right there and then.
“Whoever wins goes over,” Saranaka said, meaning whoever won the real fight would also get to win the fake one.
Kowalski was all for it. He wasn’t gloating like he had already won, but I could tell that he was confident. He didn’t think anyone could touch him on the wrestling mat.
“If you feel something painful, tap,” Sammy told him, already knowing what the outcome would be.
With a nod of his head, Kowalski assumed his fighting stance in the ring. The moment we got the go-ahead to begin from Saranaka, I shot in on his legs, took him to the ground, and caught him in a heel hook. I forced him to tap.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, truly perplexed.
“A heel hook,” I said.
“Well, I wasn’t ready. I’ve been doing Greco, no one has shot in on me for years.”
I agreed to give him another shot, so we climbed back into the ring. This time it took me twenty seconds to get him to the ground and catch him in a heel hook, and once I had it sunk, I put it on nice and tight just to let him know that I could break his leg. He still couldn’t believe it, but he didn’t demand another go. And when we stepped into the ring in front of twenty thousand fans a week later, he put me over without complaint. It went fairly well, too. Then, a short time after the match, I started coaching him in submission wrestling.
I was becoming an animal in the gym, learning hundreds of different ways to make an opponent scream in pain. I could catch my opponents all the time during practice, but I knew that was different than catching an opponent in a real fight. When two people are going at it with bad intentions, adrenaline is flowing; there’s more at stake. A hold that worked in training might not have the same effect when your opponent’s pride is riding on the line. I was Fujiwara’s biggest star, wrestling in front of twenty-thousand people each month, but it was getting harder and harder for me to put my fellow wrestlers over. I didn’t want to pull my punches and kicks. I didn’t want to release my submission holds once I had them sunk. I wanted to test out my newfound skills in actual battle.
Six months into my new career, I finally got that chance. At the time, there was a heated feud going on between the Japanese submission wrestlers and the Muay Thai kickboxers. For the past twenty years, the kickboxers had been widely regarded as the toughest fighters around; no one could touch them, but when the UWF had been in full swing, they claimed that their grapplers were tougher. The feud had never been resolved, so Fujiwara decided to give his organization a boost by capitalizing on the controversy. He called out Don Nakaya Nielson, the middleweight Muay Thai champion. Although Nakaya Nielson lived in Hawaii, he trained in Japan and was extremely popular. The bout was supposed to be worked, everything predetermined, but a few minutes into the bout, Nakaya Nielson threw a huge knee to Fujiwara’s face and split him open.
Afterward, Fujiwara decided to settle the feud for real. There weren’t, however, many submission wrestlers at the time that were willing to step into the ring with a Muay Thai kickboxer, especially one as experienced as Nakaya Nielson. They were hesitant because of all those knee and elbow strikes. There had never been a mixed martial arts competition before, at least not in Japan, so they didn’t know how they would fare. They knew that submission wrestling was effective, they just didn’t know how effective.
I had high expectations, so when Fujiwara asked me if I would fight with him, I said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll do the fight.” In addition to wanting to test my skills, I also wanted to get revenge for what Nakaya Nielson had done to Fujiwara.
The fight was put together, and then the press started. Nakaya Nielson talked all kinds of trash. He kept saying how he hoped that I had good insurance because when he was through with me, I was going to need it. He kept saying how he was going to put me in the hospital, over and over and over. The guy was like a broken record, and people were listening to what he had to say. He had been fighting a long, long time, and he was a trash-talking expert.
I, on the other hand, was still relatively green. I was young, and trash talking was definitely not my strong suit. I kept thinking, “What’s with all the hostility, I don’t even know this guy.” So when the press came by asking what I thought about my opponent’s comments, I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “I guess we will find out in the ring.”
I still hadn’t worked on any standup fighting at that point. Well, that’s not entirely true. Back when I was fighting in the Toughman competitions on the East Coast, I had enrolled at a boxing gym and started taking lessons. My training had lasted a total of two weeks. They wanted me to reposition my stance, hold my hands in a different way. I was a brawler, and it worked for me. I figured that if I started changing everything I did, my game might fly right out the window.
I didn’t feel the same way when training to fight Nakaya Nielson. I had started to realize the importance of learning how to strike efficiently and effectively, and I would get better and better at it as I got more heavily involved in MMA competition, but at the time I didn’t feel like it made all that much difference. I knew Nakaya Nielson understood nothing about fighting on the ground, and once I brought him down into my world, he would be little more than putty in my hands. If he could keep the fight standing, I might be in trouble, but I doubted very highly that he would be able to do that. This was back in the days when you were either a striker or a grappler, and although competitors from both disciplines had yet to converge in a ring to see how the different styles mixed, I had a hard time seeing how Nakaya Nielson would keep me from taking him to the ground with little to no takedown defense. I had managed to take Kowalski to the ground, and he had one of the best takedown defenses in the world. Nakaya Nielson might be able to catch me with a punch or a knee on my way in, but I had been hit with a lot of punches and knees. If he wanted to knock me out, he would have to hit me with more than one shot.
Because of my confidence, excitement was the only thing that I felt when I climbed into the ring with Don Nakaya Nielson on the night of the fight. Forty thousand fight fans had turned up to watch this first-of-its-kind battle, and it sent a chill down my spine. There was no fear, no hesitation. This was the moment I had been waiting for, a chance to test my skills in combat. A chance to prove myself in front of thousands of people. And to top it all off, I got to prove myself against a guy who’d gotten on my bad side by talking a whole bunch of trash.
We circled each other in the center of the ring for a moment, and when he didn’t go for anything, I threw a couple of jabs as bait. They were not good jabs, and I think they elevated Nakaya Nielson’s confidence because he threw a powerful kick. Before the kick had a chance to land, however, I dropped low and shot for his legs, dumping him hard to his back.
In a matter of seconds I had isolated one of his arms and slapped on a key lock, which put pressure on his elbow and shoulder. Nakaya Nielson had two reactions—he began screaming in pain and furiously slapping his gloved hand against my back. He was trying to tap in submission, let the referee know that he was done fighting, but there was some confusion. Nakaya Nielson had wanted a Muay Thai kickboxing referee to be the other man in the ring with us so the fight would lean in his favor. But there was a downside to that, as Nakaya Nielson was now learning. The referee had no idea what a submission hold was. He thought Nakaya Nielson was trying to punch me in the back. He thought Nakaya Nielson was screaming out of anger. Since the referee wasn’t stopping the bout, I kept cranking on the hold. I could hear the tendons and gristle in Nakaya Nielson’s arm and shoulder crackling, and still I cranked on the hold. Nakaya Nielson was screaming really loud by this point, “AAAaaaaaaa,” and the referee was looking at him like, What? What does he have? What is he doing to you?
It took at least ten seconds for the referee to realize that his boy was in some serious pain and pull me off him. With Nakaya Nielson rolling around on the ground, cupping
