K-1 Closes Year with ‘Dynamite!!’

It's been said many times, but K-1 Dynamite!! events are not for hardcore fans. They're for the general Japanese populace, your Mom and Pop who don't fancy watching celebrities have a singing competition on New Year's Eve. They'd rather see a really little guy fight a really big guy, or those old guys fight who used to be great.

FEG hasn't completely forgotten us, though.

Although K-1 is supporting the Yarennoka! event with some of its top talent, the promotion managed to keep some compelling matches for its own card in Osaka's Kyocera Dome.

One of the best pound-for-pound athletes in the sport, Norifumi "Kid" Yamamoto returns for his customary New Year's Eve performance, this time interestingly against WEC-contracted fighter Rani Yahya (Pictures).

The talented Kazuyuki Miyata (Pictures) will unfortunately be most famous among fight fans for his vicious head butt to Kid's knee last year, but he will face off with MMA's premier Viking, Joachim Hansen (Pictures), in a compelling match.

Pancrase legend Masakatsu Funaki (Pictures) retired more than six years ago, but he will battle Kazushi Sakuraba (Pictures), who should be thinking about retirement himself.

Also on the MMA portion of the card, we'll see Melvin Manhoef (Pictures), Hideo Tokoro (Pictures), Ikuhisa Minowa (Pictures) and Kiyoshi Tamura (Pictures). Just not in the bouts that we would like.

On the K-1 rules side, Masato and Musashi will participate.

The rest of the names aren't so stellar. We have comedians, a 400-pound monster, an 0-4 boxer, a baseball player and Bob Sapp (Pictures), but at least there's no Akebono. Besides, you're secretly interested in these freak matches anyway, aren't you?