Issue 075
May 2011
He’s the Japanese MMA superstar who rose to prominence with displays of merciless violence and blood-hungry aggression. Now ‘Kid’ Yamamoto has entered the UFC and is set to destroy
Norifumi ‘Kid’ Yamamoto’s nickname may evoke a sense of purity and innocence, yet his fighting spirit demonstrates nothing of the sort. In the cage, the Japanese fighter is a dangerous and unrelenting tyrant. During his formidable MMA career, the 33-year-old has left his opponents eating through straws, amassed a brutal seven-fight KO winning streak and shot members of the Japanese mafia. Try telling the 5’4” 135lb scrapping machine that he is just a ‘kid’.
A fighter revered by Japanese fans, highlight reels of Yamamoto’s frentic and explosive style saturate the Internet. His bad-boy image is most famously chronicled in his 2002 bout with Tetsuo Katsuta, in which he blitzes Katsuta unconscious with an airstrike of vicious blows, fracturing his opponent’s facial bones in the process. What’s more disturbing is that after the knockout, officials and cornermen had to tear ‘Kid’ off Katsuta’s limp body and restrain him as the relentless fighter
aimed to spill even more blood. Yamamoto’s legacy has sees him boast an 18-4-1 record, attaining most of his victories in brutal K-1 Hero’s clashes. His career has also seen saw consecutively destroy 14 opponents during a five-year rampage, solidifying him as a semi-mythical figure in the sport.
Now Yamamoto is making his much anticipated venture into the UFC. “It has always been my dream to fight in the UFC,” the 33-year-old Yamamoto says candidly. “It makes me feel young, more like a rookie coming up.” Already there’s talk of long-awaited match-ups with other headline-hogging fighters like former WEC poster boy Urijah Faber.
“One day I’d like to fight Urijah Faber,” he says. “We will definitely fight. But right now I am ready to fight anyone in my weight class.”
To MMA fans, it is the arrival of the biggest Japanese star the UFC has ever seen. The wave of Yamamoto fever has not only infected millions of adoring Japanese fans, but has also caused hysteria stateside. Yamamoto only has to show his face briefly and the hardcore MMA community goes into raptures – perhaps best embodied by a short cameo in the audience during season nine of The Ultimate Fighter, where fans flooded forums with responses of jubilation to rumors of his potential inception into
the UFC.
On the back of a severe knee injury and an unfortunate decision loss to American wrestler Joe Warren at Dream 9 in 2009, some argue that Yamamoto’s form has dipped as of late. A successive loss against Masanori Kanehara at Dream 14 in 2010 drew even more ire from aficionados. Yet Yamamoto now feels reborn, and he’s taking no prisoners. “I am 100% ready to go,” he says. “Everybody sees this as a fresh start for me.”
A fresh start means fighting at his lower and more natural weight class (bantamweight) and a renewed desire to tear up anyone dropped in front of him. While he has destroyed a range of high-caliber opponents such as Genki Sudo, Caol Uno and Royler Gracie, recent Japanese signings have not fared well inside the Octagon. Does this worry Yamamoto?
“When I’m fighting, I don’t think of anything like that,” he says. “I’m just thinking about all the hard hours I put in the gym and showing the world what I can do. All I’m thinking about is taking every chance possible to destroy my opponent.”
During his career, Yamamoto has taken a firm hold of the many chances thrown at him. He’s proven himself time after time with displays of elite wrestling; a pedigree he’s earned growing up in the States. Although born in Kawasaki, Japan, Yamamoto was raised in Arizona in his youth. Wrestling at the Marcos de Niza High School, his name is still scribed in the school’s records as Nori Yamamoto. He has the ninth highest all-time career record with 122 wins and 4 losses between 1993 and 1997, and won the State Championships three times; as a sophomore, junior and senior, without losing a single match.
The wrestling connection came from his father, Ikuei Yamamoto, a grappling guru who wrestled for Japan at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The Yamamotos are a family united by wrestling, with Kid’s sisters Miyu and Seiko holding a total of seven world freestyle wrestling titles. As an exchange student, he would develop his wrestling credentials by living and training under the tutelage of Townsend Saunders, a 1996 Olympic silver medalist in freestyle wrestling at 150lb, before moving in with his head wrestling coach Jim Weed.
Upon returning to Japan to attend Yamanashi Gakuin University, Yamamoto finished second place in the prestigious national wrestling tournament, the Emperor’s Cup, in 1999, falling just short of a place in the Sydney Olympic Games. It looked as if a promising wrestling career beckoned. Tragically, it was cut short after a near-deadly incident with Japan’s equivalent of the mafia, the yakuza. After accidentally shooting a member of the Yakuza in the face with an air gun, they hunted Yamamoto down by tracking where he was living through his car’s licence plate. Although details are admittedly sketchy, Yamamoto was able to jump of his balcony in a narrow escape before the yakuza got to him. Japanese MMA legend Enson Inoue, who was married to Kid’s sister at the time, was able to pull strings with his underworld connections and stop any serious retaliations for his accidental attack, but it was enough for the image-conscious Japanese Wrestling Association and the university to take action. He was banned from wrestling for one year and expelled from university.
Not wanting to see Yamamoto’s talent wasted, Enson invited him to train MMA at his Purebred gym in Tokyo. During that year, under Enson’s guidance, Kid won the All-Japan Amateur Shooto (MMA) title and fell in love with fighting. After his one-year wrestling probation was up, Kid’s father tried to call him back to wrestle again but Yamamoto elected to stay with Enson and fight MMA, a decision that did not go down well with the Yamamoto patriarch. Enson used his contacts in the MMA industry to advance Kid’s career, securing him a two-year contract with K-1, which was unheard of at the time.
“I’d like to know what he’s up to now. He introduced me to a lot of people,” says Yamamoto of Enson. “He made me tougher. He connected me to a lot of people.” As Yamamoto rocketed to nationwide stardom and larger pay checks, he and Enson began to disagree on a moral level. Yamamoto wanted to break his contract with K-1 for a special rules match, which didn’t sit right with Enson. In the end, Kid left Purebred and returned to the guidance of his father.
“My dad has always supported me, in everything, not just MMA,” says Yamamoto. “If I am passionate about it, he supports me.” Yamamoto’s crowning glory came in December 2005, when he TKO’d Genki Sudo to win the K-1 Hero’s middleweight (155lb) grand prix final. An impressive feat considering Yamamoto is a natural 135lb’er.
The following year, in a bout with the highly lethal wrestler Kazuyuki Miyata, Yamamoto
set the fastest knockout in K-1 history with a brutal four-second flying knee KO that left his opponent with a broken jaw and eating through a straw for months. As Miyata lay on the deck, eyes rolled back into his skull, Yamamoto fired one more vicious blow to his face for good measure.
His father’s influence and the lure of an Olympic wrestling shot led Yamamoto to take a hiatus from MMA at the height of his career. In 2007, Yamamoto wrestled in the 132lb class at the Emperor’s Cup for a place at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. After winning his first match comfortably, he found himself at the wrong end of a takedown from decorated wrestler Kenji Inoue and suffered a badly dislocated elbow, and as quickly as that, the Olympic dream was over. Kid had even renamed his gym to Krazy Bee, from its original and far less Olympic-committee-friendly Killer Bee. After the Olympics, Yamamoto turned his sights back onto MMA. He is now pursuing it with an unrivaled determination, with the UFC bantamweight belt firmly in his sight.
After a career spanning a decade, a highlight reel of savage knockouts and a character that is merciless and violent, it comes as no surprise that Yamamoto has earned himself a legion of Japanese fans that hold the highest of expectations. “I don’t feel any pressure to represent Japan in the UFC, but I feel that my gym’s name, Krazy Bee, will lose value if I lose,” he says. “Although of course I am Japanese, so I naturally represent Japan when I fight.”
At UFC 126, despite his excellent wrestling caliber, Yamamoto would lose by a unanimous decision against wrestler Demetrious ‘Mighty Mouse’ Johnson. It was a classic example of first-time Octagon ‘jitters’. Perhaps focusing too much on his stand-up, Yamamoto was taken down numerous times during the bout.
“I was taken down too much like a little girl,” he said in a post-fight interview with World MMA Award’s 2010 Journalist Of The Year, Ariel Helwani. “I learned a lot in that bout on how to fight in the UFC. Next time I’m going to improve my takedown defense and I’ll shoot for more takedowns. I’d fight again tomorrow if I had the chance. I feel like I’ve let my fans down and I’ve disappointed everyone in the world so I’m sorry. Next time, I will be better.”
Yamamoto has now expressed he would consider moving training camps to the US to gain a better understanding of the American style of wrestling. If he can synthesize his knowledge of Japanese wrestling with the MMA-specific grappling style that’s currently so prominent in the UFC, his potential to tear up the bantamweight division holds no limit. Refusing to let the loss faze him, he still pursues American glory with a focus and tenacity, keen to resurrect the brutal legacy that served him so well in the Far East. “I don’t feel like I have any unfinished business or anything like that in Japan but I would like to fight there again one day,” he says. “But first, I must do my best in America.”
