bernard hopkins ended the discussion of boxers vs mma fighters

When did B-Hop start to talk so oily? The way he says "absolutely" is absolutely slimy. :icon_chee I remember a couple of years ago he said that MMA is gay.
 
24-2, WBO champ Nishijma doesn't count as a legit boxer?

Your trolling is getting so thick that you're starting to disrespect acomplished boxers. Come on, you used to do better.

fyi, the "WBO NABO" title is not the WBO title, it's a lesser fringe title
 
The BEST combat-athletes will ALWAYS go where the BEST money is.
If they have the ability to compete there, that's where they'll be.

$12 million/fight plus a percentage of PPV revenue contrasted with Shane Carwin's 40 thousand payday against Lesnar in UFC's self-proclaimed "Biggest Fight in UFC History."

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there's alot of truth to this, but then again if you are a freak of nature and a elite athlete, like lesnar and GSP, and you have trained either wrestling or BJJ, why would you go to boxing if you know your at a disadvantage having not trained these atributes at a younger age
 
We saw what happened when the undisputed heavyweight world champion fought a professional wrestler in a fight where kicks were allowed in 1976. What happened to the champion's leg in that fight? What if a legitimate kickboxer did the kicking?

Jesus christ. Do you seriously believe boxers with no experience with leg strikes and strikes below the belt can easily destroy people with that experience? It's like saying an army without tanks can easily destroy an army with tanks, simply because you believe the former army is somehow mystically "tougher". People who have all the tools you have, and more, HAVE AN ADVANTAGE. Give me a break. Just because you enjoy boxing doesn't mean you should treat boxers like gods who are the epitome of mortal combat.

you mean the fight where the wrestler lay on his back kicking? and you are insinuating a legitimate kickboxer would do the same thing? and you think a prime heavyweight champion couldn't bullrush the kickboxer like bob sapp did and finish the fight faster?

my contention is that the boxer with some minor training would demolish the kickboxer in a non thai clinch/knees match, with a clinch knee attack the kickboxer has a much better chance, but it's all speculative: the match won't happen in our lives.
 
We saw what happened when the undisputed heavyweight world champion fought a professional wrestler in a fight where kicks were allowed in 1976. What happened to the champion's leg in that fight? What if a legitimate kickboxer did the kicking?

Jesus christ. Do you seriously believe boxers with no experience with leg strikes and strikes below the belt can easily destroy people with that experience? It's like saying an army without tanks can easily destroy an army with tanks, simply because you believe the former army is somehow mystically "tougher". People who have all the tools you have, and more, HAVE AN ADVANTAGE. Give me a break. Just because you enjoy boxing doesn't mean you should treat boxers like gods who are the epitome of mortal combat.

YouTube - Ernesto Hoost vs Bob Sapp(1st)

YouTube - Ernesto Hoost vs Bob Sapp(2nd)

Yet in the minds of sherdoggers this bum called Mike Tyson would have no chance against any top Kickboxer because zomg! the Kickboxer can Kick.

And this doesn't even account for the talent gap between the 2 sports due to money differences.
 
dont forget Erik Paulson was much bigger for MMA than James Warring was to boxing

Only as a coach (he didn't hold any world titles in MMA, nothing like the IBF title Warring held, and if guys like Nishijima don't make the cut for boxing than Paulson certainly doesn't make it for MMA as a fighter - as a coach of course he's top level), and that isn't relevant in this discussion. I could probably beat Angelo Dundee in a boxing match, even though he was obviously a million times more knowledgeable about boxing than I am.

The thing is, you have to have the same standards for MMA and boxing if you're going to bother with this kind of comparison. And the bar seems to be set in this thread (not by me I'll point out) that you're a nobody without a world title - WBO, WBC, WBA, IBJ for boxing. And the equivalent for MMA would be Pride (old days) or UFC, the rest are like the WBO NABO titles that Nishijima had and which is discounted on this thread).

Toney vs Couture meets this criteria, as did Sylvia vs Mercer. None of the rest do.
 
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Are you on the meth?!
Mercer wasn't anywhere close to near the top of Boxing last Summer in the fight with The Maine-iac!!

Mercer's best was in 1990, 1991.
By 1997, Ray was finished as a top Heavyweight boxer.
He had once been Top 5 and an Olympic Gold Medalist, but he was done by 1997.


Fast forward to 2009, and out of over 1 thousand licensed active Pro Heavyweight Boxers, Ray didn't even rank in the Top 100 anymore!

Ray was 48 years old with a bad back, hepatitis, and though The Maine-iac challenged him to a boxing match, no commission would sanction it, so 2 days before the scheduled fight, they agreed it could be held under MMA rules instead.

Ray was nowhere close to the top of his sport anymore, but The Maine-iac still was though, having fought Nogueira for the UFC Heavyweight Title just 16 months earlier.
The Maine-iac totally dominated and beat the p!$$ out of Nogueira for 3 rds until getting caught in a submission.

In fact, The Maine-iac's still near the top of his sport right now and could defeat most top fighters including Lesnar, but Dana won't use him because he's not a Draw like Lesnar, and The Maine-iac is a promoter's nightmare:
A guy that can win big fights, but the fights aren't very entertaining PLUS he doesn't catch on with the fans and doesn't sell tickets.

I think he's gonna achieve one last Title run though.
Win enough fights like the Buentello fight the other night, and he can't be ignored.


If there's still any doubt or excuses about the Mercer/Maine-iac fight, Toney will lay them to rest (along with Couture's body) in 13 days.

.

No meth, just an afternoon beer :icon_chee

True, but Tim Sylvia wasn't anywhere near the top of MMA at the time of that fight either. He'd been submitted by a past his prime Nog (as Nog's subsequent fights have shown), submitted in less than a minute by Fedor (who's also past his best days as the Werdum fight showed), and came in 30 pounds overweight (at 310 pounds). Think about that 30 pounds, and what that means about how hard he'd been training up to that fight.

Neither of them would have stood a chance against the top guys in their sport (Sylvia would have lasted no longer against Brock or Fedor than Mercer against Klitschko), and to suggest that either was a top fighter at that time is just being biased - would you really bet on Sylvia against Brock or Fedor? Seriously? In fact, we'd already seen how long Sylvia could last against Fedor - I'd bet Mercer would last at least that long against either Klitschko (ie he'd make it past a minute)

But they're the only two who'd ever been at the top. There have been no fights between guys who are both at the top - not surprisingly, since they're too busy being at the top to do the kind of exhibitions that fighters make on the way down.

In short, its 0-0.

Couture-Toney is once again a fight between two guys who are long past being the best; its like watching old-timers baseball or hockey. Great fighters in their day, but neither is relevant to the top anymore.
 
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you mean the fight where the wrestler lay on his back kicking? and you are insinuating a legitimate kickboxer would do the same thing?

I'm insinuating that when a heavyweight gets two blood clots in his legs while getting kicked by a prone-lying professional wrestler, a kickboxer would do much, much worse.

and you think a prime heavyweight champion couldn't bullrush the kickboxer like bob sapp did and finish the fight faster?

How many 350-lb prime heavyweight champions are there?

And hey, by all means, pretend that Bob Sapp's tactics work for everybody.

my contention is that the boxer with some minor training would demolish the kickboxer in a non thai clinch/knees match, with a clinch knee attack the kickboxer has a much better chance, but it's all speculative: the match won't happen in our lives.

And yet you give no reason. Why would a person who has no kicks be better than one who does. The latter has every weapon that the former has, and more. There's no objective way to do this.

YouTube - Ernesto Hoost vs Bob Sapp(1st)

YouTube - Ernesto Hoost vs Bob Sapp(2nd)

This shows your point... how? Hey, let's see what Muhammad Ali did. What Trevor Berbick did when a small Nobuhiko Takada started throwing some kicks.

Yet in the minds of sherdoggers this bum called Mike Tyson would have no chance against any top Kickboxer because zomg! the Kickboxer can Kick.

And this doesn't even account for the talent gap between the 2 sports due to money differences.

Oh please. I said nothing about kickboxers automatically winning. I said it's stupid to think boxers would automatically dominate boxers.
 
The score, by the way, in actual Boxer vs. MMA fights, outside of fantasy land, is this:

1. James Warring (BOXING) SUB 1 Jerome Turcan
2. James Warring (BOXING) KO 1 Erik Paulson
3. Renzo Gracie (MMA) SUB 1 James Warring (BOXING)
4. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) KO 1 Josh Tamsen (MMA)
5. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) KO 2 Ron Fields (MMA)
6. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) SUB 1 Derek Thornton (MMA)
7. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) KO 3 Charles Jones (MMA)
8. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) KO 1 Auggie Padeken (MMA)
9. Ray Mercer (BOXING) KO 1 Tim Sylvia (MMA)
10. James Toney (BOXING) KO 1 Randy Couture (MMA)

Boxing: 9
MMA: 1

(Jobbers & losing club fighters like Butterbean, Bowen, Nishijima, Laverne Clark, Botha and Art Jimmerson obviously don
 
The score, by the way, in actual Boxer vs. MMA fights, outside of fantasy land, is this:

1. James Warring (BOXING) SUB 1 Jerome Turcan
2. James Warring (BOXING) KO 1 Erik Paulson
3. Renzo Gracie (MMA) SUB 1 James Warring (BOXING)
4. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) KO 1 Josh Tamsen (MMA)
5. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) KO 2 Ron Fields (MMA)
6. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) SUB 1 Derek Thornton (MMA)
7. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) KO 3 Charles Jones (MMA)
8. Jeremy Williams (BOXING) KO 1 Auggie Padeken (MMA)
9. Ray Mercer (BOXING) KO 1 Tim Sylvia (MMA)
10. James Toney (BOXING) KO 1 Randy Couture (MMA)

Boxing: 9
MMA: 1

(Jobbers & losing club fighters like Butterbean, Bowen, Nishijima, Laverne Clark, Botha and Art Jimmerson obviously don
 
This shows your point... how? Hey, let's see what Muhammad Ali did. What Trevor Berbick did when a small Nobuhiko Takada started throwing some kicks.

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uh, you do know that nobuhiko takada only worked in his federation, right? and again these shot over the hill boxers show nothing so the argument stands. what techniques? uh raising the front leg, some different footwork and then movement into attacking range.
 
That fight was an exhibition, "brah".

Nice excuse brah, you almost sound like an anderson silva nuthugger who says that he let chael sonnen beat him up till he decided he wanted to end it with a triangle with 2 minutes left.

Looks like mercer couldn't pull an anderson silva huh?
 
I hope Toney wins so all boxing haters and MMA nuthuggers will cry.
 
Nice excuse brah, you almost sound like an anderson silva nuthugger who says that he let chael sonnen beat him up till he decided he wanted to end it with a triangle with 2 minutes left.

Looks like mercer couldn't pull an anderson silva huh?



I think you need to try and find that "fight" on Fight Finder....brah.

A work is not a fight.
 
Okay, so Butterbean doesn't count as a representative for boxing but auggie padekan counts as an mma representative? Jerome Turcan? Hardly fair.

This is a list of the results of decent boxers entering MMA, not a list of decent MMA fighters who faced boxers.
Butterbean was almost a “decent boxer” back around 1999, but really was never quite.

By the time he embarked on a successful 12-7-1 MMA career which saw him ranked in the top 10 by Sherdog as a “Super-Heavyweight” (Thin pickins’ in that made-up weight division, no pun intended), Esch was no longer able to hang with guys with 5-3, 4-3 and 26-16 records in pro boxing, so he turned to the softer touch fighters available in the minor leagues.

The move saw him beat then #15 ranked Cabbage Correira in January 06’ and # 19 rated James Thompson in February 07’, whom he blew away in 43 seconds directly after Thompson’s win over Yoshida.

Combined with his win over Yusuke Fujimoto in K-1, it becomes noteworthy that even though he never developed beyond being a pure “one dimensional Boxer”, and not a very good one at that, Bean-O became higher ranked in both K-1 and MMA than he ever had been in Boxing, and did so after his limited skills had all but abandoned him, which says all there is to say about the respective depth of the big-three fighting sports.



art jimmerson vs royce gracie
ray mercer vs kimbo

vince phillips vs masoto(k1)-vince phillips broken leg


The Boxing forum is unique at Sherdog because it’s a no bullshit zone.

Come here fully loaded or don’t come – We know stuff.

Art Jimmerson was “paid to go in, lay down and get paid”, and that’s exactly what he did in the early, unregulated days of the UFC.
A good golden gloves fighter in the early 80’s, his pro career, though well managed never saw him become a world class professional.
By the time he did his funny, one-glove quit- job against Royce he was a losing club fighter looking for a payday.
As he puts it now “I never dreamed that what I did would ever be seen again or that this thing would become a sport”.

He went 4 and 13 in Boxing after his UFC work, getting beaten by pedestrian opposition as easily as when Royce was able to do it, even when actually attempting to fight.

Mercer against Kimbo Slice was a worked exhibition in which Mercer agreed to stand and let Kimbo punch himself out, but he’d stated prior to the fight that if the fight went to the ground he would excuse himself from the match, “because I didn’t do any training there”; and rather than scrub his main event, Felix Martinez, the promoter, agreed to let Mercer do the fight his pre-arranged way, forcing the commission to rule it an exhibition and not an actual fight – which, obviously it wasn’t.

This is well known at this point.

When Mercer, no longer a top 50 fighter but still an old pro opened up his guns for real, UFC champions (who are still to this day top 15 ranked) fell like rain.

…And the rest is history.


K-1 legend Masato Kobayashi is one of the 2 or 3 best K-1 Max (Middleweight) division champions ever (many say the best). He was matched at the height of his prime against a 40 year old former Jr. Welterweight (140 pounds right through till his 40’s) who had been the subject of an article titled “Should fighters be forced to retire?” over a year earlier in a major Boxing monthly.

Too old, too slow and too small, Vince tried his best but was overmatched against the best K-1 could muster, and “Cool Vince” went just 4 and 4 in boxing after that, with pedestrian club fighters able to duplicate Masato’s effort even without the benefit of being the only one in the ring hitting below the belt.
Moreover, Phillips was back in the ring 5 months later, with no “broken leg” (That was a rumor).

Though Masato has retired, wait until 2019 when he’s as old as Phillips was at the time, and match him with the reigning Cruiserweight boxing champion and see if he does any better than Phillips did against him.

The track record shows that he probably won’t.

With apologies to Bonjaski and Schilt and perhaps one or two others; Hoost, Aerts, Hug and LeBanner are the 4 best heavyweight K-1 fighters in history.
But Kickboxing and K-1 are a very small world.....

Hoost was creamed by a novice prizefighter in Sapp (and twice), Aerts and LeBanner were defeated by the remnant of Frans Botha, a former boxing fringe contender some years prior who never once defeated a top 10 ranked boxer in his real career, and Hug was upset by low ranking boxer Mike Bernardo, who went on to make a career in K-1, earning a spot with the other 6 I’ve named as one of the 10 best ever.
Even the aforementioned Butterbean came in and blew away Fujimoto, the 2nd or 3rd best Japanese heavyweight in K-1 history.

Obviously, when selecting a boxer to face a beloved legend like Masato, you can’t be too careful.

You should note also the presence of two other past it & mediocre pro boxers on Masato’s ledger, Akira Ohigashi and Virgil "The Conqueror" Kalakoda, both of whom he also defeated.


Most good boxers with anything at all left in the tank wouldn’t give K-1 or MMA even a passing thought as these are, by the definition of historical importance, world wide acknowledgement and of course, the money to be made, regarded as “minor league”.

This certainly doesn’t mean that boxers have all the tools or that they are magically better fighters, but boxing is the bigger carrot, and any fighter with a micron of self confidence & adventure will adjust his range & training and go for the big prize if he’s going to bother fighting for a living anyway.

Those who populate the smaller, newer fighting sport are those lacking the guts for the big show, regardless of their base or formative background; even those from grappling pedigrees who’ve had to learn fist fighting anyway to succeed in the minors.

How else to explain getting bashed in the brain for almost nothing while multi-million dollar paydays await for some simple adjustments and the employment of things you have to perfect in MMA & Kick Boxing anyway?

Of course, Boxers are far from impervious to the skills shown in the other fight sports. It’s naive to think otherwise. Certainly, what Boxers do works very well, hence it becoming such a fundamental part of MMA, Kickboxing, Muay Thai, Modern Kyokushin and Shotokan Karate, etc., but other things work too, and the more widely versed you are as a fighter, the better off you’ll be in an open rules fight.

Fights do not encompass only boxing; they often expand outside of it; beyond it.

But once a person is knocked out cold, the fight is over, regardless of what that victim might have known or been great at, and nobody in the martial arts is as well equipped to take an opponent out with a couple of quick shots as a good boxer is.

Tim Sylvia learned that the hard way and Randy Couture is very likely about to as well.


As to some of the other recent dialog here; Berbick, Saad Muhammad, even Roberto Duran participated in hard style works for Japanese wrestling promoters (vs. Nobuhiko Takada, Kiyoshi Tamura and Masakatsu Funaki, respectively).

These were not unlike more recent works like Yoshihiro Akiyama vs. Michael Lerma & Frans Botha or Butterbean Esch vs. Genki Sudo, in that they were just for fun, and natually, in Japan, where Shooto, Pancrease and Shoot fighting serve as precursors to MMA and are direct decedents of worked Pro Wresting; the line between “hard shoots” and “works” is a very fuzzy one...lol.

Worked wrestling is a big industry, you know? And history is loaded with Boxers (mostly old ones or bad ones) giving it a try, sometimes winning and sometime not.

And by the way, having defeated Kenny Jay and Buddy Wolf already, the Ali-Inoki match brought Ali-s pro wrestling record to 2-0-1 if you don’t count the Gorilla Monsoon Airplane spin…lol.

Inoki, for his part did however manage to beat then Kyokushin Karate champion Willie Williams, Olympic Judo gold medalist Willem Ruska, Kickboxing champion Everett Eddy, Russian Judo great Shota Samsonovich Chochishvili and the Indo-Pakistani wrestling legend Akram Pahalwan in pre-MMA “Mixed Martial Arts” matches.
(In addition to boxers Karl Midenberger, Chuck Wepner and Leon Spinks & modern MMA star Don Frye).

In short, Boxers can't win every time against a grappler or a kicker, much less a qualified hybrid fighter who does both.
But they are good with their hands; better than anyone else, and more often than people envious of the history there & maybe the paydays too might want to admit, that's enough to shut the door on all the other tools & ranges, and it becomes, regardless of who you are or how rabid your fans are.........Lights Out.


Of course, you have to watch what I write because I can be a little full of shit, don’tchaknow.
 
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