Ask James Thompson about his favorite memory from his days fighting in Japan, and you’re likely to get a story about an omelet.
The truth is that Thompson, who first fought in Japan for the old PRIDE promotion back in 2004, has a lot of good memories from those days. But pretty much everyone you ask about fighting in Japan will tell you the same kind of story about how much fun it was, how much the Japanese people love and respect mixed martial artists in a way that Americans do not, how they were treated like rock stars.
But Thompson’s most vivid memory is about an omelet, though the omelet itself isn’t the thing that sticks out in his mind.
“I was standing in line for breakfast and I was behind Wanderlei Silva,” Thompson says. “I just couldn’t believe I was there, watching him get his omelet done.”
Japan was something of a culture shock for Thompson, as it is for most people who visit there for the first time. Everything is brighter and weirder and just more vivid. That was especially true for PRIDE, a promotion that was created for the purpose of matching up the popular Japanese professional wrestler Nobuhiko Takada and Rickson Gracie. PRIDE did these sort of “freak show” fights for a long time. They were enormously popular, and Thompson—a massive MMA fan himself—loved taking it all in.
“I was lucky to be there,” he says. “I should have taken more pictures. I didn’t get as many as I wanted to.”
Luckily for Thompson, he gets a second chance to take all those pictures and to experience the sights and sounds of a big Japanese MMA event. On Christmas Day, he’ll board a flight bound for Tokyo. On December 29, he fights for the Rizin Fighting Federation against Tsuyoshi Kohsaka, himself a veteran of PRIDE who has faced just about every big name you can think of from the last decade of fighting.
The promotion is the spiritual successor to PRIDE, created by former PRIDE executive Nobuyuki Sakakibara. PRIDE legends Fedor Emelianenko and Kazushi Sakuraba are under contract, which is perhaps unfortunate in Sakuraba’s case.
Rizin is not PRIDE, but it’s close enough, and it features the kind of matchups PRIDE used to book and the kind that have now become the hallmark of Bellator MMA under the leadership of Scott Coker. Since competing with the UFC using its model is kind of a bad idea, Coker has gone the other direction. He brought in Tito Ortiz and Kimbo Slice and Ken Shamrock, using big names from the past in the hopes of bringing in eyeballs to his product. So far, it has worked. And nobody is more enthused than Thompson.
“I think Bellator are really smart. A lot of people don’t like it, but it has been clever. Scott has the right idea. You never know what he’s going to do,” Thompson says. “Competing directly against the UFC is an uphill struggle. He’s getting these big marquee matchups not for hardcore fans like myself, but for the average fan sitting at home. And then he’s putting decent fights on underneath it. I think it’s great.”
Thompson is like every other fighter. Ask him about the possibilities of future opponents, and he’ll say he just takes it one fight at a time, that he doesn’t worry about what’s coming up after this one. But there are two potential fights that he feels absolutely comfortable in saying that he wants: Kimbo Slice and Bobby Lashley.
Thompson has faced Slice before, way back in 2008, for the old EliteXC promotion. It was a historic night because it was the first time a major MMA promotion aired a live event on a big American network. And it was also notable because, well, Slice punched Thompson’s giant cauliflower ear and it exploded, right there on national television. It was gross.
Thompson was TKO’d by Slice in the third round. He always likes to avenge losses whenever possible, and so Slice is definitely on his radar.
“There’s so much what was wrong with that fight in so many ways,” he says. “It’s a chance to put the record straight.”
And then there’s Lashley. He and Thompson have faced each other twice, and they each own a victory over the other. In November, Lashley scored a TKO win over Thompson in just 54 seconds, which would seemingly put an emphatic end to the rivalry. But Thompson says otherwise.
“I know he’s acting like he’s satisfied, but it was a freak injury on my hamstring,” he says. “A third fight to finish that would be a good one.”
But for now, there is a flight to Tokyo, and there is Kohsaka and the Japanese people and the theatrics that go along with a show of this magnitude. And this time around, Thompson plans on enjoying the sights, on taking it all in and savoring the moment.
Read more MMA news on BleacherReport.com