Pride Fighting Championships was a Japanese mixed martial arts promotion company. Its inaugural event was held at the Tokyo Dome on October 11, 1997. Pride held more than sixty mixed martial arts events, broadcast to about 40 countries worldwide. Pride held the largest live MMA event audience record of 91,107 people at the Pride and K-1 co-production, Shockwave/Dynamite, held in August 2002. For ten years PRIDE was one of the most popular MMA organizations in the world.
In March 2007, Dream Stage Entertainment (DSE) sold Pride to Lorenzo Fertitta and Frank Fertitta III, co-owners of Zuffa, which, at the time, owned the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). While remaining as legally separate entities with separate managements, the two promotions were set to cooperate in a manner akin to the AFL-NFL merger. However, such an arrangement did not materialize, and in October 2007, Pride Worldwide's Japanese staff was laid off, marking the end of the organization as an active fight promoter. As a result, many of the Pride staff left to form a new organization alongside K-1 parent company Fighting and Entertainment Group. That new organization, founded in February 2008, was named Dream.
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Pride FC Mens |
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