Worst Life Ever: The Story of Kazuyuki Fujita's Skull

Kazuyuki "Iron Head" Fujita made a fighting career out of having a thick skull. This is that skull's story. Like many mixed martial artists, Fujita started as a wrestler. Unlike many mixed martial artists, he never learned a second skill. It would take him 60 minutes to describe to you what he thinks a kick is, and he attempts submission holds the same way he tries on hats-- confusedly pulling in random directions with no results. That's because his skull is measurably thicker than a normal skull. If you were to take an x-ray of it, you'd fire your medical equipment for coming in to work drunk. He was created by filling a cement truck with coconut sperm, and no one was more surprised than that cement truck. Since he was diagnosed with this head, he has been searching for the man who would one day destroy it. I understand many readers don't follow or relate to the sport of mixed martial arts, but those readers are in luck because I speak fluent Nerd. Each section will have a Nerdsplanation to help everyone enjoy this skull's terrible and ridiculous journey. Fujita's Skull vs. Mark Kerr The Birth of F.F.S. In Fujita's fourth professional fight he faced 260-veiny-pounds of world-class wrestling and emotional issues named Mark Kerr. Using a style of kickboxing based around the tango and signaling rescue planes, Fujita hopped around like a scarecrow in gunfire while Mark Kerr blasted him in the face with punches and knees. Mark Kerr wasn't exactly Bruce Lee himself, but when you bench press 600 pounds, just swinging your paw through the air is going to knock salmon out of every river for two miles. Nerdsplanation: To put the damage Fujita's face took into perspective, steroid users couldn't measure their dicks for an entire year when Mark Kerr hit a button on a calculator and killed the number 2. I'm sure you've seen a shortened bus filled with retarded children. Well, that was just a regular school bus before Mark Kerr waved at it. For three minutes, everything either fighter did resulted in a hard part of Mark Kerr getting smashed into Fujita's medically impossible head. It looked like an industrial training video on how to turn a human into soup using just one naked man. If I was Fujita's family, I would have already been ordering a box of gorilla-sized diapers and flash cards so he could relearn all our names. But this face-suicide was all part of Fujita's plan. After five minutes of savage anaerobic assault, Mark Kerr's brain and body agreed that it was time to give up. He went fetal and Fujita punched the back of his head for 10 minutes. Which, in back-of-the-head time, is

fucking forever. This surprising win led to the invention of the F.ujita F.ight S.ystem which would serve him well throughout his career. Let's go over the basics: 1. Receive beating until opponent falls asleep. 2. Maul opponent's unconscious body. 3. Realize that the celebration banana was a trick and that you've once again been led into a cage for safe transport. Fujita's Skull vs. Ken Shamrock Helmet Laws Are For Pussies Next, Fujita fought Ken Shamrock. Throughout Ken's long MMA career, this is easily the greatest performance he has ever had. He unloaded on Fujita. Every punch and kick of every combination landed exactly on Fujita's chin. I swear Fujita mailed Ken Shamrock a list of every move he was going to do and Ken got together with Jean-Claude Van Damme to plan the most destructive and beautiful ways to counter them. Jean-Claude maybe did a little consulting on Fujita's side too, since the only move that Fujita landed in the entire fight was a crotch attack. This showdown continued for six minutes: Ken Shamrock's extensive martial arts training vs. a mixup in Fujita's head DNA. But Shamrock was no match for F.S.S. Something strange happened. Ken beat this man so hard that he, no bullshit, started having heart palpitations and his corner threw in the towel. Seriously: Fujita took a beating so severe that the man doing it had a goddamn heart attack. I guess it was a strategy devised by his stand-up coach, Anna Nicole Smith's vagina. And while doctors were treating Ken Shamrock, the only thing that was hurt on Fujita was the team of archaeologists that happened to be exploring his skull's upper mantle at the time. Nerdsplanation: When creating characters in video games, you often have to make sacrifices. For example, your rogue doesn't have enough points to learn Mutilate AND Killing Spree. It's the same thing when scientists create igneous-skulled punching bag monsters. If you spring for Invincible Head, there aren't enough points left over to put into Agility. Fujita actually has a -65 to Dodge which means cars instinctively swerve into him, and it takes him 10 minutes and a man-shaped hole in the wall to get through a doorway.

Fujita's Skull vs. Cro Cop Fujita's Skull Takes a Job at the Female Ejaculation Plant Japan has a childlike fascination with strange match-ups. If two things are stupidly different, Japan will put them in a cage and see what happens. All their fight cards have at least one match between a giant fat guy and something that looks like it should be making Christmas toys. If a man with no arms and a man with no legs started learning karate, the same light bulb would appear over every head in Japan. That's right: Glue them together and see if it can kill a panda. Through their own experiments, every Japanese parent knows exactly how many rhinoceros beetles you have to put in a baby's crib to make it a fair fight. And I guarantee you that when the first cheeseburger comes to life, Japan will throw it in the ring with a sumo wrestler before it ever gets a chance to lead us to our better lives in the sky. So it's no surprise that fight promoters decided to put him in the ring with Cro Cop. Take the man with the crazy hard head and put him in the ring with the guy who kicks heads crazy hard. The result might surprise you: partially exploded head. In an explosion of blood and duh, Cro Cop measured Fujita's slow motion takedown attempts and threw a knee into his eyeball just as he was coming in. Fujita didn't even notice. It takes so long for light to reach the center of his head that he wouldn't even know one of his eyes was gone for 11 minutes. So all he did was finish the takedown and try to drown Cro Cop in ocular blood. The referee had to inflate a life raft just to paddle over and stop the fight. Nerdsplanation: For a Japanese fight promoter, Fujita's cranium is like a boss monster they're seeing for the first time. They are so compelled and excited to destroy it, but the only thing they can do is hit it with every weapon in their inventory until something works. This was their eureka moment. "Holy water bounces off, Ifrit hits for 0, Bubble Lead actually heals him... fuck, look at how much Cro Cop took off!"

Fujita's Skull vs. Cro Cop Again We Must Destroy That Which We Love After engineers designed a needle capable of it, they stitched Fujita's skin back together and he was given a rematch against Cro Cop. Fujita should win this one, right? I mean, what are the chances that something with almost 100 percent certainty will happen twice? In what took him 29 seconds, Fujita watched the 18 seconds of the first fight carefully and devised the perfect plan to defeat Cro Cop: exactly the same thing. He charged in with takedowns and Cro Cop countered by kneeing him in the head. But instead of taking them with the front of his head, he blocked them with top of his head. For crashing knee after crashing knee, Cro Cop's giraffe legs were screaming for Fujita's spine to become paralyzed and the fucking thing was too stupid to understand. F.F.S. doesn't work against Cro Cop. Instead of throwing frantic combinations, Cro Cop likes to take his time and throw one big kick that only gets described during a eulogy. You can't tire him out or give him a heart attack by pretending to be his soccer ball. The only thing Fujita's invincibility did for him in this fight was let Cro Cop's knees manufacture cubic zirconium against his forehead until time ran out. Nerdsplanation: Imagine for a moment that Scooter, the Go-Bot that turns into a scooter, fought the Constructicons. If moments into the fight, they formed Devastator and stomped on him, you'd be surprised at how simple and unsurprising it was. That's what this fight was like. No one could have predicted that every single obvious thing we expected would happen. Fujita's Skull vs. Fedor Emelianenko A New Hope By this point in his career, the world now knows that Kazuyuki Fujita has only two assets: a clumsy takedown and a forcefield where his brain's reflexes should be. So PRIDE Fighting Championships decided he was ready to take on the best fighter in the world, Fedor Emelianenko. Fight promoters apparently gave up on finding someone who could beat the guy and now they were just using him to conduct further stress tests on Fujita's head. They were sure that Fedor would be the thing to finally crack it open and allow evil scientists to reverse engineer his remains, almost certainly to grow a more durable sex melon and unkillable robots to fuck them. Then Fujita did something that surprised even him-- he almost won! He landed a knee-buckling counter punch that to this day is the closest anyone has come to beating Fedor. In a waste of his body's natural punching bag camouflage, he was about to beat someone by hitting them. Unfortunately, Fedor found a practical solution to Fujita: get behind him, grab his unbreakable head, and yank it the fuck off his body. The official fight records call it a "rear naked choke," but that's like calling Tiananmen Square a wet t-shirt contest. If the ref hadn't stopped him, Fedor was going to take that head home to his spaceship and polish it.

Nerdsplanation: I think that last part was already in Nerd. Fujita's Skull vs. Wanderlei Silva On The Wings of Hope Cro Cop proved that Fujita's head is living tissue over a metal endoskeleton, and then Fedor proved that it will surrender if you start to sever it from its body. But Japanese fight promoters still hadn't gotten a chance to see someone just pound on it until it cracked. Will it explode when you expose its core? Is it filled with something that you can rape with an octopus? That's when it hit them: Wanderlei Silva. That guy hates skulls. At the time, the country of Japan was using Wanderlei Silva to control the fighter population and they occasionally dragged him on a chain through the ocean to hunt whales in the least humane way possible. The fight was a massacre. Fujita tried every both of his techniques against Wanderlei. He slowly waited to get punched and laid on top of him without doing anything. Neither worked, and Wanderlei eventually got to his feet and stalked Fujita like a Japanese octopus in an all-female prison. He hit him as hard as you can hit someone, many times. And every time Fujita fell down, Silva kicked him in the head as if he was going for a 70-yard field goal. None of this did anything! Half the arena was crying since they thought they were watching one ape administer the death penalty to another and the other half was dead from shock waves. Silva kept punching him down, kicking him, watching him get up and starting from the top. Someone outside the ring (or probably just a chunk of shrapnel) hit the bell and the referee declared it a "knockout." But Fujita was already back up before the words were out of his mouth. Why'd they stop it? He had Wanderlei right where he wanted him. Nerdsplanation: Science can't explain this. Wanderlei dropped a Shock And Awe campaign on that head and couldn't hurt it. This fight was stopped only to get everyone's car alarms to shut up-- it had nothing to do with Fujita's safety. Fujita was probably back to identifying simple shapes that very same night.

Fujita's Skull vs. James Thompson Don't Call It A Comeback! I Was Kind of Never Here! James Thompson is an imposing figure. So imposing that during the staredown, Fujita admired his abs and groin area and gave him an approving thumbs up. It was unprecedentedly inappropriate, but there was a science to this flirting. F.F.S. works a lot better if your opponent comes at you in a completely incoherent homophobic rage. And James Thompson did. Thompson manhandled him, hitting him with hundreds of unanswered punches and knees. He was going to prove he wasn't gay even if he had to thrust every last bit of his vitamin-supplemented shirtless body against Fujita's beast-like hide. It probably smelled like a leather smoothie, but gayer than that sounds. Nerdsplanation: After taking an eight-minute beating that mocked mankind's entire understanding of physics and medicine, Fujita started throwing his own punches. Drunken, woman-like punches. But when you're James Thompson and you recently spent eight minutes heaving 550 pounds of violent meat around a ring, you'll take any excuse you can get for a nap. By this point of the fight, Fujita could have screamed boo and knocked him out. But he had to save his voice. He had a screaming date with Lou Ferrigno later. Fujita's Skull vs. Alistair Overeem The Final Crusade Alistair Overeem is a Dutch kickboxer who looks like someone at Marvel comics drew a man genetically engineered to fuck your girlfriend. And at the end of 2009, this giant, black Thor beast hit Ewerton Teixeira with a knee that adjusted the Earth's tides. Police were already taping off Alistair's leg before Ewerton dropped face-first onto the canvas with his eyes open. During the replay, you can actually hear the knee call gunshot wounds pussies. Japanese fight promoters saw this and had a great idea: restraints that taste like fish! But right before that: This could be the man to finally shatter Fujita's Iron Head. They set up the fight for New Year's Eve. The 39-year-old wrestler with an advantageous birth defect vs. six-and-a-half-feet of death-dealing emasculation. This wasn't just a battle between genetic perfection and someone born out of head sorcery... it was possibly Japan's last chance to experiment on this skull that had given them so much joy and baffling medical data over the years. Just short of the literal definition, the fight began with Alistair beating the shit out of Fujita. Kazuyuki Fujita has been in a constant state of what you and I would call "near death" for 10 years, but this is the first time I've ever seen him look scared. After Overeem lands two knees, Fujita backs into the corner then sheepishly tries sneaking past. Alistair punches him back into the corner and lands a third knee that I swear lights on fucking fire before it impacts.

Fujita goes down. Here's the crazy part, though: he doesn't get back up. He stays on the ground holding his head, as baffled as the rest of us. I have a theory that the previous 17,000 blows to the head all gave him amnesia and this one Looney Tunes bonk gave his head all its memories back. Japan finally got what it wanted, only there was no candy surprise inside Fujita. There was no tiny pilot demanding to know why you humans broke his apeship. Just a guy with a decade's worth of fist craters and bad decisions catching up to him all at the same time. It'd be almost tragic if you could look away from the slow motion rippling of Alistair's muscles in the instant replay. Nerdsplanation: In the Secret Wars, the Human Torch was being choked by Ultron, a robot completely encased in Adamantium. Obviously, fire doesn't do much against any metal from the Coolnamium family, so Torch went nova, so he would at least look awesome as he died. However, Ultron stopped. His shell was intact, but the nova flames melted something important inside him. I think that's what we're dealing with here. Alistair couldn't figure out how to crack Fujita's skull, so he simply hit it hard enough that everything in it turned to liquid. One would imagine that we're talking about a brain, but remember: This is the same man who fought all these terrifying people with his face alone. Would a brain come up with that plan? There's still so much we don't know! I say we go back to the drawing board with the Fujita skull experiments, Japan. I miss them already.