Pride Fighting Championships New Year's Eve Pics+Vids

Being a fan for more than 13 years of MMA (and practitioner of related arts), I finally got the opportunity to go to a Pride show and see it live! It was fantastic! While you get a better view of the fights if you stay at home, seeing everything in person in reality was soooo different from television viewing, I'm thinking of going to see every show live. It made for an unbelievable New Year's Eve. I was really moved by the whole thing, seeing the show pulled off (over 5 hours), it was a work of mastery, the introduction with pyrotechnics, amazing music. There's so much I can say, maybe I'll get some question comments to answer. It left me floored!

Here are pictures, videos and descriptions from parts of my trip (no pics or vids of the fights, there's a million sites to find those).

PLEASE REMEMBER - the pictures are shown only very small here - please click on the photo to see a larger and much nicer view. Only then will you actually see what you should see!

We left my apartment at 12:30 to get some lunch. We decided on West Park Cafe, which I think has the best burgers in Japan. They have 4 branches I think, we chose the Marunouchi one as brought us closer to Pride (the Saitama Super Arena at the Saitama Shintoshin station - roughly north from Tokyo). West Park Cafe is in the Marunouchi Building (shortened to "Marubiru") basically in front of Tokyo Station. It takes 9 minutes on the train to Tokyo Station. After eating, we went out on the deck of marubiru and I took these two photos. Tokyo Station and the main post office. I think it has an interesting appearance and with the traffic circle, almost like London.




Looking for an ATM, now 2pm, we went through the tunnel to get from marubiru back to tokyo station. This photo isn't great, but there's these realistic underwater scenes on the walls and such, It's a really interesting and quiet hall.



We went back to Tokyo station and had to wait 10 minutes for the next Keihin-touhoku train heading through Saitama. Because of the holidays there were no express trains so it was going to take us 49 minutes. Thankfully the arena is attached to Saitama Shintoshin station, so once reaching the station, it took us 2 minutes to reach the arena. Waiting for the train, I saw this ad featuring Astro-Boy (called Atomu - Atom - Adam in Japan). I've always like him so here it is.



And here's the first picture of going from Saitama Shintoshin station towards the entrance to the arena. We arrived at 3:15. The show was starting at 4:00.



Here are two pictures of the outside of the arena. From here we looked for the booth to get our tickets and then went sightseeing/shopping.




I ended up buying a Nogueira shirt, thankfully he won later that evening. I wanted to get one of the pride credit cards (pic below) but there wasn't much time. I also got 2 Josh Barnett pride trading cards, but I don't want them. As you can see, the cards come with Takada or Crocop etc.



Here's two pictures from the booth for member's club/credit cards. They were blasting the pride theme music so for at least a half mile around it was all you could hear. Really felt like OK WE'RE AT PRIDE!




It was getting close to the 4pm showtime so we decided to head in. Lots of people were taking their photos at this big Pride poster showing all of the fighters.



Here's three pictures of the arena as it's filling in over the next 30 minutes before the show started. It was packed. I need to find out the attendance. The third picture giant tapestry says "Otoko Matsuri" - it means "Festival for Men!"





The show started at about 4:15pm. Here's a picture from the intro - there's 2 giant screens at the right, a huge group of singers below that, Takada playing a giant drum below that. There were all sorts of light effects, fire, explosions, it was amazing. Then the show began, I put away the camera and watched with intent!



After the show ended at 10:15pm, we walked with the crowds back to the station. Here are 3 pictures of the holiday lights around the arena and station.





Here is a giant thumbs-up from the pride show, I think this was about as tall as a person and on top of a 10 foot booth.



And a last blurry pic of the lights walking down the path to the station.



Finally the videos - Two of the outside (lights, the pride music, booths) and one verrrry short (2 second clip) from the intro (you can hear the crazy female announcer, see Takada, the singers, effects, etc.)