Control21

With it's pick in Round 21...Fighting Network RINGS selects....Rumina Sato! @jeff5819 is up next

With their pick in Round 20....Fighting Network RINGS selects.....Kenichi Yamamoto from UWFi! @Perfectly Straightedge is back on the board for Round 21.

With my 6th (19th) pick in the 1996 draft...Fighting Network RINGS selects...the real Baki the Grappler....Naoyuki Taira! With that we move on to round 20 and @Perfectly Straightedgeis back on the board

D'oh...

Great shows as always. It's interesting to see the fun undercards followed up by a solid main event. Shinya Hashimoto vs Dean Malenko and Brian Pillman vs Art Barr both sound like matches that would have been excellent. In other news, the Destruction Crew have been shown the door but the talking points will inevitably be around the "mystery man."

Thanks! Frank Shamrock actually fought in RINGS in 1997 against Kohsaka and 1999 against Tamura and both were excellent fights. I always wanted to see him against other RINGS guys like Volk Han. Takayama might be the perfect heir to Akira Maeda in terms of tall guys that can throw some stiff strikes... As for storylines, RINGS was pretty much presented like a sport. They were sort of like PRIDE before PRIDE. Fancy video game-esque graphics, and they only did singles matches (although I might introduce a tag team format). They had pre and post-fight interviews on their shows that sort of told the stories along with the in-ring stuff of course. I'll be making use of some WON-style posts to further storylines and give people a sense of what is transpiring beyond the match results. If you want a taste of what RINGS was like, you can find a lot of stuff on Youtube and the full shows are on PuroArchive's Internet Archive channel.

With my 5th (18th) pick, Fighting Network RINGS selects....Hiromitsu Kanehara @Perfectly Straightedge back on the board for Round 19.

Khabib isn't around yet so we don't have any bear fighters on our roster...maybe Volk Han could take him?

With their 4th (17th) pick in the 1996 Draft, RINGS selects....Semmy Schilt from Pancrase.

Some fights in PRIDE were worked like Takada's later matches with Otsuka and Coleman, but the majority were real. How many fights were "fixed" by dirty money is another question and one we might never know the answer to, but I'd say most of it was clean.

It would have been interesting if someone tried that in the late 80s as MMA hadn't taken off in the US yet, so I wonder if it could have reshaped the perception of wrestling with US fans like shoot-style did with Japanese fans until PRIDE sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

My next two picks will be Yoshihiro Takayama and Frank Shamrock.

I believe I have the next pick, so with that, RINGS' first pick of the 1996 draft will be.....Kazushi Sakuraba. @LowBlowPodcast Is back on the board with the 15th pick

Just a friendly note, but you have me drafting the bear when that was W*ING. Also, you had me skipping a round. By my count, my draft should start after round 13.

Commentary Team - Kenichi Takayagi, Sadaharu Tanikawa, Hideyuki Kumakubo Ring Announcer - Nobuyuki Furuta Backstage Interviewer: N/A Managers: N/A

Can't wait to get started!

Fun night with lots of solid matches. I doubt that's the last Kokina and Singh see of the Ultimate Warrior. Lanny Poffo vs Nikita Koloff promises to be a solid main event for the next show while the Guerreros vs Synergy might deliver a show stealer.

Alright, I'll keep it as it is.

RINGS' exemption list: Kiyoshi Tamura Yoshihisa Yamamoto Tsuyoshi Kohsaka Mitsuya Nagai Masayuki Naruse Wataru Sakata Volk Han Andrei Kopylov Nikolai Zouev Mikhail Ilyukhin Grom Zaza Maurice Smith Valentijn Overeem

Great show. Both of those matches sounded excellent. I really like IPW's identity so far. It feels very low-key yet there is a clear idea in terms of the type of wrestlers and matches involved. Keep up the good work!

With the second pick....I will take Fighting Network RINGS to the shock and awe of many.

Sounds good to me

As for the 4th point, shoot guys should be fine for shoot-style promotions as long as you can reference when/where they were active in a certain year. If anyone else wants to draft those types of people, that's fine too I suppose. I don't think we need to add them to the free agent pool (I can create a list if you need it), but if someone drafts them or adds them during free agency, they can reference their activity in 1996.

Yes, I did plan on making use of some Shooto and Pancrase guys...