Pride Fighting Championships

Pride Fighting Championships, also written PRIDE or Pride FC and founded under the name KRS-Pride, was a Japanese mixed martial arts promotion that staged its first show at the Tokyo Dome on 11 October 1997. It grew out of Japanese professional wrestling and was built around spectacle, with opening ceremonies, elaborate entrances and no formal weight classes except for title bouts and its Grand Prix tournaments. Its rules were more permissive than the later Unified Rules, allowing stomps and soccer kicks to a downed opponent, and bouts ran in a roped ring over a ten minute opening round followed by two rounds of five minutes. Across a decade it held more than sixty events that were shown in about forty countries, and its August 2002 Shockwave and Dynamite show with K-1 drew a record live MMA crowd of 91,107. Financial trouble followed a scandal over ties to organised crime, the Fertitta brothers of Zuffa bought it in March 2007, and in October 2007 its Japanese staff were laid off. Its successors include DREAM and, from 2015, the Rizin Fighting Federation. Heavyweight Fedor Emelianenko held its title from 2003 until it closed.