Found this linked over on MMA on Tap. Pretty long read but the guy brings up some very good points.
http://www.boxingscene.com/mma/?m=show&id=696
PRIDE 33: The Last Coming?
By Zach Arnold
This Saturday night at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, PRIDE 33 will take place with a main event featuring PRIDE Middleweight (205-pound) champion Vanderlei Silva facing PRIDE Welterweight (185-pound) champion Dan Henderson. The show is being marketed as The Second Coming, but the politics and turmoil surrounding the event have made it nothing short of The Last Coming.
Unhappy campers For an MMA event that hardcore fans online have been promoting as a great night of fights, the atmosphere surrounding the matchmaking and show promotion has felt very quiet. First, there have been online reports stating that ticket sales have been poor for the PRIDE 33 event. F4WOnline.com columnist Mike Sawyer, based out of Las vegas, confirms that 'the lack of buzz on the street is scary' for the event.
After PRIDE's first Las Vegas event (October 21, 2006), I wrote an article titled The Echo Chamber in which I stated that the fans that appeared for the first PRIDE American event were the hardest of the hardcore fight fans. These were fight fans who flew to Las Vegas from all across the country and the globe to see the first major US event.
However, what would happen when PRIDE scheduled more events in America? The answer is that their small, limited North American fan base wouldn't be able to attend every show and support the company. There were, and are, very few casual PRIDE fans. Which leads to an intriguing second point. Ed Fishman, who is contracted as PRIDE USA President, has been making some rather strange statements over the past couple of weeks in the media.
On Monday, Fishman was quoted in a news report by The Fight Network stating that if PRIDE didn't sell their organization to him soon that he would consider opening up his own MMA organization and buying out top fighters. What an odd thing for an event promoter to say about the product he is promoting the week before a show is about to take place. Potentially sabotaging (either on accident or on purpose) the viability and credibility of your own event in order to leverage for a potential buyout?
Nothing screams 'first-class' to fans more than strong talk about whether the company that's producing the event they're attending is about to be sold to the highest bidder or suffer corporate death in the near future. Making Fishman's statements last Monday even more bizarre is that the Friday before that TFN interview, he was pushing PRIDE's April 28th Las Vegas event in a Sherdog.com interview with Josh Gross. How can you push live events for a company you're contracted to, and then turn around claiming that if they don't sell their operations to you that you're going to start your own deal?
Bizarre matchmaking and promoting in typical Japanese fashion, the matchmaking for this PRIDE event has been weird and wacky. Trying to decipher PRIDE's matchmaking is like working with a rubix cube. In typical PRIDE pro-wrestling style booking, the promotion announced Takanori Gomi vs. Nick Diaz with a twist that you only see in Japan. In the Japanese media, PRIDE announced the fight as "Gomi vs. a UFC top class fighter." Nick Diaz, UFC top class 170-pound fighter? Don't tell Georges St. Pierre, Matt Hughes, BJ Penn, Josh Koscheck, Jon Fitch, Karo Parisyan, or Diego Sanchez about this.
PRIDE decided to come up with an ingenius marketing strategy for the Japanese fans that would have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the American audience. In newspapers like Sports Nippon, the purpose of billing Takanori Gomi vs. Nick Diaz was to market the match as "PRIDE vs. UFC." Despite the fact that Diaz is not under UFC contract, the idea was to insinuate to the Japanese fans that if Gomi defeats Diaz at the PRIDE 33 event, that PRIDE is stronger than UFC because Gomi beat "a UFC fighter." And once Gomi beats Nick Diaz, therefore this will start PRIDE's "raid on UFC" in America.
Besides the faulty logic in this storyline, there happens to be another speed bump in the road. Since his last UFC fight, Nick Diaz was scheduled for a main event against Thomas "Wildman" Denny at the Gracie FC event on January 20th in Miami, Florida at American Airlines Arena. The building cancelled the event a week before it was scheduled to take place due to extremely poor ticket sales. Nick Diaz, at this moment, is not exactly a strong drawing card business-wise in America right now. An exciting fighter, for sure. But not a major drawing card. Which brings us to Frank Trigg, PRIDE color commentator and TV personality.
Trigg was also scheduled to fight in the upper half of the Gracie FC card which sold very few tickets in Miami. Trigg, who has fought a grand total of one time in the PRIDE ring (and that was at PRIDE 8 in November of 1999) will be facing Kazuo Misaki, the 2006 Welterweight GP tournament winner. Misaki was supposed to get a title shot against Dan Henderson (after beating him on 8/26/2006 at Nagoya Rainbow Hall in Japan), but has not gotten one yet. The fight was originally discussed for PRIDE's New Year's Event in Saitama, but it didn't occur. The fight was then discussed as a possibility for the PRIDE 33 Las Vegas event and the fight isn't happening now. So why is Trigg getting a shot at a talented fighter like Misaki? Most likely, it's because he's American and he's the face of PRIDE on US TV.
Therefore, in the land of PRIDE matchmakers, that is supposed to automatically sell tickets. Sadly, the most talented fighter at the PRIDE 33 event will not be fighting. He'll be doing color commentary instead, and his name is Josh Barnett. The undercard features some extraordinarily wacky matches, including talented BTT fighter Antonio Rogerio Nogueira versus Rameau Thierry Sokoudjou. Plus, Jason Ireland will face veteran Joachim Hansen and Mac Danzig will face Hayato "Mach" Sakurai. Despite the potential talent level of fighters like Danzig, none of these fighters are household names at all with casual American fans.
To say that PRIDE has done a poor job of marketing their promotion and their fighters in America is the overstatement of the year. However, the biggest booking conundrum is the main event itself. Dan Henderson, PRIDE's 185-pound champion, is fighting for Vanderlei Silva's 205-pound Middleweight title belt. Why is the 185-pound champion facing the 205- pound champion? Outside of the fact that Dan Henderson is an American (and not as charismatic as other American fighters like Barnett), the match-up between Silva and Henderson makes little sense. It's not a marquee match-up in Japan or America. On a mass-marketing level in North America, it's a hard sell as a main-event fight.
The final end game in Japan Ultimately, the success or failure of the PRIDE 33 show will lead to further speculation about the future of Dream Stage Entertainment, the parent company of PRIDE. Since losing their Fuji TV deal last June due to allegations made by Shukan Gendai which created a yakuza scandal, PRIDE has been on the ropes. They thought that the publicity stunt with Vanderlei Silva in the UFC Octagon last July would help them gain notoriety quickly.
It didn't. The first PRIDE US PPV from Las Vegas reportedly drew 50,000-75,000 buys, which isn't a great number considering the price tag of many of the PRIDE fighters. The promotion continued to take a heavy image blow in Japan when both Quinton "Rampage" Jackson and Mirko Cro Cop appeared at the UFC 67 PPV for their UFC debut fights. Furthermore, the landscape in Japan is becoming very hostile for the various fight organizations to promote their events in the country.
With mounting promotional problems, PRIDE is facing a crisis. Will they sell their company assets (video tape collection, fighter contracts, etc.) or corporate shares to UFC? Will they sell to Ed Fishman? History, based on the failures of past Japanese professional wrestling promotions without television, generally points to no future deal being reached for PRIDE and a painful promotional death upcoming.
