Stories from the Road: Fedor Emelianenko

Nobuyuki Sakakibara succeeded for a time in successfully promoting the sport’s No. 1 heavyweight, mostly by getting out of his way and letting Emelianenko operate like a sportsman while multiple parties attempted to stake out their turf in the background.

I remember thinking Fedor was this invincible being after he dominated Mirko [Filipovic] in 2005. Going into this fight, the odds were even, but at the end of the day [and] although it went to decision, Fedor simply dominated the fight overall. Fedor’s got this aura that gives him the sense of being undefeatable. His ground-and-pound was something that stood out during those days, like his brutal ground-and-pound against “Minotauro” Nogueira. I remember the durability that he showed in the [Kazuyuki] Fujita fight and [Kevin] Randleman fight. I mean coming back immediately after doing the chicken dance is something not all fighters can do. He defined “undisputed champion.”

I was very impressed when we took Pride to Las Vegas and Fedor fought Mark Coleman back in 2006. The entire crowd in Las Vegas was cheering for Fedor. Usually you would expect a “USA” chant, but that didn’t happen. It just shows how much respect everybody had for Fedor and how much recognition and influence Pride had to the world. One of the reasons why Fedor had so much popularity is because of his fight style. He is always aggressive and doesn’t hold back one bit. That’s why he’s such an exciting fighter and why people respect him so much.

Fedor loves rollercoasters, and I remember Fedor would always visit Fuji-Q Highland to go ride Japan’s most thrilling rides after his fights. I think he’s the type of guy who finds excitement through the thrill and by taking risks. The contrast between his regular calm behavior and his aggressiveness inside the ring is definitely one of his appeals. Fedor Emelianenko is definitely a fighter who cannot be replaced when talking about Japanese MMA, and he is a true superstar that any fight fan would know here in Japan.

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Jacob “Stitch” Duran was given a chance to wrap Emelianenko’s hands when the Russian returned to competition after suffering a broken thumb. Of course, he agreed.

The last time I worked with Bellator, I think he fought in San Jose. I got out of the taxi into the lobby to check in. He’s down in the lobby sitting there with his team. He comes up to me and gives me a hug, and he don’t do that. I’ll tell you why all this happened going forward, but he hugs me and said, “I have some sweats for you.” I said, “No kidding?” He sent a guy to go upstairs and he got them and came down and gave me the sweats. I thought that was so admirable, because usually when you create sweats, you do that in your home country. He included me in that, and that’s how we ended up working our final fight together.

I was going to the Pride fights with Josh Barnett. When I got there all these guys wanted me to wrap their hands and all that. Josh was saying, “No, you know what? I paid to bring ‘Stitch’ over here. If you guys want him to wrap your hands, it’ll cost you 500 bucks.” I’d come back with two, three grand easy.

So Fedor had just come back from his first fight back because he had broken his thumb. The promoter came and asked me if I would be willing to wrap Fedor’s hands. Bro, I didn’t talk dollars or cents. He’s Fedor. This was way back. So I walk back into the dressing room. I’ve worked with the Klitchkos and quite a few Eastern European fighters, so I know for the most part they’re quiet. So I’m trying to talk to Fedor, and he’s giving yes and one or two words and that’s it. I wrap open and close, open and close. Finally, I’m finished and ask how it feels. He looks at the palm of his hand. He stretches and looks. He opens and closes and opens and closes. He says, “Super.” That’s all he said, man. I walked out, my feet weren’t even touching the ground. I was so happy, man. After the fights, of course he was victorious, Josh and I walked back to the bus in the hallway, and he brings us on [and] said, “Thank you very much.” From there on, I was the guy designated to work his corner and wrap his hands. By the grace of God, my final fight with Bellator was with him, and he goes and presents me with the sweats.

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Steven Koepfer embraced the sport of combat sambo as Emelianenko made a name for himself—and the Russian martial art—when he reigned in Japan. In 2003, Koepfer opened New York Combat Sambo, a gym in New York City, and over the years, he had several occasions to be around the legend.

It was almost like this parallel track. Some people knew Oleg Taktarov before, but it was really Fedor who brought sambo into the fighter mainstream more than anybody before. So for me, as somebody training sambo when Fedor was just becoming known, he was definitely a superhero kind of, you know? To open my gym in ’03 and have that grow as his career grew, it’s interesting. We’d get a Fedor bump. Every time he won a fight, our phone would start ringing. It was cool. It was a coincidental meeting of the worlds with those two parallel tracks happening.

Before the fight with [Antonio] “Bigfoot” Silva, he used my gym for his training while he was staying in New York. He did the public workouts somewhere else, but he would come to my gym in the morning and work out with Vladamir Voronov, his sambo coach who unfortunately died of Covid during the first wave of Covid. I remember sitting in the gym watching him workout [and thinking], “Holy f---, I would not want to get hit by that guy.” He would do a couple-mile run through Manhattan. No one would recognize him. He would run into my gym, do an hour workout without rest, one minute on [and] 30 seconds off, but for like an hour. He’d hit mitts for a minute and rest by shadowboxing.

The first time I met him was at the MFC “USA vs. Russia” event at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City. So now, he’s been in Pride for three or four years and was still with the Red Devil team. It was still early on in his career, and he was already a legend. Unbeatable. I met him. He was really cool. Didn’t speak a ton of English but was very friendly. Very willing. Not a celebrity. Very low ego. The next time I met him was two years later at the World Sambo Championships in Russia. That was kind of a crazy story because that was the first time he ever lost [in] combat sambo.

The first I knew of him was before Pride. It was in the Rings days. He won the World Combat Sambo Championships in 2002. We already knew who he was back then. In 2008, I was coaching Oleg Savitsky for Team USA, and we were waiting to go out. We were watching Fedor on the mat at that moment fighting against Blagoy Ivanov. We watched Fedor lose, and it was like, “Holy s---.” We knew it was history in the making. It was like, “Holy cow, this guy finally lost.” We knew that he had beaten Ivanov the year before and were like, “Yeah, Ivanov has probably been training the whole year just for this rematch.”

If you want to beat Fedor in Russia, you have to wholeheartedly beat him. It cannot be close. I don’t think anybody would deny that the Russian officials would definitely underscore and favor Fedor on things that weren’t entirely clear. There were definitely people who would just not fight him. They would come out, bow to him in the center of the mat and he would get the win. I’m not trying to diminish his skills because the guy’s a beast, but why people would bow out and not fight him, I’m not trying to speculate. People can make their own decisions whether they did it out of respect, or maybe there was a little “You’re just not going to fight Fedor today.” Somebody backstage or something. There were a lot of wins on his combat sambo record that he didn’t actually win by fighting. He won by default. That fight with Ivanov was a legit war.

The early scores in the match were definitely low-scored, and even the Russian crowd was yelling that Ivanov was getting cheated in the scoring. So Ivanov had to absolutely destroy Fedor, which he did. He beat him wholeheartedly within the context of a combat sambo ruleset. It was amazing to see. Fedor came back and won his next match and got a bronze medal, but it was still momentous. All of us standing around kind of knew, like, this is probably the beginning of the end. We’re probably watching now Fedor moving into the latter half of his career where he’s not going to be the unbeatable guy. That’s actually what happened. It showed up in his combat sambo performance before it ever did in his MMA performance.

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