The Fungibility of Heavyweight
Or: Trashweight Ever After, a Division’s Lament
Cut them both!
Get rid of the whole division!
Why, God, hast thou forsaken me? To torture me with this interminable slog and steal away precious moments of my all too-fleeting life in fifteen minute increments?
Such are the sentiments often expressed when heavyweight fights go the distance. So it goes for the division with the biggest men when a fight doesn’t reach a satisfying (read: concussion-based) ending after three minutes. As the clock ticks on, fans, and perhaps worst of all, the fighters themselves, are continually held hostage by, and are at the mercy of, two poorly conditioned athletes. Men, who all too frequently, eschew fundamental techniques and skills honed with hours of practice, in favor of fleeting raw power.
After the UFC foisted a double shot of unwatchable dreck more closely resembling slowdance night at the senior assisted living facility than a fistfight, a slate of articles bemoaning the dire state of the heavyweight division were churned out. That’s fully understandable, when two of the worst fights in heavyweight history came on back-to-back cards. That kind of psychic punishment gets people antsy, and they start talking about getting rid of the division, or, even worse, talking about the Good Old Days. Not that I’m against wrapping up in a thick blanket of nostalgia, that’s one of my favorite things to do with my MMA fandom. No, the issue here is there are sweeping statements that posit just about any fighter of the last fifteen years and beyond would beat just about any fighter on current offering above 205 pounds.
Look, I love a good thought experiment, but I’ve got to put a stop to this a mere two to three weeks after it has gained traction and, like a heavyweight fighter, has lost most of its steam and is slowly petering out.
My argument is fairly simple. Heavyweight MMA, from its inception in 1993, through 2026 and beyond, is 1) entirely stagnant and 2) entirely fungible as a corpus. It is stagnant because while individual fighters may grow and show improvement, the general level of skill of the division mostly resembles two bull elephant seals crashing into each other on the beach. Heavyweight as a whole does not get better, nor does it get worse. Heavyweight simply Is. It is fungible because rather than saying a fighter from 2012 would beat a fighter from 2026 flat out with no caveat or equivocation, I strongly believe any fighter from any era would simply rise or fall to their nominal level of success and competency when placed in a different timeline.
Don’t believe me? Here’s some highly cherry-picked examples. Take a guy like Valter Walker. He’s on a four-fight win streak, all by heel hook. He could, theoretically, plop into 2008 and tap out Brock Lesnar. Or, he could land in 2002 and get knocked unconscious trying to leglock Ian Freeman. I say this with certainty because that’s just Frank Mir.
Sergei Pavlovich at one point was on a six fight KO streak. Look me in the eyes and tell me with conviction: Would he catch 1997 Mark Coleman with an uppercut shooting for a takedown, or would he get double legged five times in eight minutes, and then turned into a pile of wet lumps after a series of headbutts and hammerfists? It’s a damn coin flip.
Tank Abbott was both bad and fat, but I fully believe he could at least make a crack at the current UFC top 15. Because a few weeks ago number 15 was Tai Tuivasa, and now it’s Mick Parkin, a man so unremarkable I always think that’s Parker Porter. Tank Abbott could probably beat Parker Parkin, the inhuman transporter accident fusion result.
Another example: I give you the entirety of Alistair Overeem’s career. He might KO Brock Lesnar in devastating fashion. He might get pummeled by Travis Browne and look utterly crestfallen. He could win 24:50 of a 25 minute fight and then Jairzinho Rozenstruik punches a hole in his lip with seconds to spare. The multitudes of heavyweight are contained within that Pantastic Body.
To circle back around to the argument that the old guard of heavyweight was so much better to watch: motherfucker, Assuerio Silva? You want to talk about bad heavyweight fights? Assuerio Silva versus Tim Sylvia was so mentally abrading it made me forget how much I hate MMA to the point that I still watch MMA. Cheick Kongo? The guy who knew two moves: groin assault and split decision.
Speaking of Tim Sylvia: remember when Tim Sylvia was a mere two fights removed from UFC title contention and he got knocked fully dead by a nearly 50 year old Ray Mercer in 9 seconds? Remember when Martin Buday got cut with a three fight win streak and then was trounced at Oktagon MMA? Heavyweight is a flat circle, man. It’s all the same and will always be the same.
I take you back to UFC 1’s opening bout, before the concept of weight classes. Former sumo wrestler Teila Tuli gets his teeth kicked out of his head 26 seconds into the contest, thus indelibly etching the first rule of heavyweights into the great Fight Codex: big man fall down real hard. Such is existence, such is the plight of the Large Lads. The Big Beef’um Boys. The Meaty Men.
Much like water finding its own level, heavyweights will gravitate towards the dumbest outcomes.
Ultimately, the problem isn’t that heavyweights have gotten worse. It’s that the average fan is now seeing the bad fighters that normally wouldn’t have made it to the UFC because, much like modern society, there’s no longer a middle class. Now, I’m not saying PRIDE was middle class, and it had some real good heavyweights, but they also had some garbage. For every Fedor vs Big Nog fight, they had Giant Silva falling over slowly, or Alexander Otsuka trying to snap suplex someone to no avail. There’s no more EliteXC, or Strikeforce, or Bellator for mid-level guys to get some experience under their belt fighting someone roughly their same size, instead of just bull rushing the jumped-up middleweight too stupid and brave to fight them at Duke Phillips House of Chicken and Fisticuffs.
Now, there’s PFL, but a lot of their cards are under the MENA or Africa banners, which creates the same issue facing Rizin, and the two times a year ONE pretends they have heavyweight MMA. It’s hard to get US-based heavyweights to fight internationally when they’ve all got nine DUIs and are banned from entering another country.
In times past, a fighter would win some at the bar out past route 9 where they hold the TuffMan on the weekend, then move up to something like Island Fights in Pensacola. Win some of those, you get to face the mini-boss, Chase Sherman. Beat the Vanilla Gorilla, you get put on the Bellator prelims. The ladder starts anew.
Now? All it takes is a stinky wrestling singlet, ringworm, and some virulent, outspoken bigotry and any horrid oaf gets a shot on the Contender Series against a Brazilian guy who’s 9-3 against an assortment of scarecrows.
Sad thing is, there isn’t a fix. Not really, unless PFL becomes something. And PFL isn’t awful, Vadim Nemkov is pretty good. Some of the other heavyweights there are ok, but I don’t want to just Name Guys at you. Bruno Cappeloza. Ok, sorry, I’m done.
Without the super regionals and the B-Leagues, there’s no winnowing of the dross. That leaves everyone who puts on a pair of four ounce gloves as a potentially viable option for the UFC to sign. Which gives noted ratfuck Hunter Campbell too many choices. And Hunter Campbell ain’t a fight pervert sicko like Joe Silva was. Joe Silva wrote into Black Belt magazine to talk about the up and coming Kumite fighters. Hunter Campbell fucks ROI spreadsheets. They are not the same. Now, the metric for a UFC-caliber heavyweight is “will you accept this pile of filthy pennies and then shut the fuck up?”
There isn’t a fix, so there’s no point in expounding on how to change things. But why are they like this in the first place? The first answer is that any moderately large man with an inkling of athletic skill has been occupied at a Real Sport. By that I mean something with at least two of the following: revenue sharing, union or contract protections, pensions, respect, lowered risk of concussive impacts. When all you take in is cast-offs, don’t expect more than a handful of actual gems in amongst the dirt clods.
Sometimes it doesn’t take an actual real sport to pull a high level heavyweight away. Sometimes it is just the stability of a normal job that pays well and doesn’t involve getting hit in the head so god damn hard. For example, Shane Carwin, hydroengineer, or Cole Konrad, dairy futures trader. Sometimes it’s the glamorous allure of the silver screen, in the case of D-level actors in C-level movies, like Don Frye and Oleg Taktarov.
It’s also reasonable to believe that simply being extremely large and powerful can lead to bad habits in training which leads to skill stagnation. If a heavyweight has few to no equally or larger sized training partners, they could, in theory, roughneck everyone at the gym. Sure, that boosts confidence, but it does nothing for technique and skill when facing another actual heavyweight fighter.
And for the fighters who do train with larger opponents, or at the very least don’t just power through everything and actually develop skills? Well, here comes an enormous bearman who doesn’t do any of that, but his wild and aggressive flailing is enough to catch your chin and put you out. Sorry!
So, the division is bad. Has always been bad. Will remain bad. The fighters coming into the sport have minimal opportunities for improvement before being thrust far beyond their capabilities. What is a MMA fan to do? Could stop watching. Get up and go for a walk when the heavyweights come on screen. Stretch, drink some water. Call a friend or loved one you haven’t spoken to in a while.
Or, if you are incapable of not being a fight pervert sicko, recognize heavyweight MMA for what it is: A stupid trash heap that is continually on fire. Sometimes a can of gas buried deep in there sparks up and you get a cool explosion. Mostly, it’s just old tires putting off harmful fumes. Stand well back and just let it smolder for fifteen minutes.