Prime Alexander Karelin in today's HW division. How would he do?

Yea, put him in to train with Couture. He'd be smothering people.

 

hard to say. interestingly the guy who finally beat him was only a modestly talented mma fighter.

 

There is no accurate way to answer this because we have no idea if he could learn to strike or defend submissions, nor do we know about his Chin. Any one of those factors could make or break him.

I do, however, think it is safe to say that he would at least be a Top 10 fighter based solely on the fact that he would be the best wrestler in all of MMA and would be able to dictate where any of his fights took place.

 

Modest? He was ****. He only got that fight in PRIDE because he beat Karelin. I remember the promo when the bought him into the ring. And Id hardly even call him an MMA fighter. He only had one fight.

 

props for a win over yoshida though

 

You would have to fancy him to do well, of course he might have a wet toilet paper jaw for all I know.

 

I think in his entire life Rulon Gardner has trained MMA for something like 3-4 weeks. He did one fight for which he had very little time to prepare. Pride offered him a good amount of money for the fight and he took it. He had no interest in pursuing it after that. If he had actually wanted to be an MMA fighter he may have become a good one. Who knows?

His Pride fight was one of those deals where they bring in a guy with impressive credentials but very limited MMA training to get beat up by the house fighter (in Rulon's case Yoshida). Of course Rulon ****ed up Pride's plan by winning the fight. In the case of Gardner/Yoshida you also had the marketing gimmick of two Olympic gold medallists clashing, which I'm sure Pride liked as well.

 

And Karelin was a massively superior wrestler/athlete to Rulon Gardner, as was demonstrated by their first bout's score of something like 8-0 in Karelin's favor.

Issue with Karelin against Lesnar as a wrestler, though, is that Greco-Roman innately exposes one to more punches than an equivalent collegiate-style wrestling style. Hence the only two major fighters with Greco-roman 'focuses' in background having obscene advantages in closing the distance to the clinch that allow them to utilize their abilities.

Hendo has his chin, which there's no indication that Karelin would equal, and Jones has his ridiculously-long reach along with not being that much of a focused GR wrestler (Jones had success in competitive GR, yeah, but he's hardly beholden on it at this point, which is the same with Hendo.)

 

Why, because he's scary looking with big muscles? I know a lot of you assume that a guy who is juiced and tatted up must be tough but Glass Jaws come in all forms. Look at Lesnar, the guy is as physically imposing as they come but he is built with more Glass than was used in the construction of the World Trade Center. We have no clue what Karelin's Chin would be like and while it is safe to assume that outstanding wrestlers and athletes like him will do well, we can only guess that at the least he would have been a perennial Top 10er.

 

And how does that prove or even suggest why he would or wouldn't have a Glass Jaw? It doesn't, there is no empirical evidence to know one way or another so this topic is more pure conjecture than the worst of fantasy match-ups in the general.

 

I'm 99% sure he'd have the UFC heavyweight belt around his waste at least once. :yep

 

If he had a chin he would be a total and utter monster.