I don't have much knowledge and that's exactly why I'm asking for opinions and explanations to more knowledgeable guy about things that may seems "fishy" or inexplainable to me.
Mine are not accusations, but request for other's people opinions and inputs to help form my own opinion, and of course I feel free to express them even without "evidence" (after all, if I had evidence I would not need to discuss and analyze it).
P.S: as a very small guy with a litte of BJJ training I would love for Royce vs Akebono and Minowa vs Choi etc....to be true and I sincerely hope that they are not fixed, so I'm surely not biased against them or something.
I just went to rewatch it and you may be right, It's a lot more "natural" than I remembered, altough it's still remain a little ambiguos to me.
To me it seems that Choi barely tried to strike Minowa despite the massive reach and size advantage, which doesn't make much sense.
Minowa was clearly hitting him as hard as he could, yes, but not the other way around, and to fix a fight there is no need of the designed winner even knowing it.
Being baffled at a fighter's approach to a fight doesn't mean the fight was fixed--there are any number of reasons Choi might not have just let loose with his striking, one of them being that he didn't want to get taken down while over committing, which would be an entirely reasonable concern. But the fact is that he did throw strikes and did tag Minowa plenty of times. Does his striking look so different from other fights Choi was involved in during this era? He didn't have blazing hand-speed or anything. Punches that might look like taps from Hong Man Choi are doubtless a lot harder than they look. He took big shots and kept going and he threw plenty of his own, including a knee to Minowa's face from the four-point if I recall.
And while I don't want to take away from Minowa's win, I do believe this occurred after Choi was forced to remove the tumor on his pituitary gland, which clearly made a major difference in his ability to carry his own weight around. That said, he looks a lot better against Minowa than he went on to look in some subsequent efforts.
As far as bigger guys losing to smaller ones--have you been to many grappling tournaments that had an absolute division at the end of the tournament? I've seen mediocre grapplers submit guys who appeared to have, if memory serves, at least 50 plus pounds on them if not closer to 100 pounds. Specifically, I remember when an overweight high school wrestling coach with presumably minimal training entered the absolute division and lost to a guy who looked literally half his size who was no great shakes as a grappler.
The last tournament I competed in to date, I beat a guy who was significantly younger than me, maybe 19-20, but was also 34 pounds heavier. He normally didn't compete in adult advanced divisions, but decided to step up. Admittedly, I didn't submit him, but I don't think he scored a point on me. It was clear that one of the major differences was just age and experience. And actually, in that very same tournament, I enjoyed a similar size advantage--maybe even a greater one--against a guy named Tim Jenny and ended up getting nearly submitted a couple times and trailing on points before I caught him with a toe-hold. So I've experienced both ends of it.
Things are different when all else is equal between a big man and a little man, but certainly, a smaller man with significantly superior ground skills can submit a bigger man. In Minowa's case, a lot of it is his doggedness, durability and the fact that is attempts are often sudden and explosive and fully committed to. In a lot of ways, its ideal for someone who is bigger but might be slower to react.
