Hate on me MMA fans! Boxing vs. MMA

According to most boxing posters on ESB boxers are all bums, should retire or are over rated while MMAers are gay and have no athletic skills. I will not take this thread serious. (Meanwhile I will watch the US Open Tennis and wait for a replay of Men's Figure Skating on ESPN Classic.)

 

There is no one way to define athleicism.

Personally though, pretty hard to argue against the idea that the more athletic human being is the one that walks out of a room alive when you would have to outfight the other with nothing but your body.

Your version of athleticsm is pretty useless when your dead body is laying in a pile of it's own **** because you just got choked to death by the less athletic guy.

 

Widdow's post pretty much sums it up, people the vast majority of time don't start out sports at a young age looking for "the big pay day" and if you do not start out a sport at a young enough age you can generally only go so far.

So if a guy has wrestled or done Judo or Sambo or whatever between the ages of 10 to 20 or whatever why would he suddenly try to box where he can't use those skills.

I would bet you that if you combine the number of Judo/Sambo/BJJ/Amatuer Wrestling/Muay Thai/Kickboxers they would vastly vastly outnumber tha number of boxers.

Fighters from those backgrounds tend to go into MMA.

Anyway, in terms of athletic ability Boxing is often less to do with athletic ability and more to do with skills, hell look at Hopkins, he could whip pretty much any LHW/SMW fighter in the world and he is 43 years old, nothing to do with him being athletic.

 

now if thats not the worst definition of athleticism i have ever heard, arent you the same person who claimed torres was the most superior person in the room if he was in a room the likes of floyd mayweather, why do you keep coming up with this one on one fighting bull**** that you think is the reason mma is superior to boxing, what age are you?
boxers due to their level of achievement in the art of boxing in theory makes them athletes with higher levels of athleticism than athletes who need to focus their athleticism on a range of different arts, a boxer reaches higher levels of coordination, dexterity, stamina etc

 

I see that you stayed away from my post David. Smart thinking.

 

mma is growing. Where is boxing going?? No ****ing where. Its the same as its always been. I hope you live long enough for mma to overtake boxing.

 

Your missing the point; there is no one thing that makes a person athletic.

There are traits that are useful in some situations but not in others; a sprinter is athletic but so is a football player they are athletic for different reasons. So do you take the guy with the most traits? If so then decathletes are the most athletic. Do you take a few and ignore the rest? Which ones? How do you define them? Is a Olympic weightlifter stronger than a powerlifter? Is a long jumper or high jumper the better jumper?

So you can either pick and choose random traits to suit your argument, or you can devise a contest.

Ideally the best test of one athletes body is another athletes body; the most direct test of one athletes body against another is unarmed combat, the less rules the more pure the test.

So regardless of which particular attributes you consider to be athletic, the traits that are best suited to unarmed combat are the ones mma fighters posess.

Not to mention even if we go with your completely arbitrary definition, the pools that MMA draws from have some of the most of those attributes. Wrestling for example; name one person more athletic than an Olympic level wrestler. Name one man in the entirety of human history more athletic than Karelin.

You define athletic as some arbitrary collection of traits, my point is that you have no actual basis for those traits other than they are included in some sports you follow. If you look at MMA for what it is, the purest form of one on one competition of one body versus another, that no matter how many traits of your arbitrary system a person has, if they cannot directly defeat the athlete they are directly competing with then they are of no value on their own.

 

Just the statement "If MMA fighters were better athletes they would be boxers" shows how assinine this thread, which has been done thousands of times by people who share the same traits as you: they think they are being original and they think they are intelligent; they also share the fact that theybare neither with you.

The athletes best suited to being boxers are boxers, this in no way means the best athletes suited for MMA are boxers or that the best athletes overall, if such a thing even exists, are the ones best suited for boxing.

An athlete suited to being a boxer is not likely to be the best athlete suited for sprinting, the best athlete for sprinting is not likely to be best suited for cycling.

You start with the premise that the athletes best suited for boxing are somehow superior to athletes better suited for other sports because they make more money. Even if your insane assumption is true, it still stands to reason that an athlete best suited for wrestling is going to pursue MMA over boxing becuase the traits of MMA and wrestling are better matched than those of wrestling and boxing.

The idea that the athletes best suited for boxing are better simply because they suite boxing better (longer limbs, smaller leg muscles, etc) rather than simply being suited for the very specific task of boxing is just an inherently flawed one.

 

The whole idea of money being a scale of athletism is one of the dumbest things I've heard. If that were the case, like someone mentioned earlier, the best athletes in the world would be golf players. I don't know about you, but thought of John Daly being more athletic then the fastest sprinters, swimmers or any number of elite athletes boggles the mind.

Your argument is completely flawed for this reason.

I agree that elite boxers are extremely athletic, but your opinion is simply that, an opinion and your entitled to it but everyone on this board knows that it's bias.

 

That was your argument, that boxer's are paid more then MMA figher's theefore must be better athletes. I made the point that golfer's can be paid more then boxers, does this make them more athletic?

If you can't understand this simple argument then I can see why MMA is lost on you.