Media What it's like to spar and grapple with Khabib Nurmagomedov

Damn son
It goes in line with what Dustin Porier said, that Khabib isn't particularly strong, but his technique is the stuff of legends

 

Fighting is 90% mental and Khabib has a 190 IQ

 

In a bathtub

 

Khabib can hold in his own against Luke Rockhold in grappling

 

i see what you did there.

 

I appreciate this level of candid honesty.

Thanks Joe Giannetti.

 

But Contards and Nate Diaz say he is not humble!

 

He's like a mix of Nate Diaz and Zach LaVine.

 

In 1989 when I was wrestling at Clemson, Kenny Monday popped in to roll with us. He was the Olympic Gold medalist in Freestyle at 74KG in 1988. Won Silver in 1992. He was a D-1 national champ at OSU in 1984, but it's not like he was a 4x D-1 national champ. But he had progressed considerably since then.

Now- I was not an elite college wrestler. Far from it. Never saw a varsity match at Clemson. But I at least competed with the starters that were on the squad. If I wrestled a match against the #1 guy in my weight class, I would lose like 8-2 or 10-3 or something like that. Which is a pretty sound drubbing at that level. But it's not like I was getting pinned every 45 seconds.

I got a single 2 minute round with Kenny. The only way I could describe it is to say it was like the earths gravitational pull on me was suddenly 10 times as strong. I could not free my wrists from him. I could not move an inch when I was on the bottom. I was simply unable to get my head, hips, legs or shoulders anywhere they needed to be.

When I shot in on him and he sprawled, it was like he sprawled forward not backward. Normally if you shoot in on someone and they do an effective sprawl, you are left flattened out holding onto a leg or something, and they just hop around. But with Kenny, I was just this concentrated knot of limbs crumpled into a space that was far too small for my mass.

Within a minute, he had racked up an incalculable number of exposure points on me before he pinned me. And he did the same again in the second minute. Felt like an hour.

Humbling is not a strong enough word.

 

Thank you, thank you

 

Rolling with Khabib at 155lbs is a death sentence. Not sure its physically possible in an MMA setting with ground strikes

 

Well a monkey should be able to see that low hanging fruit

 

Thanks for the story, Kenny must've been sumn else to go with. Im a smaller guy myself but Ive got to do wrestling lessons under Alexis Vila (Cuban medalist) and barely got to full live rounds with him, mainly drills and needless to say I could not do a damn thing and he was playing with me barely trying.

Also got to do submission rounds with Eric Akin (4x US Olympic alt) and he had really really good submissions with like less than a year doing subs. He arm barred me pretty quickly and was the strongest 145lb dude Ive ever felt period.

 

How so ??? can't say I've seen him Dunking from the free throw line and smoking a joint at the same time

 

Awesome story, what weight class were you how did the starters do against him?

 

Yeah. Strength is just a weird thing and it's crazy how big a role technique can play. I mean I must have had a thousand people grab my wrist in wrestling when we are standing and there is always a way to free it. But I just couldn't. It was like I was 3 and he was my Dad. And he still had my wrist in his hand when I was trying to get off my back. Just crazy.

 

This is what religious people called being "clean". Compared to Frank Mir who boasts of telling people that he could have sex with them if he wanted to and they couldn't do anything to stop him.

 

I went between 150 and 158. But that was back when the weigh-ins were the morning the day before an evening match. So you had almost 36 hours to re-hydrate. So I was walking around at 180 or so most of the time. Kenny wrestled at 163 lbs and he dwarfed me. He was monstrous. About an inch shorter but he was just enormous. I have no idea what he weighed at the time.

He wrecked everyone on the team. Even he biggest guys, though they were not quite as badly humiliated as I was.