James, you are the expert, what are your comments?

-Ishmael

Abraham

A z-man thread up your alley, mma v boxing etc

The z-man, apparently an experienced wrestler and also a boxing fan, who has seen a few bar fights and successfully wrestled a karate guy, was discussing in the article linked above the possibility and viability of UFC Champion Colin McGregor fighting Floyd Mayweather.

Z-man makes an excellent and accurate point that top MMA fighters have boxing skills that run about the level of local pro boxers. What he might not know is that there is a lot of interchange between boxers and MMA fighters, with an increasing number of MMA fighters putting in time competing in boxing so low-paid that it amounts to subsidized training. The middle ground is often kickboxing. Most often MMA fighters have experience boxing through kickboxing from the time they put in in boxing gyms trying to correct all of the false mechanics and bad habits they picked up in karate dojos. I disagree with him that MMA fights are choreographed. There is little need to fix fights in this manner in boxing or MMA, as all you have to do is buy the judges [such as in Taylor versus Kovalev, last month] or make unwinnable matches. It is more difficult to pick a winner in MMA because there are so many more ways to win. For this reason—and this is the key of the sport’s popularity—an MMA fighter who loses one fight is not considered a bum, as in boxing, where the prefect record at all costs is the goal. So, if an MMA favorite loses, his value does not fall as far as boxer who loses.

As a man who coachs both sets of athletes, I have the following opinions as to a McGregor versus Money matchup.

In an MMA fight Mayweather will be tapped out on the floor within a minute. McGregor needs to throw one kick and then go to the clinch, avoiding or eating one punch, which is very doable as Money has bad [they’ve been broken] hands. Most elite boxers have a horrifying lack of ability to avoid the clinch and understand nothing about shooting. All boxers who have entered K1 in Japan have had their legs kicked from under them. An MMA fighter dealing with a boxer should only kick and wrestle until they hit the floor, then he does what he wants. Money is more susceptible to the takedown than most boxers because he relies on holding so much in his defensive game. See the first two UFC events, featuring Royce Gracie, or the more recent Randy Coutre versus James Tooney, for examples. Boxers in our age have become so bad at clinching in the amateur ranks that I can train any loser to shut down a winner by clinching in a week’s time. I have done this and saved my man from a KO. As Z-man points out in his article, wrestling ability trumps punching ability, but that punching susceptibility to the clinch or takedown is not limited to martial arts people and includes boxers.

In a boxing event I doubt if McGregor would punch Money a single time. His boxing is something like six levels below Floyd’s, who I would expect to cruise to a stinker of a lackluster shutout, not risking his delicate hands on that Irish skull, but putting on a clinic of humiliatingly boring proportions.

In kickboxing, Floyd would have no legs by round three and not be able to get off the stool. Boxers do not conceptualize the leg as a target and are utterly helpless against leg kicks.

The interesting match-up would be fought according to modified London Prize Ring Rules, in which clinching and throwing would be allowed, with a throw counting like a knockdown. In such a match-up I’d call the fight even and it would be an epic event, if someone taught Floyd just enough Judo so that he wouldn’t break anything when he got tossed. The LPR rules are actualy closer to “bar-fight” “rules” than the UFC. The fight would be like Chinese Sanshou kickboxing, without kicks.

The rule for boxer versus wrestler is this. If the wrestler can box well enough, or is tough enough, to survive a round boxing against the boxer, then the fight goes to the floor. It is among the rarest occurrences in the boxing ring to have a clinchless round, and one clinch is all the wrestler needs to take the boxer into completely unknown territory. Now, boxers of earlier eras, like James J. Corbett trained with wrestlers, as the clinch game was allowed in their day and throwing a McGregor against an old-time boxer like Sam Langford or Archie Moore would be like an execution. Floyd Money, as a boxer, a boxer with more potential than any man of his era, has shat upon the sacred art he practices, by using only that narrow expression of it that will insure him victory against the sad array of opponents that would not have served even as decent sparring partners for the likes of Ray Robinson, Willie Pep, Jack Johnson, Sandy Saddler and hundreds of other greats who stalked the ring in the great age of boxing in the hundred years prior to my birth on that accursed year of 1963.

Thanks, z-man, for the inspiration.