Wednesday, February 13, 2008

New Japanese MMA event, DREAM, press conference (1)


New Japanese MMA event, DREAM is announced in Tokyo Metropolitan Hotel on Feb 13.

At first, Tanikawa(FEG), Karino(TBS) and Sasahara(Yarennoka!) appeared on the stage.

Tanikawa said:
Thank you for coming today. I heard more than 300 fans were here today and I appreciate that. We were a success with our new years events, K-1 Dynamite and Yarennoka! with the support and understanding of TBS. FEG would like to start a new MMA event to keep our alliance with Yarennoka! Our new event is not PRIDE nor HERO'S. Though the sponsor of the event is FEG and TBS, Yarennoka is going to produce the event. Mr. Sasahara will take the initiative as the event producer. I'm going to focus on K-1 events including K-1 World GP and K-1 World Max. Japanese MMA didn't have energy for a while. It's time for us to stand up together and work on the new event which attracts fans.

Sasahara said:
We worked on Yarennoka in the last NYE together. We were supported by FEG, M-1 Global and many other people. After having the successful event, I knew Japanese MMA was still popular and had a potential to attract more fans. Though we dropped a hint of having a next event at Yarennoka, we didn't have any direction to move next. I got an offer from Mr. Tanikawa and took his offer because I could be in charge of producing this event. I got signatures from more than 3000 fans asking us to continue Yarennoka and to create a great event. Passion from our fans stimulated me to create an event which MMA fans were satisfied.

Karino said:
We sponsor and broadcast K-1, HERO'S and Dynamite. We are excited about broadcasting DREAM which is the replacement of HERO'S.

http://gbring.com/sokuho/news/2008_02/0213_dream_03.htm

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