He passed away at the end of March this year. I remember Rogan talking about him when he died. Holy crap did I miss the boat on him. He was known as "Mr. Low Kick," because nobody was more devoted to it, and he used more effectively than anyone else. He TKO'd people with it, imagine that. When you see it, everything makes sense. 





I didn't want to ruin the old school MMA thread, plus he didn't really do MMA

Damn I missed this thread, this guy was one of the all time greats ever. I have only recently realized the connection to pro wrestling that K-1 had. It's fascinating to me the way everything was interlinked from UWF in the 80's to Rings/UWFI/PWFG/Shooto, into Pancrase and K-1, the UFC, Pride everything is everything.

The Rings promotion in 1991-92 was bringing in the dutch kickboxers and putting them in a big spotlight in worked shoot matches. Kaman wrestled against the founder of K-1 in a match in Rings in 1992 on one of my DVD's I have. The spun off of Rings in 1993 to start K-1 devoted to just kickboxing, but booked like a pro wrestling fed, by the early 2000's K-1 was fucking massive(bigger than Pride at one point, the two promotions were linked and held a massive show in 2002 crowd of 100,000 at Tokyo National Stadium, Pride breaking away from K-1 the way they did in 2003 was what launched them into being a mainstream pop culture phenomenon in Japan in their heyday).

With K-1 blowing up those Dutch kickboxers were now fighting in front of sold out arenas with massive crowds making legit money. It all came from Rings early days, they had the pipeline to Holland to bring those guys in and expose that kickboxing style to the world. The heavyweights coming out of Holland were the cream of the crop of that kickboxing style. Rings went out and found that and brought it to Japan to put it on the world stage(just like they did Fedor Emelianenko from Russia, and the Noguiera brothers from Brazil). Kaman was a big pillar of that. Everything traces back to pro wrestling; the UWF.