The Shrine

I had some random threads about hypothetical fights and I'm reminded of this video:


Here, we can see the Mountain who appears to be way stronger lost in an arm wrestling contest. There are many comparable analogs when you hear people argue about how soandso with superior training will beat another guy that's much stronger in what appears to be a strength dominated field (e.g. MMA, boxing, whatever).

However, you can see that the weaker guy wins because the rules of the engagement makes strength relatively unimportant. To me, the fact the Mountain lost arm wrestling is no different than if he lost in arm wrestling to me because we have to play Street Fighter with the other hand and whoever wins that gets a huge powerup on our arm wrestling hand, enough to overcome the strength difference. Sure, the arm wrestling champion is quite strong himself, but I'm guessing the point is that he cannot possibly have enough strength to match the Mountain. What is even the point of engaging in seemingly feat of strength competition if you don't actually plan to let the strongest guy win?

At any rate, unless there's something I'm totally missing about the whole arm wrestling thing, I'm guessing the Mountain could learn about the same techniques and if he spent enough time practicing he'd also win. Of course, there's probably no incentive to do such a thing. Another fairly similar example I can think of is that Brian Scalabriane, a washed up NBA player that fans usually laugh at for his lack of basketball skills, routinely does these shows where he takes on random challengers and crush them to show that even a washed up NBA player is way stronger than random guys who think they can take on him. But even a washed up NBA players have tens of years training with the best and playing with the best and presumably he started out with basketball stats equal to top 500 of the world, while the random guys who thought they're good at basketball are not pro so they obviously don't spend the whole time training and likely rates below him in basketball stats. There's zero incentive for a person to stop everything they're doing just to prove they could be slightly better than a washed up NBA player, so even if a guy could be better than a washed up NBA pro they'd never come close to that potential. Yes, I know pro players are unfathomably good at their sports, but when you compare to the millions of guys that practice a sport, it's not that impossible to find an amateur that has the talent to beat a washed up pro. Again, I don't see why it's brag worthy that an ex-Pro with the benefit of the NBA training that is far beyond what any amateur can have act like how NBA level is something an amateur cannot possibly pass, especially after the said pro has turned out to be washed up. There is virtually zero chance he'd lose to random guys that challenge him because they lack his training. If he instead challenged guys in G League that at least have somewhat comparable training I'm sure he'd find someone that can beat him quite fast.

I guess it turns out there are relatively few feats of strength that are truly unrivaled. For example Usain Bolt doesn't need to have some qualifier on why he's faster than anyone else, but for stuff like 'fighting', we sure have all kinds of different classification on who is the strongest fighter. I think it's because it's impossible to be the 'best' at something like fighting, since if you ever lose you're by definition no longer the best, so you end up with all these attempts to qualify why someone is the best despite losing being a very real possibility. Instead of acknowledging that for something like the fighting even the very best fighter might only win 90% of the time against top tier, and not even 100% even dropping a tier since too much random things can happen, but that really doesn't fit the narrative where the best is supposed to always win.

It depends on the sport. And the “best” fighter is often a fiction for marketing purposes.

Kickboxing is much better at determining top fighters because everyone is practicing the same discipline while MMA has a mashup of styles so there’s always someone who might be specialized at taking down a champion level fighter, but could lose to most other top level fighters.

The top MMA league, UFC, is largely fictional. They’ll market fighters who have lost a lot of fights as the best in the world. They don’t do tournaments anymore, it’s all done through matchmaking with no clear advancement path other than self-promotion and being entertaining. A fighter can get in trouble in UFC for winning if they’re not entertaining enough, this happened with Lyoto Machida, a guy who went 16-0, but had a very defensive counter-punch style of fighting which UFC didn’t like. It’s only when he began being more aggressive that they gave him a chance, and that’s how he lost.

The old kickboxing league K-1 would do tournaments every year. Usually they’d have 8 qualifying tournaments of 16 fighters each. The winner of each would go to the main championship tournament—also 16 fighters. So 8 of the 16 were that years qualifying tournament winners, and ideally the other 8 fighters were the final 8 from the previous year—often this number would be 6 or 7 due to injuries/other reasons so the company would select impressive fighters from that year to participate in the empty slots.They’d do it in two shows: the first show would be the first eight fights. The final 8 in the tournament would all happen in one night—so the winner would have to fight 3 opponents in one night. The downside is if a great fighter gets injured/tired early on, then they can lose to worse fighters who come in more fresh after a lucky KO… as happened the year Alistair Overeem won the tournament getting lucky and facing two very injured/tired opponents—the semi-finals saw two of the greatest kickboxers in history have a brutal battle (Semmy Schildt vs Peter Aerts) and Overeem was basically fresh, and only had to throw a few punches to win against a better fighter—same thing happened a few years earlier where he beat Badr Hari—the following year they fought each other fresh and Badr Hari destroyed Overeem in minutes. Overeem was a good fighter, but he was not the best—whoever had his luck would have won.

The upside to tournaments is this is significantly more accurate at discovering the best than simple match-making, as that match-making is about as legit as pro-wrestling booking. Matchmaking a fighter might fight for years, winning every time, and not win a championship. In a K-1 championship style tournament, a fighter is never more than 4 shows across 1 year from the championship.

They dress it up nicely to make it seem legit, having fictional positions like “number one contender.” But they select who they want in the “number one contender match” and it’s usually set up for one guy to win against a hyped up fighter who might have only won one out of their last 4 or 5 fights. The winner of the number one contender match is sometimes conveniently forgotten. Of course, a fighter can’t lose too often or it makes the promotion’s job at making them look spectacular much more difficult. But Brock Lesnar, Conner Mcgreggor, and Randy Couture had no issues, they lost all the time and fans still thought they were the best fighters in the world. UFC and fans will also take a fighter who was winning all the time across 5-10 years, and loses once, and then “see, they were never that good.”

In other sports: Alexander Karelin was a super heavyweight wrestler who not only didn’t lose across 12 years, but didn’t even lose a point: 3 Olympic Golds, 9 world championships, 12 European cups. Lost due to a technicality at the Sydney Olympics, then retired.

Boxing is often as political as MMA, maybe more so. Why did it take Tyson so long to fight Lewis? Why didn’t Riddick ever fight Lewis? Because they knew stylistically Lewis would win almost every time against either of them. By the time Lewis and Tyson fought, both were well past their prime, but still at the top of the rankings.

On arm wrestling. Not just total size, but which muscles are actually strong. While technique plays a part, there was a lot more going on in that match than technique.