-25-1. It's hard to place him in the mass spectrum of MMA competitors: Nearly all of his victories came from an organization that shifted between real and fake, and in the world of more legitimate fighting his only true victory was against an 0-1 kickboxer who didn't know what grappling was. But he was undeniably important to the history of Japanese MMA, and he was undeniably tough as hell.

Moveset, logic, stats and four attires (Old-school RINGS 5/16/92 vs Naruse / Vale Tudo Japan '95 vs Rickson / Pride 16 vs Assuerio / K-1 Hero's 8 vs Shibata).