why do mma fans bash boxing

:yep

Okay, as trolling goes, this one-liner response to my long list was pretty funny.

Pretending for a moment that you're serious, though...you're claiming all of the athletes I mentioned suck? Could you give some reasoning for how such a variety of top competitors -- including multiple gold medalists -- are sucky athletes?

For your convenience, the list is here:

 

Stop feedin teh troll

 

Waiting for Another Headjob to trott out his gold he earned whilst steamrolling through all these hacks. atsch

What a ****in' muppet.

 

Elite boxers like James Toney who got owned by old man Couture. You're a laugh.

 

And Couture was like 45 and almost done. After kicking Toneys ass he went on to lose his next fight and retire. Did you forget about that? Couture in his prime would have submitted Toney and Mike Tyson both at the same time.

 

Couture hadn't fought anyone of note since losing the title. He was washed up as his next fight showed.

 

Why does it need protecting?

 

Jesus, you have no business on a Boxing site.

 

BTW back in the 90s when the UFC was all about style vs style several boxers stepped into the cage and got their asses stomped. BJJ practicioners were the most successful by far than any other style.

 

You mean when they had that Boxer wearing one glove? UFC in the 90's was a Fairground attraction, not a sport.

 

Yeah, but even though Absolute Job isn't serious, I've seen similar arguments made seriously by others. So I thought I'd set the record straight.

First: Of the sports I listed, Shotokan is the world's most common style of karate, San Shou is a popular sport in a country of 1.2 billion people, Kyokushin practitioners number in the millions, and Muay Thai is Thailand's national sport with massive participation at all levels. Even without bringing kickboxing in, these styles dwarf boxing. San Shou alone probably has more participants than boxing does.

Second: You claim that boxing has more to do with "fighting" than judo or wrestling. Where did you get this claim in the first place? Clearly it's not through real-world experience, since boxers have almost always lost challenge matches against wrestlers, MMA fighters, and judo players since the 1890s. (The last time when boxing included significant grappling). Boxing's heavyweight champion was so afraid of getting taken down and submitted by Inoki (which almost happened anyway before the ref stopped Inoki) that he set up the rules so Inoki could do nothing. He still got outstruck. Boxers lost the Sullivan-Muldoon fight, the Fitzsimmons-Roeber fight, the Steele-Levinsky match, Edwardian exhibition matches from Tani and others, "Merikan" competitions against Japanese jiujitsu players, all of the MMA matches already mentioned (except Sylvia Mercer), Lebell's match, and plenty more besides. Yeah, very few of them were the best boxers around, but they always lost.

You're the one with the burden of proof here. Pure boxing never established itself as a useful no-holds-barred art in the first place. (Don't bother with unsourced street fighting anecdotes, since every style has a million of those.) Boxers who did well in anything like an MMA fight usually had a background in wrestling, judo, etc.

When you consider all that, boxing's talent pool means even less. Tae Kwon Do has a vastly larger talent pool than boxing, and MMA fighters even cross-train in it like they do boxing. But no sane fight fan would ever claim that a pure TKD fighter could become the UFC champion.

Third: Kickboxing's talent pool isn't the size of boxing's, but it's big. The pay's decent. K-1 is the largest promotion around, and it pays its top fighters millions of dollars. Still below boxing's earnings, but pretty good. Kickboxing of various types is quite popular in mainland Europe and Asia, and it draws competitors from a broad geographic base.

The few crossover fighters' careers (Klitschko, an aging Skelton, an aging Botha) also suggest that the massive gap you're describing between boxing and kickboxing is actually fairly small.

To be fair, Toney was further past his prime than Couture. He also had the worst possible style for crossing over into MMA. The Toney fight isn't close to a fair measurement of a top-flight boxer in MMA.

We haven't seen a top boxer cross over to date. If they did, they might do well, depending on how good their grappling is. Or not -- success in MMA doesn't closely correlate with success in a pure discipline.