The nostalgic fans were on tenterhooks. The opening to the first day of Rizin’s two day spectacular was relatively tame. Nobuhiko Takada, PRIDE FC’s first headliner and the man who almost knocked out Rickson Gracie , showed up looking dapper but underwhelming in a tuxedo. The alternate MMA fan found himself worrying that Rizin was cutting back on the staggering production values for which PRIDE FC was known. Nobuhiko Takada’s opening ceremony appearance in a fundoshi, or "sumo diaper" for the Westerner, had become a grand tradition in PRIDE. In his Reddit AMA a day earlier, PRIDE founder Nobuyuki Sakakibara had teased fans by stating that he didn’t know if the old style opening ceremony was planned but he knew that the fifty-five year old Takada had been working out.

No, that is the "bad" and the "ugly" of Rizin. The "good" of Rizin is five feet and five inches of karate fury. His name is Kyoji Horiguchi and he is one of the greatest fighters in the world, serving out a period of self-imposed exile.

This opening ceremony perfectly encapsulated just what Rizin is. It tries new things, and they are often very intriguing, but the old things that just don’t quite work any more are the things which actually bring in the ticket sales and the stream purchases. This writer would rather not linger on a 50-year-old Tsuyoshi Kohsaka coming out of retirement to fight the Mirko Cro Cop who just stopped King Mo and won the Rizin Open Weight Grand Prix, which could only be described as "fucking disgusting." Or on Gabi Garcia missing weight by twenty pounds when matched against a 50-year-old woman. Or on proven world class bantamweight kickboxer, Tenshin Nasukawa, being fed easy knockouts.

As the camera cut to a view of Takada’s glistening buttocks, the crowd let out a mild cheer. Takada entered the ring and stood before a giant taiko drum, suspended in the middle of the ring with the Rizin logo on the skin. He paused, waiting for his cue, then missed it and drummed wildly while out of time with the music being played through the arena.

The pyres were extinguished and the arena plunged into darkness once more. The central caped figure stepped forward to raise his hands and reveal that his elbow length latex gloves contained flashlights in each of the fingers. A drum sounded and the entrance way was spotlighted. Two of the drummers began to undress the man with the luminescent fingertips, stripping him down to a latex hakama or "Aikido skirt" and revealing him to be Nobuhiko Takada, inexplicably heralding a gasp from the silent crowd. A drumroll and a fanfare began as Takada marched down the entrance way.

PRIDE nostalgia is Rizin’s whole trip and it brought back the memories in force when the second day’s broadcast opened on a darkened Saitama Super Arena, a quartet of torches lit on the entrance ramp. Eight men entered in latex robes and in a scene which evoked memories of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and the steel mill from The Simpsons , the eight began banging on drums assembled on the stage.

Working with ATT, Horiguchi has looked better from fight to fight. After picking up his best win to date, over the top ten ranked Ali Bagautinov while stuck on the undercard of a UFC Fight Night event, Horiguchi decided he’d get better treatment in Japan. At the time, we described the move as “ perhaps the UFC's greatest failing in recent history ,” showing zero anticipation of the year to come. But letting as highly ranked a fighter as Horiguchi go, when he was one of the most exciting and hardest hitting men in the division, was a break with UFC tradition. The aforementioned Bagautinov made the same decision and jumped ship to the Russian promotion, Fight Nights Global.

Kyoji Horiguchi is the best and most proven fighter today outside of the UFC. There have been plenty who never made it to the big American shows or arrived too late, but Horiguchi is in his athletic prime and currently the most glaring omission on the UFC and Bellator rosters. A flyweight, Horiguchi fell victim to the sausage factory that is the UFC’s flyweight title picture. Why does no one care about Demetrious Johnson when he has defended his title a dozen times? becomes Quick, find someone from the undercard to fight Demetrious Johnson which again becomes Why does no one care about Demetrious Johnson when he has defended his title a dozen times? Horiguchi was green as a goose turd when he was thrown in with the flyweight king and while he showed Johnson some interesting looks on the feet, he wound up losing just the same. Horiguchi still had some serious holes in his game back then and before moving to American Top Team, Horiguchi gave up his back in almost every fight he had, despite being considerably better than most of his opponents.

After making his Rizin debut in April, Horiguchi was entered into the Rizin bantamweight grand prix, ten pounds heavier than his usual fighting weight. He smashed the aged Hideo Tokoro in the opening round back in June, then stopped three men in two nights last weekend to become the tournament champion.

Life After Ippon

The discussion of karate styles is a sticky area where you will always offend someone. You say something like “karate doesn’t really have elbows” referring to karate competition and someone will get offended and say “there are elbows in our kata!” As with every martial art, karate tapers down to whatever the rules of its competition permit. There might be some old geezer out in Thailand declaring that real Muay Thai has headbutts, but you don’t see many Nak Muay who claim half their style is out the window when the headbutt is banned. So for our purposes there are only two styles of karate—points and knockdown. Points is about tagging the opponent first at all costs before the opponent can tag you. Knockdown is a gruelling battle of body punches and high kicks. Andy Hug, Semmy Schilt, and the many top guys from the golden days of K-1 were knockdown stylists. Horiguchi is a points stylist and he might be the best example of it in MMA today.

Points karate is largely built around the reverse punch, gyaku-zuki. Typically to score in competition this comes from about chest height and has to come back to the hip in hikite to score. This leads to the low hands of karate competition. As we noted back in Lyoto Machida and the Double Edged Sword of Competition Karate:

The point sparring system just produces an atrocious attitude to exchanges. A fighter will dive in with a straight punch to the midsection, then pull his hand back to his hip, and turn his back while shouting, to convince the judges that he totally did just score. Often both fighters will pirouette around the mat, mouths open, “selling the point.”

If you do that in MMA you stand a great chance of being cracked after you have landed your punch. As Holly Holm showed the other night, you can land your rear hand perfectly and still get hit with two shots while you admire your work. The old karate mantra of ikken hissatsu or "one strike, certain annihilation" is a good training philosophy, not a guaranteed outcome.

What Horiguchi does so well is burst in to score the point, then continue into something more sensible and "real." Adding a little bit of head movement has made his karate far more reliable in the wild world of four ounce gloves. Most often he’ll blitz in on the 1-2, then weave out to his right side. Many coaches, including Freddie Roach, like weaving out to the right side off right-handed punches because the left hook is an expected counter when the fighter closes the distance to fire his right straight. Or he’ll burst in and immediately stiff arm out to range.

Or he’ll burst in, push his man back and skip up into a left high kick. It’s using that traditional karate burst to get to the inside, and then building off being on the inside before the opponent has time to swing back that makes for that beautiful combination of karate and boxing.

Horiguchi has had a ton of success connecting his right hand, stepping out to his right side and weaving into a left hook. A simple counter punch but one which normally you would see in extended mid-range exchanges in boxing. Closing the range and moving into it as Horiguchi does and as T.J. Dillashaw did to spark Renan Barao the second time is essentially starting the counter without concerning yourself about reacting to the opponent on the inside. In fact, curiously enough during his Shooto run, Horiguchi’s left hook was his main lead and he was considerably wilder in his leaps across the floor.

One of the more interesting differences between Kyoji Horiguchi and other points karateka in MMA like the Machida brothers, is that he doesn’t often switch stances and he seems to prefer being in closed position to open position. Where Lyoto Machida constantly looks for that southpaw counter left straight while leaning outside the lead foot, and Stephen Thompson retreats to throw the southpaw counter left straight through the open side, Horiguchi is always in an orthodox stance, looking for his right hand. And where Machida is often kicking straight into the open side with his rear leg, Horiguchi uses skip up lead leg kicks to attack the body and head on the open side. Very few fighters can get the same pop into a skip up body kick from such a side on stance. This kick forms a double attack with the high kick should the opponent’s right hand get a little low or close to their head.

In the tournament quarter final, Horiguchi was matched against Gabriel Oliveira, a 10-0 fighter from Brazil fresh off a knockout of Tatsuya Kawajiri. Against Oliveira, Japan’s littlest bantamweight looked a class apart.

In karate there are three initiatives—Sen, Sen-no-sen, and Go-no-sen. To hear more about those, check out Ringcraft: The Three Initiatives. But to summarize: Sen is to attack, Go-no-sen is to defend and then attack—or a delayed counter—and Sen-no-sen is to attack as the opponent attacks—a simultaneous or intercepting counter. Horiguchi burst in on Oliveira, weaved his head out after his right hand, but Oliveira had run a mile. As Oliveira stepped back in to kick, Horiguchi intercepted him. Sen-no-sen is considered the highest level technique in karate, and of course was the focal point of Bruce Lee’s philosophy: Jeet Kune Do, meaning "The Way of the Intercepting Fist."

This is how most karate competitions go—you are trying to get in as fast as possible, or away as fast as possible, and if you can convince your opponent you’re running but actually step in as he does, you’ve made a perfect collision. This was both Lyoto and Chinzo Machida’s main method for accumulating knockdowns and knockouts without tremendous hitting power.

As a bonus—for all of his big bursts across the floor, Horiguchi uses the low line side kick in just the subtle way you like to see. There are two ways to use it: to keep someone the hell away from you, and to annoy and set up further attacks. Both of those are helped along by planting the foot straight on the opponent’s knee as you bounce in. Pulling the knee up to the chest and stomping down as hard as possible—as Yair Rodriguez always does—simply results in the opponent running a mile and you missing the second part of your sick two-touch combo by even further.

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