Pride Fighting Championships

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PRIDE Fighting Championships

Company type	Private
Industry	Mixed martial arts promotion
Predecessor	Kingdom
Founded	1997
Founder	Nobuyuki Sakakibara Hiromichi Momose Naoto Morishita
Defunct	2007
Fate	Acquired and deactivated by Zuffa
Successor	Rizin Fighting Federation
Headquarters	Tokyo , Japan
Area served	Japan United States
Key people	Nobuyuki Sakakibara Hiromichi Momose Naoto Morishita Nobuhiko Takada
Parent	Kakutougi Revolutionary Spirits (1997–1999) Dream Stage Entertainment (1999–2007) Zuffa (2007)
Website	http://www.pridefc.com

PRIDE Fighting Championships (Pride or Pride FC, founded as KRS-Pride) was a Japanese mixed martial arts promotion company. Its inaugural event was held at the Tokyo Dome on October 11, 1997. Pride held more than sixty mixed martial arts events, broadcast to about 40 countries worldwide.^[1] PRIDE was owned by the holding company Dream Stage Entertainment (DSE).

For the ten years of its existence, PRIDE was one of the most popular MMA organizations in the world. Pride broadcast its event on Japanese pay-per-view and free-to-air television for millions of spectators in Japan, holding large events in sports stadiums, including the largest live MMA event audience record of 91,107 people at the Pride and K-1 co-production, Shockwave/Dynamite, held in August 2002,^[2] as well as the audience record of over 67,450 people at the Pride Final Conflict 2003.^[3]

With its origins in Japanese professional wrestling, PRIDE was known for its focus on spectacle and entertainment. Events were proceeded with opening ceremonies and fighters had elaborate entrances. There was no formal weight classes—except for championship belt bouts and the Grand Prix tournaments—and fighters would often matched with opponents from wildly different weights.^[3] Including the frequent promotion of "technique vs size" freakshow fights.^[4] Pride also had the Grand Prix, one-night single-elimination tournaments with multiple fighters.^[3] The PRIDE ruleset was also more permissive then the Unified Rules of Mixed Martial Arts, permitting soccer kicks, stomps and knees to downed opponents, body slams directly in the head ("spiking"), and allowed more fighting outfits, including wrestling shoes and keikogis. Matches were done in a boxing-style roped ring and went for an opening ten minute round followed by two rounds of five minutes.^[5]

In 2006, DSE started to have financial issues, as a scandal revealing ties between the company and yakuza resulted in the end of multiple lucrative contracts with Japanese broadcasters.^[3][6] In March 2007, DSE sold Pride to Lorenzo Fertitta and Frank Fertitta III, co-owners of Zuffa, which, at the time, owned the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).^[7] While remaining as legally separate entities with separate managements, the two promotions were set to cooperate in a manner akin to the AFL-NFL merger. However, such an arrangement did not materialize, and in October 2007, Pride Worldwide's Japanese staff was laid off, marking the end of the organization as an active fight promoter, while the top and most popular fighters were brought to the UFC. As a result, many of the Pride staff left to form a new organization alongside K-1 parent company Fighting and Entertainment Group. That new organization, founded in February 2008, was named DREAM.^[8]

In 2015, Pride's co-founder and former president Nobuyuki Sakakibara established Rizin Fighting Federation in Japan with the same philosophy and ambition as for the defunct Pride organization.^[9]