Pride LW & WW NAMES!!

Holy shit Pride as well as its Bushido show are pulling out all the stops this year! Apart from the Pride Middleweight GP, Pride today announced that the first round of the Lightweight as well as Welterweight tournaments both kick off on their September 25th show. Both are 8 man tournaments.

The names under official consideration for the LW tourney are as follows:

Gomi

"Mach" Sakurai

Kawajiri

Kotani

Mishima

Jens Pulver

Yves Edwards

Ralph Gracie

Luiz Azeredo

Buscape

Charles 'Crazy Horse' Bennett (sp?)

Joachim Hansen

Gomi is the first fighter who has been officially announced. Gomi said his dream final would be against Mach Sakurai, who Gomi has lots of respect and admiration for. Either way, any match ups you make, they all look good!

As for the 8 man Welterweight tounrament held at the same time, the following names are under consideration:

Ryo Chonan

Minowa

Gohno

Misaki

Ryuta Sakurai

Yasu Namekawa

Akira Shoji (wtf?)

Daniel Acacio (sp?)

Murillo Bustamante

Phil Baroni

Dennis Kahn

Paulo Filho

They are thinking about Yuki Kondo as well.

This is a great time to be a fan!

i'd love to hendo drop to 185 for a ww tourney

No Sak?

damn...they got the wrong punk in there...drop minowa out...bring in hendo...drop ralph gracie and bring in josh thomson

Sucks that Crosley Gracie might not be in it. Not suprising though, given that he broke his hand against Gono, and may not even be back training fully yet.

Where's Josh Thompson?

Mach was pretty heavy in his fight with Crosely, lost a lot of weight to get back to his natural 77kg (?) for the Viera fight, now he has more dieting to do.

I'm not a fan of too many weight divisions, but ~80kg divison makes sense considering there are so many Japanese fighters around that weight.