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.