As per usual, you come across with a dog shit take. A quarter century watching the sport and you're still clueless for the most part, you're a case study for this forum.
Show me the "multiple times he was starched", old timer. Poatan has been KO'd once across his career, by Izzy. At MW, after cutting 40lbs at 37 years old. Dehydration and KO's, I'm not going to go into the entire biology lesson, you can look it up yourself.
He was TKO'd with the ref waving it off standing by Kyshenko, who was
juiced to the fucking gills on an entire pharmacy's worth of substances, ballooning up from a journeyman LW (154lbs) to a starching MW (187) to a suspended for doping violations jobless fighter in four years. His TKO against Wilnis was due to leg kicks. I'm sure you didn't know this, as you didn't actually watch the fights, you just looked up the record and made assumptions, but that's okay.
Gane being dropped by Tai shows that he can be dropped by a sloppy brawler. It wasn't a knock on his chin. Poatan has the kind of power where your chin doesn't matter, the damage accumulates from headshots, body shots, and calf kicks, you just eventually go down. He isn't a sloppy brawler who has a punchers chance against the superior striker. He is the superior striker against any man he steps into the cage with, if you're looking at it purely on paper.
It
was a knock on Gane finding himself getting caught flat footed and dropped by a molasses 2-1-2 by Tai, again, a fat sloppy brawler. This moment in time was the moment where we could have had Jon Jones vs Tai Tuivasa. Imagine that for the legitimacy of the HW belt.
99% of people on this forum would call Tai a sloppy brawler. No one would describe Tai as "a professional boxer" just because he boxed in two last man standing tournaments against literal who's and lost to the only one okay boxer he's faced and the one good boxer he's faced in Demsey McKean (that one isn't a knock on Tai, McKean is actually good).
View attachment 1072243
Gane beat Frank on the feet because he is a better
kickboxer than Frank was at the time, with his torn ACL
. Meanwhile, Francis won the actual fight because he is the smarter martial artist. NCAA Francis ain't nothin to fuck with.
What Francis did years later, healthier, in a different combat sport, is completely irrelevant to the Gane fight at the time. The Fury fight moreso was proof that Fury fights to the level of his opponent, while AJ showed us Francis' actual ceiling in boxing, but that's for a different thread.
So yes, I am convinced that a former MW would run through Gane on the feet at HW and we would see him panic wrestle. Who is the best kickboxer Gane has beaten? Headhunter Rozenstruik? Volkov, who I love, but has never kickboxed professionally? Name a single one of his Muay Thai opponents? The guy has a single French MT title win, 13-0 beating up regional french muay thai fighters as a genetic freak athlete. Those are the accolades that are supposed to convince me he's going to soundly outstrike the most proven striker to have ever walked into the octagon outside of Semmy Schilt?
View attachment 1072244
Poatan by TKO in the championship rounds. Chops Gane's legs down, limits his mobility, works the body. Strikes with Gane like no one has ever struck with him in his career to date.
