A few days ago Nightmare of Battle reported the television ratings of the year end FiELDS Dynamite!! 2008 event (an updated BE Fan Post of the ratings here). To quickly recap the highest rated portion of the broadcast was the 2nd part which included fights from Mirko Cro Cop, Kazhushi Sakuraba, Badr Hari, Shinya Aoki and Bob Sapp. That portion of the broadcast recieved an overall rating of 12.9%.  It was recently learned that the highest viewed fight in that portion was of course... Bob Sapp vs Kinniku Mantaro. Wait... What?

The fight received the broadcast's highest rating of 18.1%. At this point I don't even know what to say about this news. I was a big fan of the match up when it was announced even though it was a completely ridiculous concept. I thought that it's Japanese MMA, they can get away with that sort of stuff and guys like me can watch it just for the fun of it and not take it too seriously. I didn't think though that this fight would be the highest rated fight of this star packed event. Maybe I just underestimated the appeal of freak show fights to the Japanese crowd. I am really interested in finding out which was the second most viewed fight of the event just for comparison.