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Kiyoshi Tamura

Kiyoshi Tamura is one of the best fighters Japan ever produced. Kiyoshi Tamura is a professional wrestler, and a large chunk of his MMA career of record is a lie. Kiyoshi Tamura is one of the unluckiest men in the sport, and never reached his true potential.

The story of Kiyoshi Tamura is somewhere in the middle of those three statements, and it's tricky to unravel where each begins and ends.

Tamura was one of the stars of Nobuhiko Takada's UWF-i: A good-looking, well-rounded, charismatic martial artist as notable for his remarkable skill as his political discontent. Some of it was self-imposed--he was an agitant, chafing under what he felt was an insufficient focus on realism in the dawning age of MMA--and some of it was sheer misfortune. He had a way of finding himself in the ring with people who decided not to cooperate, famously injured by his own mentor Akira Maeda just a few matches into his career and stonewalled by Gary Albright on national television. The UWF-i wanted a lengthy feud between their two top stars--Tamura and a young talent named Kazushi Sakuraba--but having grown disenchanted, Tamura left for Akira Maeda's new project, FIghting Network RINGS.

And this is why Tamura's MMA record is hard to suss out. He was one of the finest technical grapplers in the world, even winning an award for it in 1998, and he was tough as nails in shootfights--but RINGS blurred the line between real and fake more than any promotion before it, and as a result his record is covered in worked matches. It's impossible to know how many of those early bouts are real. It is very possible to judge Tamura by starting in 1999, when the matches were real and saw him going to a draw with UFC champion Frank Shamrock and winning decisions over Dave Menne, Jeremy Horn, Pat Miletich and Renzo Gracie. Unfortunately, as he was entering the spotlight and transitioning into Pride he also hit the worst skid of his career, losing five fights straight--against heavyweight champion Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, light-heavyweight champion Babalu Sobral, jiu-jitsu master Gustavo Machado, middleweight champion Wanderlei Silva and Bob Sapp, who outweighed him by 100+ pounds. He still clawed his way back to a winning record in Pride, and at Pride 34, President Nobuyuki Sakakibara announced their main event for that year's big show was a fight a decade in the making--Kiyoshi Tamura vs Kazushi Sakuraba.

Pride never held another event.

Two years and two organizations later, the main event of Dynamite!! 2008 was Kiyoshi Tamura and Kazushi Sakuraba, and after almost a decade and a half Tamura outgrappled Sakuraba and won a decision. It was the final vindication of his career and his talents, and it was where he chose to retire.

Kiyoshi Tamura is one of the most-beloved combat sports figures in Japanese history. He fought across six different organizations, beat numerous world champions and made an enormous name for himself. I cannot help still feeling a residual sense of What If about him--for the kind of fighter who could take a prime Frank Shamrock to his limit, who could outgrapple Renzo Gracie and Kazushi Sakuraba and submit Hideo Tokoro, how much different could things have been if he'd spent less time in pro-wrestling, if he'd spent more time in his weight class, if he hadn't gone through that murderer's row in the height of his prime, if he'd gone to the UFC when he was beating its champions in Japan?

He was great. But I wonder if he ever got to show the world how great he could be.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (RINGS '97 vs Han / Pride 31 vs Nogueira / K-1 Dynamite!! 2007 vs Tokoro / Fields Dynamite!! 2008 vs Sakuraba).