I didn’t think this deserved any attention, but when the fight was changed to MMA rules and Mercer managed to upset the former UFC Heavyweight champion in his MMA debut, I thought I should chime in on it. For those of you who are yet to see the fight, here it is:
First thing I’m going to say is that I’m a huge Ray Mercer fan and I’m glad that he won this fight and ended his career on a bit of a positive. He was a talented although lazy heavyweight who could have made a lot more of his career if he took it a bit more seriously when he was younger and also didn’t fight in an era with such talented guys like Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield and Larry Holmes. He’s tried to make some money later in his career by taking stupid fights like his K-1 career and fighting guys like Wladimir Klitschko and Shannon Briggs. To see him score a win over someone like Sylvia under Sylvia’s rules was very satisfying for me.
Now, the issue that I want to address (and shoot down) in this post is the Boxing vs MMA one. Basically I see this fight as the one out of fifty occurrence that would happen if a good professional boxer fought an elite MMA fighter in his rules. That occurrence being the pro boxer gets his big punch off before the MMA fighter can either kick his legs out or take him down. The fact that Sylvia is more of a stand-up fighter anyway gave Mercer all the more chance and also the facts that Sylvia had been training boxing and was 310lbs makes that occurrence that much more possible.
The fact is, pro boxers will always have the advantage with their hands and being a good pro boxer is going to give you an advantage over someone in an MMA fight. It’s like being a world class submission artist; if you can keep the fight on your feet you’ll always have a punchers chance. The advantage top submission guys have is that most people naturally have a morons idea how to fight on their feet whereas fighting on the ground requires years of training to be competent in. Plus it’s easier for a submission fighter to keep an inexperienced ground fighter on the mat then it is for a good boxer to keep it standing up because boxing doesn’t train takedowns. Bascially what I’m trying to say is that MMA fans knock pro boxers as fighters a lot but they’re still dangerous fighters if you let them throw punches at you and thats what Sylvia did. If Sylvia shot after the opening bell he’d likely have got Ray down and submitted him with a rookie submission. I really hope Mercer retires on this and Sylvia gets back to fighting MMA seriously.
For the record, this win by Mercer takes zero away from Fedor’s win over Sylvia last year. If you think the Sylvia that fought Mercer was even remotely close to the Sylvia that fought Fedor then you need to unclench your fingers from around Dana Whites nut sack and do it now before you evolve into a nasty growth that he has to have surgically removed.
