The winner in PRIDE vs. UFC? Neither
When Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira forced Tim Sylvia to tap out in the third round at Saturday night's UFC 81 main event, becoming the first man to hold both the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the now-defunct PRIDE Fighting Championship heavyweight titles, it once again fueled endless debates over which organization had the better competition.
A little over a year ago, before UFC purchased PRIDE and subsequently folded it, at a post-show press conference, when Quinton Jackson and Mirko Cro Cop were about to debut, a reporter asked UFC president Dana White about the possibility that the ex-PRIDE stars may come in and win all the belts.
It was a common theme among insiders and most of the fighters that, in general, the PRIDE fighters were better, even though UFC people would argue that except for the heavyweight division, in which for years PRIDE clearly had more depth, UFC felt its top guys would beat PRIDE's top guys. White noted at the time that Jackson and Cro Cop were now UFC fighters, and it didn't matter who fought where at another time, whoever was really the best would be determined in head-to-head battle and now the best were all UFC fighters.
Still, you couldn't help but see UFC officials beaming on Sept. 22, after UFC 76 in Anaheim, Calif., when Mauricio "Shogun" Rua, who was generally considered the top light heavyweight in the world at the time in most rankings, was choked out by unranked Forrest Griffin. White went into a tirade about ratings he considered biased in favor of fighters who competed in Japan, and the lack of respect in certain circles he felt UFC and its homegrown fighters were getting on the Internet.
At the time, UFC was criticized for marketing fighters off the The Ultimate Fighter reality series, whose fighters were said not to be top level but because of their television exposure, were more popular than many better fighters. On Sept. 22, Griffin, one of UFC's most popular fighters, but who had not exactly knocked them dead in competition, dominated PRIDE's best light heavyweight and sent those who believed strongly in PRIDE superiority scrambling for answers.
This came on the heels of Mirko Cro Cop, who had just won PRIDE's Open Weight Grand Prix tournament in 2006, buzz-sawing through the competition, coming into UFC and being knocked out by a relative unknown in Gabriel Gonzaga and losing again to Cheick Kongo. The UFC vs. PRIDE rivalry was clearly still alive, even within the UFC office, even though, at that moment, they were all UFC fighters.
Nogueira's win is just the latest fuel for an argument that has no other real answer than this: both groups had top fighters and in this sport, when top fighters face off, anyone can win. Were the PRIDE fighters, in general, a level above UFC, as many perceived? No, in head-to-head competition, we've largely seen that neither side is superior. Nogueira's win in reality meant no more to the argument than a Sylvia win would have proven UFC superiority. Griffin's win over Rua didn't prove that the guys in the Ultimate Fighter house were better fighters than PRIDE's elite, but it did show that the gap between a No. 15 fighter and No. 1 fighter in the same weight class was far less than perceived.
PRIDE's proponents can argue ex-PRIDE fighters now have three championship belts in UFC. But even that's a stretch. Current light heavyweight Jackson had been out of PRIDE for a year when he came to UFC, and his contract ended up in UFC when UFC purchased the dying World Fighting Alliance. But Jackson did make his reputation as a fighter in PRIDE.
Middleweight champion Anderson Silva fought in PRIDE in 2003 and 2004, and was a Cage Rage fighter (the largest U.K. based promotion) when UFC signed him in 2006. He made his fighting reputation long before going to PRIDE, and continued to be a name fighter after leaving, although his greatest success has come of late in UFC, where he's currently ranked as the No. 1 pound-for-pound fighter in the world by Yahoo! Sports.
If you want to get technical, Dan Henderson fought in UFC in 1998, and Wanderlei Silva fought in UFC in 1999, before either ever fought with PRIDE. But few would argue that they weren't PRIDE fighters, and Silva was one of the faces of the promotion.
The truth is, UFC and PRIDE have always been apples and oranges. It's largely the same sport, but the organizations were completely different, and they fought with both different rules and different goals.
There are the obvious differences every fan knows. PRIDE used a ring and UFC uses a cage, the former slightly favoring stand-up fighters over ground fighters. PRIDE rules also favored strikers, with stomps, kicks to the head of a downed opponent allowed, as well as knees to a downed opponent, all banned in UFC. UFC allowed elbow strikes on the ground, a move banned in PRIDE, a move that generally favors wrestlers, giving them another weapon as they control their opponent on the ground.
But there were many differences not so obvious. PRIDE wasn't sanctioned by an overseeing body. There was no testing for steroids, which changes the entire sport. Mismatches, both when it came to major size and talent discrepancies, were more rampant. PRIDE was a major theatrical event, born out of the world of pro wrestling, with every aspect of the presentation the same except the matches themselves, at least after the early period, were real. It also had far greater general public appeal in its culture than UFC does to this day.
UFC is a growing company, but still limited to cable television and not considered one of the top five sports in the culture. The most-watched UFC fight in history, the 2006 Ken Shamrock vs. Tito Ortiz match on Spike TV, drew 5.7 million viewers. PRIDE was on the Fuji Network, in prime time, with big fights drawing up to 30 million viewers. The biggest PRIDE show ever, held in 2002, was built around Cro Cop facing Kazushi Sakuraba, an ex-pro wrestler who had become PRIDE's top drawing card. It drew 71,000 fans outdoors at Tokyo National Stadium. Cro Cop, a heavyweight, beat Sakuraba, who if he fought in UFC, would have fought as a welterweight as he was 183 pounds without cutting weight.
One of PRIDE's most popular headliners, Yoshihiro Takayama, never won a match, but his matches were legendary due to the level of beating he would absorb. But as popular as PRIDE was, due to a Yakuza scandal, it lost its network deal, and no other television network would touch the tainted product, and it simply couldn't economically survive.
A rarely talked about difference is the amount of lead team fighters had to prepare for matches. In UFC, fighters generally knew their match-ups six weeks to three months in advance. You had two people in long training camps preparing to peak on a certain day for a specific fighter and his style. In PRIDE, the matches were often not finalized until a week or two beforehand. Contract fighters knew they had to stay in shape, but they weren't peaking either their training or strategy in the same manner as UFC fighters. In addition, PRIDE's top draws fought more often, meaning their injuries weren't given time to fully heal. But top guys in PRIDE were also often given weak opponents to showcase them as stars.
PRIDE, since it was essentially booked like pro wrestling – the matches weren't fixed, but many matches were promoted with the promotion having full belief the person they expected to win would do so, would have longer builds for major matches, which meant the key guys were given easy opponents in between.
But to the general public in Japan, that was far more appealing than UFC, which is built around championships, and setting up matches where contenders face each other to determine who gets in a championship match, with some concessions being made to promote grudge matches and personalities for box office appeal.
