Tuesday, April 22, 2014

VV Mei swallows pride, signs with DEEP JEWELS

VV Mei, Yukiko Seki
DEEP JEWELS announced today that VV Mei has signed and will fight Yukiko Seki on the May 18 Shinjuku FACE show. This is a major concession as Mei obviously wanted to remain freelance. Of course she has fought for JEWELS before. And despite the name change to DEEP JEWELS, it's still owned by DEEP. It always was owned by DEEP. The big difference is they won't hire freelancers anymore. Mei tried to get around signing a contract with DEEP JEWELS by taking fights in Guam and the Philippines. But she lost both fights so now her choices are limited. So why is DEEP JEWELS insisting fighters sign contracts? Because they want to prevent them from working for PANCRASE. Of course the ironic thing is that Emi Fujino is under DEEP JEWELS contract which got her a deal with WSOF who has a working relationship with PANCRASE. Uhhhh. Mei is now training at Riki Fukuda's offshoot of Grabaka. Her opponent Yukiko Seki has been around for years. She's 43 years old and has a record of 12-23. She's smaller than Mei and this fight will be at 48kg. Mei should win. DEEP JEWELS Flyweight Champion Ham Seo Hee will be an interested observer as Mei is a potential challenger. Ham will be kickboxing on this show. The dirty old men will be happy. And last week DEEP JEWELS added some filler matches like Ayaka Miura vs British fighter Ella Wu. Both are making their pro debuts. I saw a pic of Ella. The dirty old men will like her too. Tomo Maesawa will face Brittany Decker. Brittany is an American who has trained in Japan for a few years at WK Hearts. This will be her pro debut. And Shiori Hori will face Maya Dobashi. Several fighters tweeted today that DEEP has closed their gym in Tokyo. I'm not exactly sure what that means. My guess is DEEP is tight for money and are scaling back. I've said for the last year that DEEP JEWELS should close and be folded into DEEP. Maybe they will do that to save money.

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