News from across the Pacific is that World Victory Road has found an opponent for Kevin Randleman -- a natural Light Heavyweight who frequently fights at Heavyweight. And of course, its Middleweight Pancrase vet Ryo Kawamura. This shit just pisses me off. I realize that there is a limited pool of Japanese heavyweights, but must they throw guys like Kawamura under the bus? Not only is Ryo undersized to be taking on Randleman, but he's just moving up to the "major leagues" having fought all but a couple fights in Pancrase. Also, not that I think Kawamura will become an all-time great, but I'll never forgive PRIDE for destroying the greatest Japanese MMA fighter of all-time by pushing him into bouts with fighters one or two divisions larger than him (see pic).

And as we've seen a lot recently, the guys coming from the 2nd tier Japanese promotions -- K-Taro Nakamura, Kuniyoshi Hironaka, Kotetsu Boku, Artur Oumakhanov -- have a hard enough time handling the step up to top flight competition. Its pretty clear that SENGOKU has a pretty shallow talent pool, but that's no reason to continue the very worst tradition of PRIDE -- feeding the best Japanese fighters to much larger elite international fighters. Randleman should be fighting proven 205ers like Babalu, Vitor Belfort, or even heavies like Jeff Monson, not green middleweights.

Meanwhile they're working to get an opponent for Josh Barnett's headline bout, Sherdog is mentioning "either Olympic judo silver medalist Naoya Ogawa or five-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu world champion Marcio Cruz" as possibilities. Neither fighter is really a match for Barnett and I'd much rather see him take on Jeff Monson, who's at least been a top ten fighter in recent years. This also makes me think its very very unlikely that Barnett will be fighting on the rumored June Affliction card with Fedor and Sylvia.

Update [2008-4-22 19:15:39 by Kid Nate]:

For those who don't know, I'm referring to Japanese MMA legend Kazushi "The Gracie Hunter" Sakuraba. Clearly its time for me to get off my ass and do some more installments of MMA History.