Boxing & MMA
- Thread starter Vas Incrementum
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Yeah but that boxer is holding back because it's not a real fight. In a real fight, he would just smash that grapplers face to a bloody pulp with 1000 Newtons of force as soon as he gets tackled. And he won't be wearing gloves.
A lot of old school MMA in the 90s had these grappler vs striker matches and the grapplers pretty much always win handily. It's easier for the grappler to get the fight into his preferred phase of combat (on the ground) then it is for the striker to keep it on his feet unless the striker has a lot of grappling training as well -which in modern MMA times they do - pretty much everyone that gets to the UFC level is skilled in knowing how to work themselves up back to their feet. This wasn't the case back when it was style vs style with little cross training.
If you watch untrained people fight you'll see how often they often end up tumbling to the ground even when neither person can actually do a proper takedown.
Probably the most well known boxer vs grappler fight
Also in Pride FC a common thing the promotion would do when they wanted to ensure a win for someone they were trying to build up was to match him against some K-1 kickboxer that didn't know how to grapple.
Example:
If you watch untrained people fight you'll see how often they often end up tumbling to the ground even when neither person can actually do a proper takedown.
Probably the most well known boxer vs grappler fight
Also in Pride FC a common thing the promotion would do when they wanted to ensure a win for someone they were trying to build up was to match him against some K-1 kickboxer that didn't know how to grapple.
Example:
Terence Crawford is a champion professional boxer (and he is an amateur wrestler) and he admitted multiple times that most boxers would get owned in a fight by wrestlers.
And I am saying this as someone who did full contact karate for over 10 years when I was younger and only just started wrestling recently. Most experienced amateur wrestlers would kick my ass in a fight. The one advantage striking has in a real fight is that you can fight multiple untrained opponents at the same time which is much harder to do with grappling. If you are fighting two guys in a street fight as a wrestler/grappler when you take one to the ground the other guy is going to come and stomp your head.
But in a one on one fight a pure grappler and a pure striker who have trained for an equal amount of time the grappler is going to win 80% - 90% of the time. Back in the day Benny "the Jet" Urquidez who was an undefeated world class kickboxer got his ass kicked by a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu guy until Benny later learned Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and other martial arts and became more well rounded.
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The one exception I have seen to this was Bas Rutten in his early days fighting in Pankrase. Before he became more well rounded he managed to beat quite a few wrestlers with his striking before being defeated by Ken Shamrock then after that defeat he upped his grappling game. Although even in the early days he had practiced some very minimal take down defenses and wrestling so he wasn't at zero but he was pretty crap at it but later became good after getting serious about grappling due being beaten by Ken Shamrock and another wrestler.
To deliver a lot of force into a punch you need to be in a well balanced stable position with both feet on the ground and not leaning too far in any direction. Often when you are getting tackled you off balance and cannot get much weight into the punch meaning its just arm action without much body weight and the guy tackling you will just eat those punches and take you down. Mind you not 100% of the time but most of the time that is what happens.
Also you see Terence telling you he doesn't want to cop kicks or elbows that his why he isn't in the UFC. He understands well the limitations of boxing.
One thing that helped Bas early on was that he fought in Pancrase where there was a gentlemen's rule that you didn't ground and pound your opponent and where there was rope escapes where your opponent had to release a submission hold if you grabbed the ropes. The fight also would get restarted standing which of course helped strikers a lot