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The MMA world has lost one of its pioneers, following the death of Norifumi "Kid" Yamamoto, a Japanese combat sports man, a month after being diagnosed with cancer. He was 41 years old.
Kid was the youngest of three, born in a famous Japanese wrestling family. His father Ikuei fought at the 1972 Olympics and his older sisters Miyuu and Seiko won seven world championships between them. (Seiko is also married to Yu Darvish.) Kid was sent to Arizona to go to high school and train as a wrestler under Townsend and Tricia Saunders; After winning three state titles, he returned to Japan and almost made the 2000 Japanese Olympic team.
Legend has it that Kid started playing MMA when his brother-in-law Enson Inoue, a Hawaiian MMA pioneer, helped him out of jam with Yakuza after Kid accidentally shot a mafioso in the face with a BB rifle. Inoue is one of the most outstanding heavyweights of the early days of MMA, and he helped make Kid a true star. In the early 2000s, the MMA was the Wild West Wild, and Kid was one of the most legitimizing forces of the sport in Japan, passing from a strange rigged spectacle to a real sport.
The lighter weight classes did not have the same prestige as, say, the light heavyweights at the time, and even though Kid only had 5 feet 4 inches and something like 150 He fought to fight His handsome face, his bad boy character and his intrepid desire to fight larger men make him a real celebrity in the early years. On the eve of the New Year, Kid set foot in the box against Masato, a 20-pound world champion, and made a first turnaround on the road to victory.
Kid was defeated for the Shooto and K-1 HERO in Japan, accumulating a 17-1-1 record before his first retirement in 2007. Although the basis of his game was the fight, Kid was an athlete Monster who finished ten fights from 2003 to 2006. One of them was his famous four-second KO flying against Kazuyuki Miyata.
He also cleared Royler Gracie (the vignette is smashed, but the video works).
After Kid dislodged his elbow trying to be part of the 2008 Olympic team, he lost a leg and won only his next three fights. It was signed by the UFC in 2011, although the version of Kid that fought Demetrious Johnson in 2011 was far from being as formidable as it was at its peak. It's a shame that Kid was never able to enter the octagon before being washed, because he would have been shipwrecked.
He finished his 18-6 career with two no-contest, but his impact is much bigger than that. Kid Yamamoto was one of the best wrestlers of his time, and the mixed martial arts sport would not be where he is without him.
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