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#1 Kazushi Sakuraba
A true legend of the sport, Kazushi Sakuraba was last seen on 12/29/2015, losing in sad fashion to Shinya Aoki at the age of 46. For viewers watching him for the first time, it was probably hard to believe that in his prime, he was arguably the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world.
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But that was the truth – prime Sakuraba was an incredible talent and only the weird nature of Japanese MMA – the need to pit the best native fighters against monsters from foreign lands – meant that he peaked far earlier than he should’ve done and took criminal amounts of damage.
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After a brief UFC appearance in 1997 that saw him win an early openweight tournament, Sakuraba shot to fame in PRIDE as one of the most exciting talents on the scene. An incredibly skilled submission artist with a wicked wrestling game, at times it appeared that Sakuraba was unstoppable.
His peak came in late 1999 when he became the first man to defeat one of the legendary Gracie family – in this instance Royler – in a modern MMA fight. He followed this up by beating another three Gracies – Royce, Renzo and Ryan – earning the nickname ‘The Gracie Hunter’.
This was 2001 and if he’d been in the UFC, Sakuraba would’ve been fighting – and probably beating –the likes of Carlos Newton and Matt Hughes at 170lbs. Unfortunately, though, he was pitted against huge monsters like Wanderlei Silva and Mirko Cro Cop – men that outweighed him by massive amounts – in the ring of PRIDE and the damage began to add up even when he managed to beat large 205lbers like Kevin Randleman and Quinton Jackson.
By 2003 Sakuraba was seen as washed-up, but he continued to fight into the latter part of the decade despite taking hellacious beatings from the likes of Ricardo Arona and Melvin Manhoef.
Even as a battered shell of his former self, he was still able to pull out the odd win – witness his miraculous 2009 submission of Zelg Galesic. Despite slipping into self-parody at the end, Sakuraba in his prime was a one-of-a-kind fighter – a man before his time – and in any other era, he’d probably be a legendary UFC champion. As it is, he’s still far and away the best MMA fighter ever produced in Asia.
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