Back in the day, AJ Matthews caught a VHS tape of Kazushi Sakuraba fighting in PRIDE. He was living in South Dakota at the time, and he and his brother began learning jiu-jitsu almost immediately afterwards. Saitama, where Sakuraba was fighting, became hallowed ground.
A decade-and-a-half later, he’s one of the Bellator fighters crossing over to compete on the inaugural Rizin card, which takes place in Saitama, Japan on Dec. 29. Even with a disrupted camp heading into his fight with Anatoly Tokov, Matthews feels like he’s living the dream. To hear him tell it, he might not fly to Japan on an airplane…he might just drift across the Pacific on cloud nine.