K-1 Dynamite!! USA Recap...

amphibious · 06-05-2007, 12:49 AM

I got everything secured on Thursday afternoon, got the time off from work and class, as did my girlfriend. We left Boston Saturday morning, arrived in LA just before noon, rented a car, then checked into our hotel room.

We got to the LA Coliseum at around 4:30. Right after leaving the parking lot a guy came up to us selling badly designed shirts for $10... I haven't seen this kind of bootlegging for a long time, but this is Los Angeles. We walked to the Coliseum, found the Will Call window, picked up our tickets. The first thing we did was walk around the perimeter looking for the merch tables. Well... all the way on the other side we found them. Frank Trigg was sitting at the Triggonomics table, slightly further down was a table selling a ton of Royce Gracie shirts... at this same table where event shirts that had a really crappy design. Down a little bit further was a table for "Pimp It Fight Team." There may have been another table, but I can't remember...

NO SAKURABA GEAR! None at all!!

Apart from Royce Gracie, there were a lot of people that had Nam Phan and Mighty Mo shirts... there were a number of people wearing Sakuraba stuff as well.

We entered the Coliseum... this place is crazily run down. We made our way to the field and took our seats. They sucked. Fortunately, I only payed a fraction of the $250 cost. After the quick Nam Phan fight we moved up into the bleacher section, where the view was much much better. Shortly afterward there was a surge of people going up the stairs. They were handing out free Dynamite!! USA shirts... these shirts looked a lot like the shirts they were selling except they were red and just had the event logo. Lame.

There was a DJ for the event... I'm not sure why they needed a DJ. His name sounded like "DJ Hoppa" but I could be wrong. He was an idiot. After the Nam Phan fight he made some really stupid lowbrow remark, "is that it? The fight is over?" His mispronounced Royce twice. He also talked during the Sakuraba/Gracie fight inspiring the crowd to chant "Shut up DJ!" There was a guy in our section that starting chanting "He can't hear you." And the chant died down... only to hear the other side of the stadium chanting "Shut up DJ!" as well... it slowly morphed into "Fuck you DJ!"

Denis Rodman walked out with a torch... who handed it to Antonio Silva... who then handed it to Choi... he walked around the stadium and up about a hundred steps and lit a bucket full of something... when he did there was a huge pyro explosion that scared the shit out of him, all caught on the big screen.

For some reason the screens were showing the PPV broadcast, which was on a couple second delay... this was particularly annoying when they had some taiko drummers do their thing and it was totally out of sync. They also showed several segments of Maura Renallo and Bill Goldberg talking, but, of course, we couldn't hear was they were saying.

There were LOTS of people wearing pro wrestling shirts... at the IFL and PRIDE shows I went to I didn't see any pro wrestling shirts. The conversations I overheard were not very intelligent. (I'm not trying to equate being a pro wrestling fan with being an MMA idiot.) Some examples:

Who is going to win the Gracie fight?
Well, it has to be Gracie, he's totally the favorite.

Next...

Gracie fought Sakura before and Sakura broke his leg.
Woah, is he OK now?
Oh yeah, that was like two years ago. It was the first time that Gracie ever lost.

My favorite...

I bet $500 on Gracie.
Good bet, he wins all the UFCs.

The results of the event pretty much tell the rest of the story. Sakuraba got robbed, but the fight wasn't anything to talk about. Brock Lesnar's debut was decent... he's definitely not comfortable striking. I would have liked to have seen a submission attempt.

Other notables...

Cecil Peoples is a force of evil... he needs to be banned from refereeing or judging all MMA events.

The geek with glasses from "Freaks and Geeks" was sitting behind me for a while and kept saying really stupid stuff like "knee him in the butt" and "kick him in the balls."

There were lots of porn stars there as well as Nicholas Cage (I think he goes to everything) and Quinton Jackson.

Anyone else want to see Ackah vs Sokoudjou?

It's worth going out of your way to see Melvin Manhoef's entrance dance.

Both Royce Gracie and Ruben Villareal were in better physical condition than I've ever seen them in... no joke.

I saw Antonio Silva walking across the street after the show. His head is so big it makes the rest of his body look small.

The next day in Santa Monica I saw a guy wearing Fedor's "Nobody Beats Me" shirt.

amphibious · 06-05-2007, 01:18 AM

Sakuraba during the opening ceremony... you can see him on the big screen!

Some limeade by the boxes full of thousands of free shirts

The kid from Freaks and Geeks

Anyone know who this is? I think she's a porn star...

Oh-Henry · 06-05-2007, 01:52 AM

don't recognize the 'porn star'... =(

no sak gear, blows!

what did the attendance look like? FEG officially says 54,000 attended...i call BS

amphibious · 06-05-2007, 02:06 AM

According to Wikipedia the max capacity of the Coliseum is 92,500. Estimating attendance is a hard thing to do, but this is especially difficult because there weren't assigned seats for the non-field seats so people weren't packed in close, ie. every seat wasn't taken in the areas that were populated.

About 50% of the stadium had people in it... but again, not every seat was taken so it was probably like 25-35% full. Plus the people on the field... I wouldn't be surprised if it was over 20,000.

**Fozzy** · 06-05-2007, 02:37 AM

yeah I read somewhere it only just broke 20,000 something.

yay for pics!

~Foz

Art_Wanderlei · 06-05-2007, 03:08 AM

Free t shirts rule! I got 4.

**Fozzy** · 06-05-2007, 03:48 AM

why didnt anyone steal some of the free t-shirts to give to us G&E'rs

:-(

~Foz

TheRekiem · 06-05-2007, 06:27 AM

Gracie fought Sakura before and Sakura broke his leg.
Woah, is he OK now?
Oh yeah, that was like two years ago. It was the first time that Gracie ever lost.

Fist time? They don't know that the first time Royce lost was against Harold Howard? F*cking morons.

I know it didn't look like an MMA event but there is too much funny stuff on it. Hope you had a good time. And I agree that the Royce/Saku match sucked. Saku needs to retire, for God's sake .

amphibious · 06-05-2007, 08:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheRekiem

I know it didn't look like an MMA event but there is too much funny stuff on it. Hope you had a good time. And I agree that the Royce/Saku match sucked. Saku needs to retire, for God's sake .

Sakuraba vs. Gracie III in Japan or South Korea within the next year... guaranteed.

Here's a little conspiracy theory for you... the reason that Sakuraba threw various versions of his mask to the crowd a la Mil Mascaras is because he was letting everyone know he was going to fight a worked fight since, realistically, Gracie has no tools to beat him.

HSakurai · 06-05-2007, 04:27 PM

Amph, it looks like you sat in the Korean section. I bet it was nuts during the Sik-Manhoef fight. And even if the attendance record is somewhere at around 20,000 (which I doubt, more like 15,000), how many of those people paid? I got, count em', 4 comp tickets for the event 3 days prior to it. I went to my local bank (it's a Korean bank), and the teller asked if I liked MMA, and handed me 2 tickets. Behind me was a lady, and he tried to get her to go to event by asking if she had a son or a husband that liked MMA. She said no, but he gave her the tickets anyways saying she should go to support the Koreans on the card. Later on that day, I went to a Korean grocery store, and some guy was there with a small display booth and giving out free Dynamite tickets as well. Within a span of 4 hours, I had 3 extra tickets. And once you get to the Coliseum, you can sit anywhere with even $30 tickets, as long its not floor level. I also street parked, saving about $20 in parking. However, this is South Central, so I was taking a risk. And Amph, the DJ's name was DJ Happa, and he's the douchebag that's on every morning on KTLA 5. The event was star studded from top to bottom, featuring such stars as Dennis Rodman, All 4 One, ....actually, that was it. But if it had Kevin Federline and Kathy Griffin, this would've been the greatest event of all time. There were tons of fighters there as well. Josh Barnett, Rampage Jackson, Enson Inoue, Andy Wang, Gilbert Melendez, Sokoudjou, etc. I hated the fuckers that sat around me. I was sitting on the opposite side of the Korean wave, and MAN were those fuckers annoying. They were booing so badly during Sakuraba-Gracie, no respect for history. Both fighters could've been playing chess, and I'd still marvel at whatever goes on in the ring. Fight of the night has to go to Yoon Dong Sik vs Melvin Manhoef. My dad was a Judo Olympic alternate in the 70's, and called Sik winning by armbar in the second round, no joke. All in all, Dynamite was plagued with poor production, lots of missing last minute details, bad venue choice, and that DJ I would have killed for free. What if it rained during the fights? This isn't football, I dont know how well that would have worked out. The fighters were solid though, and the event didn't do them justice.

P.S. Is it just me, or does Brock Lesnar look like Gunjack from the Tekken series?