Delusional armchairs man, I imagine a lot of this talk was on the UG, which has always been full of total clowns.
Sherdog and Reddit, but I checked UG aaaand...yup, they've got a thread, too. Along with a higher proportion of people who'd outstrike Royce for the win and submit Shamrock than I've seen in the other forums.
Who exactly was better at the time? Jimmerson -- the one glove guy -- was ranked in 1993, IIRC. Barely, but he was ranked. Pat Smith KO'd Andy Hug and won the Sabaki Challenge, which was the best Kyokushin style karate tournament in the States. Gordeau was a good kickboxer as well. Teila Tuli was a good sumo guy, tho he'd been retired for a few years, and -- more importantly for a competition like this -- large even by his sport's standards. And Shamrock was one of the best Pancrase guys available. Ichihara -- yes, the forgettable little guy whom Royce eliminated in the first round of one of the tournaments -- was a daido juku champion, which puts him as close to being a sport MMA athlete as you're going to get in the world of 1993. Christophe Leninger was an alternate for the US Judo team until shortly before his first UFC. Severn, Yarbrough, etc were all considered good in their respective fields. Truth is, most fighters at the time thought better of entering a no rules tournament. Rutten certainly didn't want any part of it, and warned Ken that it was a bad idea despite Rutten's own street fighting experience. It took a very particular type of person to want to take that risk. They were not, by and large, a great group by today's standards. But they were good enough to beat all but the heavier professional MMA athletes today.
Er...have you seen her trying to finish an armbar against a mostly-cooperative larger, ranked, male fighter? If so, how do you like her chances to survive what Kimo tried to do against Royce?
I will add in my defense that "Could Rousey win UFC 1"? is a disturbingly common question I see online. It's not asked that often, but still far more often than it ought to be. EDIT: Perhaps from masochism, I went and checked again. There are people seriously maintaining that, e.g., Rousey would beat Tank Abbott, Marco Ruas, and Oleg Taktarov in Vale Tudo.
There were some very skilled fighters who competed in the earliest UFCs.To put it in perspective a month after Pat Smith fought in UFC 2 he brutally KO’d the great Andy Hug in a K1 match.
They were also a self selected group to have that X-factor of being willing have a public street fight against unfamiliar, trained adversaries. Like I mentioned above, even Rutten wasn't willing to do it until there were more rules.
Shamrock, Gracie, Severn were all in the their primes in the early UFC competitions. We should ask Robbie Lawler. He won at UFC 37 and UFC 266. MMA was not as deep but still good at the top.
