Pride 23 - "Championship Chaos 2" - Nov 24, 2002...vs Heath Herring. Heath Herring was one of my favourites at the time and I expected him to make a good account of himself against this sleepy Russian dude who I'd never seen or heard of before. Match gets underway, Herring comes out with a big kick and the russian just throws him down like rag doll. On the ground, the russian is just relentless, slamming bombs in bunches and Herring has no answer. Herring tries every way he can to just get away from the ruthless assault of murderous bombs coming his way. When the ref intervenes to get the fight back in the middle of the ring, Heath stands up looking like a grenade blew up the left side of his face. As the match continues, it's more of the same but now the russian was starting to manhandle Herring by picking him up and throwing him down and attempting a rear naked. I looked over to another dude in the room who was watching it with me and said "Have you ever seen a guy this vicious before?" The guy replies "I ain't ever seen a dude hit like this guy before!" When that fight was over, I was convinced we had just seen the next dominant MMA fighter. I rushed upstairs and put "Fedor Emelianenko" in Google search. Not a lot of info came up since he was pretty much unknown and it being 2002, there was no Youtube and MMA was not a mainstream sport at all. So it was kinda hard finding any real info. When I heard Fedor was next in line for Noguira's Pride heavyweight title, I genuinely felt afraid for Noguira. Noguira was a dominant champion at the time but I had a very bad feeling that he was going to get badly hurt at the hands of this russian killer! We saw what happened! And since then, the rest is history...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiF3qiZKhdg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1IbLy7Kytw I know those same feelings Hanzy. My friend, Landon, told me about Fedor and we watched that fight at his house. Likewise, I knew nothing about Fedor at the time, and had almost the same reactions as you. The two links, above, pay attention to Bas and Stephen, they start the match not giving Fedor a fucking chance. They want Heath to win sooooo badly, but they can't help be amazed. There is a point that always makes me laugh in the first link where Fedor has him down just dominating him and Bas says something along the lines of "I think Heath will escape soon and get it back to there feet where he will turn it on" . And almost simultaneously as soon as Bas says it, Fedor lands a huge fucking bomb. Its great.::
First time I saw Fedor was when he fought Gary Goodridge in Total Elimination 2003. I didn't actually see the event but I later saw the highlight made by Pal Johnsen from Ironlife. The music was appropriate because Fedor went out and just threw bomb after bomb. Goodridge was a genuinely tough customer and Fedor made him look like a kitten. Goodridge was literally balled up defenseless.
I think the Randleman fight was the first one i saw.....Randleman nailed Fedor with one of the best throws i have seen to date.....yet, within a few seconds, Fedor had Randleman tapping out. It wasn't just his toughness, but his composure that impressed mostly in turning that situation around.....on top of that he showed great strength, doing what he wanted to with Randleman's arms
not really on the same note, but the first time I saw Anderson Silva was in pride against Takase(sp). I had heard some about him so I was stoked to seem him fight, it took me a while to get past that lost and think of Anderson on a P4P champ level http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X92DEMYUaGw
Its been awhile since I saw that fight.Takase just had his way with Silva.I think fighters like takase will always give Silva problems.
I think Maia is a threat to anyone in the weight class including Silva. I don't know that I've seen Jiu-Jitsu applied with such dominance against good opponents as with Maia over his last 4 fights.
