Mark Coleman was the best HW in the world for a short while. My view is once he began training his cardio to fight for 25 minutes he was a great fighter. Mark Hunt is not a great fighter, but he could fight great. Amongst his win list is the likes of Wandy, Cro Cop and Mir. 3 legends of MMA. He's also beaten top fighters like Kohsaka, Rothwell, Congo, Struve and Silva. If Hunt keeps it standing surely he wins as he's one of the best strikers in MMA. If Coleman takes him down surely he wins as Hunt had a woeful ground game. Looking at troubling losses, Hunt has a trio of losses in the first round to Manhoef, Mousasi and McCorckle. But he had stopped training at that point before his recent rejuvenation. Coleman has two bad losses to Smith and William's both of which he dominated before gassing out, but that was before he'd trained conditioning before who's rejuvenation. So who wins this battle of the Mark's? The great fighter or the man who fought great?
I like Hunt more than Coleman, and am not writing him off, but Mark was a very controlling wrestler with great top position. I think that if Hunt doesn't do significant damage standing, and quickly, he runs the risk of being taken down and ground out. If Hunt can stuff the takedowns for a while, it could go poorly with Coleman. But I'd say Coleman 60-40 ftw.
Coleman is underrated, basically a more skilled and mentally tougher Lesnar. He takes Hunt down whenever he needs to and wins a UD or stops Hunt with his patented GnP.
This is pretty much how I see it. I would like to say that Hunt may not go down as an all time great Mixed Martial Artist, but is an all time great Martial Artist. Hunt was a world class striker and K1 Grand Prix winner before becoming an upper tiered MMA heavyweight.
Coleman honestly had decent longevity himself. He was ancient during his final UFC run, but managed to work the much Bonnar over and of course gave Shogun a really good fight in the rematch.
CC and Fedor were on a different level than Hunt and their abilities/skillsets really aren't that comparable. The Lesnar/Hunt fight was the closest real life simulation to what a Hunt vs Prime Coleman fight would've probably looked like.
I still can't wrap my head how he was able to so easily dominate Bonnar, he was so old and shot by that point. The competitiveness of the Shogun fight I believe had much to do with Shogun just coming out of a very bad point physically in his career.
Lesnar with PEDs is probably a good indication of Coleman. Both could throw punches but their gameplan was completely centered around G&P. I like this comparison.
There's a very cute interview with Georges St Pierre on the web where he first met Mark Coleman. At the time he couldn't really speak English and was sharing a very small dressing room with Hammer House. So Coleman and friends crowd into this tiny dressing room before GSP's fight, and they ask him if he's a wrestler. GSP just about manages to reply in the affirmative and all the Hammer House guys start roaring and punching walls and going "fck yeah!" trying to motivate GSP to win his fight. GSP said all they succeeded in doing was scaring the crap out of him
