Minowa was 5’9 and sometimes competed as light as 170 lbs.
Minowa’s career just seems more awesome as we are now in an era of weight cutting where a guy like Rumble will compete at WW before realizing 205 is his best class and he can also beat HWs. An era where 125 lb Mighty Mouse won’t fight the 135 lb champ 10 lbs up because the money is not right and an era where Ronda stays at 135 lbs because she does not want the Cyborg fight at 140 lbs or 145 lbs. An era where Chimaev misses weight by 8 lbs because he does a big cut with hopes of winning two belts.
Here are just some of the 220 lb to 350 lb HWs and SHWs that Minowa fought over the course of his career…
Sudario
Oli Thompson
Suzukawa
Ishii
Ambriz
Hong Man Choi
Sapp
Zimmerman
Frye
Zuluzinho
Min Soo Kim
Plotcheck
Butterbean
Crocop
Giant Silva
Legeno
Kimo
Yvel
Leko
Schilt
Fulton
Despite his size, Minowa won a lot of those fights. Not too bad for a man who started his MMA career, 1-8-1. His career spanned 24 years and he retired 64-43-8 and had competed at WW, MW, LHW, HW and OW.
RIP Dave Legeno. Just learned he died when I was looking at Minowa’s record. He was an actor in such movies as Snatch and his last MMA fight was vs Herb Dean. Legeno beat Herb Dean but MinowaMan was too much for him. He also beat Kimo and Severn in his MMA career.
Yeah I remember some funny interviews from Minowa too about gaining super powers from training up in the mountains and stuff like that, he is a character.
You wonder what Minowa’s career earnings look like. He has to be very wealthy as he had some huge fights during the JMMA boom.
Looking at Minowa’s record and I saw Min-soo Kim’s record. He has to be one of the best fighters ever with a record around 3-7. The man was an Olympic silver medalist and 240 lbs and good enough to finish Yamamoto and Minowa but his record is just not too pretty because he lost to guys like Lesnar, Mighty Mo, Frye, Schilt, Sefo and Sapp when Sapp was still a fighter.
He is sort of like Pawel Nastula who was 5-6 in MMA because 3/4 of his first 4 fights were vs Big Nog, Aleks and Barnett. Nastula and Kim would kill so many fighters in MMA but they just fought such a high caliber of fighter that a casual fan of the sport might have no clue just how good they are. If they had wanted to be brought along slowly like guys do today they could both have easily started their careers 10-0 but nope, they fought prime Big Nog and Sapp in their MMA debuts because thats how it was in Japan back then.
PRIDE and K1 threw several Olympians in there in their MMA debuts with top 10 fighters, if that happened today in the UFC with an Olympian the MMA internet would have a meltdown.
his "fight " with Cro Cop was interesting.
where he lost and just after it looked into the crowd and saw that they were far from impressed and then pretended to collapse against the ropes.
I dont think you watch enough actual works to know what they look like. I’ll agree it was a mismatch and that some behind the scenes shenanigans were occuring with crocops match making through that tournament but i don’t think crocop needed minowa to take a dive
I met Minowa years ago. He’d come to train at a BJJ club and I was in town visiting. He was very rough looking as I recall, missing a tooth and covered in lumps left over from massive bruises. When we rolled, his mullet hair was hanging down so it was hard to grab his collar without grabbing his hair as well, which he really didn’t like. Also, arm locking him was next to impossible as he was very strong. He caught me with a footlock and somehow I caught him with an armbar. Then he walked off, and spent 20 minutes kneeling on the mats with his eyes closed and a look on his face of extreme shame. Then I got a picture with him.
I rolled him years ago when he was in Vancouver
He caught me in a kneebar, my friend who was a fair bit bigger dominated him and backed off a bit as he was clearly frustrated
He had zero English but kept yelling while in the bottom
( like a gym rat screaming trying to lift a weight)
