Awesome / Universal Wrestling Federation

• In the original UWF Super Tiger vs Yoshiaki Fujiwara with their master Karl Gotch coming to the ring before the match to shake their hands and watch the match between his two best students.
• UWF Year-End Special - 12/5/1984, Co-Main Event: Kazuo Yamazaki vs Nobuhiko Takada, the only 5-Star rated shoot style wrestling match by The Wrestling Observer Newsletter and Dave Meltzer even stated at the time "This was definitely, the best match I’ve ever seen in my entire life.". Also a personal one for Yamazaki, he actually beats Takada.
• Nobuhiko Takada striking Koji Kitao with a high kick which would have made Mirko Cro Cop go "not bad". After the hit, the mighty sumo fell like a bag of potatoes and the arena exploded.
• Hayato Sakurai busting out a no-hands version of Sakuraba's cartwheel guard pass.
• The Steve Nelson versus Ralph Gracie rematch in USWF 11. Unlike their first encounter at Battlecade/Extreme Fighting 2 which lasted less than a minute, the rematch lasted about fifteen minutes, with the last moments of the fight with Nelson mounting Gracie and delivering palm strikes until Gracie escaped and submitted Nelson with an armbar. The fight was named 1998 Fight of the Year by No Holds Barred host Eddie Goldman. The fight was also a Heartwarming Moment for Nelson as his father, "Mr Wrestling" Gordon Nelson was in his corner for the first and only time.
• Minoru Suzuki defeating Ken Shamrock by submission in Pancrase (not their worked fight, but the earlier one) with a terrifying leglock combo. He became the only fighter besides Royce Gracie in submitting Shamrock for real, and actually injured him with the feat.
  • In their second fight, Suzuki miraculously escaping a fully extended cross armbar and finally submitting him. Even if this time it was worked, was also a beautiful thing to behold.
• The second fight between Bas Rutten and Masakatsu Funaki. Often considered the greatest match in Pancrase history.
• Yuki Nakai’s run at Vale Tudo Japan 1995. Nakai had the reputation of Shooto on his shoulders going into the tournament after the failure of Kenji Kawaguchi to pass the first round of the 1994 tournament and that he was also the smallest guy in the tournament by a significant margin. Nakai was first matched against Gerard Gordeau, while a dangerous karateka, his lack of ground skills should have made him rather easy to beat like Royce Gracie did as there were no rope escapes like the other U-System promotions. Unfortunately they forgot to take into account that compared to the Gordeau in the UFC 1 finals, who had broken fists and foot at the time, this time Gordeau was fresh and not wanting to suffer another defeat by submission was prepared to ignore the rules and maim his opponents that night. When their fight hit the ground in the second round with Nakai working for a heel hook, Gordeau proceed to jab Nakai’s right eye repeatedly, which got the fight restarted on the feet and surprisingly Gordeau was not disqualified. After nearly 30 minutes, Nakai finally got Gordeau to submit with a heel hook. Despite his right eye being gravely injured and having lost half of his eyesight, Nakai refused treatment and went to the ring to fight against American amateur and pro wrestler Craig Pittman who was almost double Nakai weight. Craig proceeded to ground-and-pound Nakai, who in return tried for armbars in the guard till he eventually got one to submit Pittman in the second round. Now almost completely blind due to both his eyes being swollen shut, he faced off against Rickson Gracie. While Rickson declared to himself that he would not punch Nakai, he was met by strong resistance from Nakai and eventually got frustrated enough to give a few punches anyway to get Nakai to give up his back and put on a rear naked choke to submit Nakai. With his incredible performance that night, he saved Shooto’s pride and reputation after last year’s disappointing run for the shootists and kept his right eye’s blindness a secret for years so that MMA would have a chance to grow into what it is today, and according to the man himself, it was Worth It.
• Kiyoshi Tamura's fight against Renzo Gracie. First came out Renzo, clad in his Gracie Jiu Jitsu gi and carrying the aura of a family which was carving a way through the Japanese ranks and that only recently had suffered a controversial defeat. And then came out Tamura, wearing his eternal red tights and walking out to the UWF theme music with the load of the promotion over his shoulders. That night, when everything looked lost, history repeated itself, and a man who had botched horribly his debut in the shootfighting field made up for his failure and saved the pride of a promotion.
• Akira Maeda vs Aleksander Karelin. A kind of match-up one would expect of Nobuhiko Takada in UWFI, this was the closest thing to seeing Karelin in MMA.
• Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs Volk Han in an awesome grappling exhibition in RINGS.
  • Fujiwara vs Shinya Aoki at the Next Exciting Wrestling debut show.
  • Fujiwara and Yuki Kondo vs. Minoru Suzuki and a man making his pro wrestling debut… Yuki Nakai at a Hard Hit event on 30 December 2019. Now for free on YouTube from Hard Hit’s channel.
• The Overeem brothers once attended some night club and got into an incident when Alistair went to the toilet and did not have coins to pay the toilet woman. Alistair told her he would pay a euro when he came back, because he did not have change. Then the security guard who was near by started to get involved. Valentijn saw the incident and also started asking what the problem was. They offered to pay, but by then 6 security guards came over surrounding them. The Overeem brothers were asked to leave, Alistair was already outside when he saw his brother Valentijn fighting. Valentijn tried discussing the situation on his way outside when one of the security guards hit Valentine in the face with a flash light. Three security guards dived onto Valentijn and Alistair went back inside to help his brother. This resulted in five security guards in the hospital, one guard fired and Alistair's hand injured which prevented him from defending his Strikeforce Heavyweight Championship in a rematch against Fabrício Werdum at Strikeforce: Carano vs. Cyborg. Long story short do not mess with the Overeem brothers.

---