Heartwarming / Universal Wrestling Federation

• Dick Vrij apologizing to Wataru Sakata and his cornermen for the illegal but deliberate headbutt his apprentice Willie Peeters gave Sakata in their match. Seeing someone as famously troublesome and unpersonable as Vrij doing such a gesture is as shocking and no less heartwarming.
• After winning the 1995 Mega Battle Tournament and after receiving the Golden Chaplet, Maeda gets on the mic and praises the work of his finals opponent Yoshihisa Yamamoto and gives the chaplet to him as a sign of respect and his way of passing the torch. Too bad Yamamoto kind of ruined the moment when he was exposed as a poor shooter in his future shoots.
• The afterparty at the RINGS Maelstrom 3rd event in Russia. A few moments shown are listed in the Funny page, but other moments are some of the Russian fighters hanging out with their wives and families.
• After winning a match against Volk Han, Akira Maeda goes back to the locker room to find Mitsuya Nagai in tears for losing his match against Koichiro Kimura. Maeda goes to hug and comfort him before his post match interview.
• Mitsuya Nagai’s wedding was featured on a RINGS event, with Akira Maeda in attendance.
• After losing to Manabu Yamada in the Semi-Finals of the King of Pancrase tournament, Minoru Suzuki sincerely congratulated him and even gave Yamada his black towel.
• When Akira Maeda first tried to establish RINGS, he discovered that finding people for his company was more difficult than he had thought. His only hope was his friend Chris Dolman and his trainees, but he was told that Dolman was already being contacted by New Japan Pro-Wrestling. Dolman was left with the choice to follow either Maeda or Inoki, so he went to his master Jon Bluming to ask his opinion. Bluming, being the kind of guy he was, told him the story of The 47 Ronin. Maeda had almost gave up, but then Dolman approached him and supposedly told him:
  "Even if we are down to only you and me, believe me, you will not relinquish your dreams. From now, we are the creating force of RINGS."
  • After Maeda beat Dolman in the latter's retirement match, he snuck fastly out of the ring and even tried to shut down the "Maeda!" chants in order not to take the spotlight from Chris's retirement ceremony.
• Similar to Dolman and the Dutch fighters, Maeda expressed a similar gratitude to the Russian fighters in an article for Tokyo Sports in 2022.
  "Looking back now, my activities with RINGS were a healing time in my life. RINGS cured my mistrust of humanity. Especially the Russians. After the tournament in Yekaterinburg, I was called to a separate room. When I went there, all the guys from Russia were there. Everyone said, ‘I don't know what we would have done without you. Thank you’ and everyone hugged me and thanked me so much. But I was the one who thanked them, saying, ‘If it weren't for you, RINGS would have collapsed.' Only the Russians didn't move to PRIDE until the very end, even though they were offered a large amount of fight money."
  • For context, RINGS Russia was formed during the collapse of the Soviet Union and its fighters lost the support of a coordinated, well-funded state system that paid their salaries. Then Maeda came looking for fighters and gave them much needed financial support, which they returned with Undying Loyalty for the man. This loyalty to Maeda apparently convinced Aleksander Karelin to be the opponent for Maeda's retirement match, at the relatively low price of $20,000.
• After Maeda saw his former understudy Masakatsu Funaki submitting Maurice Smith in a 1993 AJKF event, he told press that, for the first time, and despite his former comments trying to bury his former promotion in his past, he regretted that UWF folded, as he was so proud of Funaki.
• Maeda's first retirement in 1998. After working a match against Yoshihisa Yamamoto so badly that the crowd even disagreed with his decision win, Maeda received a retirement ceremony hosted by all the important people in his career, even if they were business rivals at the time: Takada, Inoki, Fujiwara, Yamazaki, other old training partners like Animal Hamaguchi and Junji Hirata, Maeda's beloved trainer Kotetsu Yamamoto, Genichiro Tenryu as a random guest, and even his old opponent Don Nakaya Nielsen.
• At the 2005 interview between Maeda and Satoru Sayama, when Sayama talked about how the Shooto factions ousted him from the company after he had built it and made the impossible for it to survive, Maeda asserted it had been an unscrupulous move by them, and that he had experimented similar problems with the RINGS teams. Akira also acknowledged Sayama's work in MMA, and went to say that despite all their years long enmity, they still had beautiful memories together.
• Minoru Suzuki and fellow U-system remnant Yoji Anjo hugging in the latter's retirement show, after years of battles and interpromotional heat.