JEROME LE BANNER is a 1.9 metre, 124kg hairy slab of muscle topped off with a crew-cut head that pinions on a 51-cm neck. His face is a pair of sunken coals nesting over a pug's nose and a mean slit of a mouth, sandwiched between a corrugated forehead and a Buzz Lightyear chin. The French and European kickboxing champion looks like he could kill with a beer-belch, let alone one of his eardrum-shattering bicycle kicks.
His bout against 105kg Japanese boxer Hiromi Amada lasts just four minutes before Amada crumples to the canvas, crippled by a series of kicks to the leg. As Amada's groaning stretcher-bound bulk is being carried past the press box, Japanese supermodel Norika Fujiwara, resplendent in a bosom-hugging red evening dress, breathes into her microphone so millions of viewers on Fuji TV can hear her: 'Gosh, that looked painful, didn't it?'
It's K-1 time again in Tokyo, and this is just the reserve match. The atmosphere in the giant Tokyo Dome on December 4 is an odd blend of the hucksterism and razzmatazz of pro-wrestling in the US - complete with rock music, fireworks and jugglers - and the solemnity of Japanese martial arts. Television stars and models mix with mobsters and businessmen in 30,000-yen ($2,240) ringside seats, among the 60,000 people who have come to watch combat between 12 of the world's toughest warriors from France, Holland, New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand and the US, in the annual climax to a series of competitions around the world.
The origins of K-1, one branch of Mixed Martial Arts, are the sort of arguments kids have in schoolyards: Bruce Lee could have mashed Mike Tyson; Giant Haystacks would kill Muhammad Ali if he sat on him. The organisers took that simple premise and asked: who will survive if you put the top karate and kickboxing stars in the ring with kung fu and tae kwon do fighters, boxers and wrestlers?
This is how one of the great modern Sumo champions, the 200kg Akebono, ended up in the ring last New Year's Eve with US football star Bob Sapp in a match that lasted less than three minutes before Akebono slammed face first onto the canvas. The sight of the slow-moving, blubbery Akebono trying to cat-punch his way to victory against the muscle-bound Sapp broke millions of Japanese hearts, dealt a huge blow to the all-important 'dignity' of Sumo, and smashed viewing records. But at least we now know: Giant Haystacks is too slow for this game.
Since it started just over a decade ago, K-1 has grown into a sporting monster, regularly winning 20 per cent of the domestic television audience, generating copycat versions abroad and spawning an even more brutal offshoot called Pride, which is so violent if can only be aired after editing. In Pride, the fighters abandon the padded boxing gloves of K-1 along with the last remnants of the Queensberry rules and straddle their prone opponents on the canvas to throttle or beat them into submission. At the end of each bout, the canvas is wiped clean of sweat and blood.