Thread's still going and there are still people acting like Tito/Ken I was a prime versus prime, healthy athlete versus healthy athlete, regular old skill-versus-skill battle. It's sad how little any of you know about the history of the sport. Ken's knee was so bad he could barely move. Man, it's too bad they didn't actually get into it back at UFC 19 when Ken could've - and would've - absolutely pulverized Tito. He should've taken a break from the WWF and challenged Tito. Then Ken would've been the Shamrock to derail the Tito train back then.
Ken had no answer to Titos takedown or gnp. Didn't have the tdd or guard game
He was fighting on one leg in the first fight and had lost his chin to age and punishment in the second and third fights. It's not that his skills weren't up to par, it's that his body was no longer the body of an elite athlete. Ken shut down the wrestling of two different 250-pound-plus decorated wrestlers in his earlier days. Had Ken been healthy, Tito wouldn't have stood a chance at taking him down.
That was a wrestling match. Dan looked like out of shape shit and the very few strikes Ken threw were awkward and stiff
"Out of shape shit"? You're not only trolling, you're doing it poorly. And Ken hit Dan with a solid knee that instantly made him break the clinch and then cracked him with a big right hand when he tried to clinch again. That was pretty much a flawless victory for Ken over a world class wrestler who outweighed him by 40 pounds.
I’ll say it since no one else will
Ken shamrock was never that good
You're not even remotely close to the first, nor will you be anywhere near the last. The number of pseudo-experts who take it upon themselves to speak with authority on fighters and eras they know nothing about are legion. You're not alone in your ignorance.
I think you are getting a bit excited. 95 already had seen 8 UFCs. I am not sure that I would rank Ken above Guy Metzger, Marcos Ruas and Royce.
Mezger? You wouldn't rank Ken above a student of his he routinely annihilated? Another terrible troll.
I think though that there is an inherent problem when talking about Ken Shamrock. His fans tend to speak about him as some killing machine that would be dangerous anytime in history. His haters are well haters. I do think he is more overrated by his fans than disrespectef by his haters.
Trust me, I've been listening to people say that Ken is overrated while disrespecting him to no end for nearly two decades. At this point, with the amount of people who prattle on about how terrible he was, how he was never any good, how he had no skills, how he was just a muscled up toughman, etc., he's the exact opposite of overrated. He's been hated on so much with such an insane level of ignorance that he's become underrated. There are like 12 people in the world who seem to know their ass from their elbow and can tell that Ken was an exceptional athlete and a top-notch fighter. He's not the GOAT, he wouldn't even crack a top 10 all-time list, but he was an excellent fighter, in 1995 he was the best fighter on the planet as the King of Pancrase and the UFC Superfight champion, and he was the first truly well-rounded fighter who could hang with strikers on the feet (go watch him never even get touched by elite strikers like Bas Rutten and Maurice Smith
and land shots on them!), with wrestlers in close (go watch him lock horns with Dan Severn and Kazuyuki Fujita), and grapplers on the ground (he was literally the King of Pancrase, the best catch wrestler among catch wrestlers), and who combined those skills with elite strength and conditioning. If you can't acknowledge this, then the problem's you, not Ken or his fans.
And dan also got run the fuck over by more powerful wrestlers that came after him.
Have you ever actually seen any of Severn's later fights? Hell, have you ever even perused the Fight Finder? Mark Coleman - one of the greatest wrestlers to ever compete in MMA - is the only wrestler you could say "ran over" Severn. Into his 40s, Severn beat "powerful" grapplers who "came after him" like Brad Kohler and Conan Silveira, he beat Travis Fulton a bunch of times, he beat future UFC talent like Wes Sims, Forrest Griffin, Justin Eilers, and Dan Christison when they were young, and he was even on his way to beating Josh Barnett until he ended up on the bottom and got armbarred in the fourth round.
He wasn't though. He was decent with excellent physicality. Cro cop shut down some great wrestlers too, people never tried to claim it proved he was a great wrestler.
That's because Cro Cop wasn't a wrestler, he just learned TDD. Ken was a wrestler. He wrestled in high school, he went to the Olympic trials in 1988, and his fighting style was
catch wrestling.
And we saw that when Ken who was devoid of that physicality post WWE career beating him down.
Sure, because once Ken was old, on the other side of four years of physical destruction in pro wrestling, and suffering through knee, shoulder, and neck problems,
that's the best indication of what Ken was capable of as an athlete. Forget about all of this "prime" talk, the
real measure of an athlete is how terrible they are once their body starts breaking down on them. Yeah, that makes sense
Great wrestlers/grapplers but they couldn't challenge Ken's physicality. Tito could.
Severn outweighed Ken by 40 pounds and Kimo outweighed him by 50. They could absolutely "challenge Ken's physicality." Can you even imagine Tito Ortiz fighting someone who weighed 250+ pounds? He struggled mightily against - and lost to - Arona in ADCC and Arona was his size. Tito's the one who always fought at LHW where he could cut weight and ensure a size/strength advantage. Ken frequently fought guys who outweighed him by significant sums and he won more often than not.
Ken was on the downswing by the time Tito came around. He could still hang with his contemporaries-the Don Frye and Kimo's of the world. But he was outclassed in every capacity against the new generation, and where he might have had an edge- experience-he was too committed to the RAAAAGE to really exploit that in fights. His temper really hamstrung him across his career, but payloads of roids will do that to most. Shammies was single minded, so it's not like he'd go back to the drawing board for the rematches against iceberg head.....he just went back to the lions den to get punched in the face super hard and over train his body to the point of injury....making it easier and easier for Tito each time.
Wow, we're going for the record with most incorrect things in a single post in this thread.
1) If Ken was so "outclassed in every capacity against the new generation," then how did he nearly KO Tito in their first fight or rock Rich Franklin on the feet and send him to the hospital from the nasty heel hook after their fight?
2) As I posted earlier, Ken's anger was a benefit to him, not a detriment. Even in fights when there was no bad blood, he'd
make himself mad to get hyped up to fight his best. That's how he beat Dan Severn to become the UFC Superfight champion and it's how he defended his King of Pancrase title against Bas Rutten.
3) Ken
wasn't single-minded and he
did go back to the drawing board by training with Erik Paulson rather than stay at the Lion's Den. Ken totally revamped his training which is why he looked so sharp in the clinch against Kimo and on the feet against Franklin. He was just older, slower, and had no chin. Physically, he was done. But technically, he'd actually improved significantly.
It's really wild how confidently so many of you are talking like experts and you literally know nothing. You're wrong about everything you're saying, yet you're so confident and close-minded that you'll go on being clueless. When did MMA fandom become so pathetic, and when did fans become allergic to learning the facts of history?
