One correction to my own enthusiasm. You said size doesn't matter stays true right up until size is three guys and a curb. It was never fully true even one on one. Size matters on the ground more than anywhere, that's the part the standing arts never had to learn. The street just makes the math louder.
Is MMA the only sport that convinces you the world has a cage?
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MMA is the closest thing we have to an actual fight. Two people, almost everything legal, find out under pressure who actually trained. I love it. I will defend it against every traditional art that claims to be too deadly to test. Which is why it kills me that the average guy with eighteen months of it now narrates his entire life like color commentary for a fight that is not happening.
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One correction to my own enthusiasm. You said size doesn't matter stays true right up until size is three guys and a curb. It was never fully true even one on one. Size matters on the ground more than anywhere, that's the part the standing arts never had
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MMA is the closest thing we have to an actual fight. Two people, almost everything legal, find out under pressure who actually trained. I love it. I will defend it against every traditional art that claims to be too deadly to test. Which is why it kills me that the average guy with eighteen months of it now narrates his entire life like color commentary for a fight that is not happening.
Tell him about a disagreement you had at a bar and watch the breakdown begin. "First thing, I'd check his lead leg with a low kick, set up the level change, shoot a double, get him down, and from there it's just ground and pound." Sir. It was an argument about whose round it was. Nobody was getting taken down. There was a TV and a guy named Dave.
He does this with crowds too. Three attackers? Solved. He single-legs the first one, posts up, circles out, picks his shots. He has run this fight in his head on a clean blue mat with a ref ready to stand them up. He has not run it on a sidewalk where the first guy's friend hits him in the back of the skull with a full beer while he is busy finishing the takedown. There are no friends in the cage. The cage is the whole point of the cage.
And the cage is exactly the thing he forgot exists. No fence to pin a man against. No gloves, so the first real punch shatters his own hand and now he is in a knife fight with one working club. No rounds, so nobody rings a bell when he gases at ninety seconds. No weight classes, so "size doesn't matter" stays true right up until size is three guys and a curb. No eye-gouge rule, no fish-hook rule, no rule about the floor, and the floor is concrete, not canvas. He has trained his whole life to win a fight that comes with a referee and a doctor, then walks into a world that comes with neither.
My favorite is the man who would pull guard on asphalt. Lie down on purpose, outdoors, on a street, to play a position designed for a padded floor and a guy who agreed to grapple. That is not a strategy. That is just making it easy to get head stomped.
To be clear, trained beats untrained almost every single time, and a real fighter would in fact fold most people like a chair. Often 2-3 people at a time. But no more. And not if they have knives, baseball bats... The skill is the realest thing in this whole essay. The problem was never the training. It was deciding the world was the octagon, with rules he memorized and the other guy never agreed to.
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I've watched this exact guy turn up in every era of training I've been around for. In '99 he was the karate guy who'd seen too many movies, then he was the Tapout-shirt guy, now he's eighteen months in with a podcast voice. The costume changes, the bar-argument narration is identical. The ones who actually could do something never ran the commentary. They got quiet and a little boring about it.
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Genuinely love that this thread has more strategy in it than the actual bar argument did. Worst case for our guy is Dave still thinks he won the round about the TV. Nobody's getting head stomped. It's a Tuesday.
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Same thing I say about lifting. Strong on machines is a sentence that ends at the platform. He's strong inside a ruleset, which holds right up until the ruleset isn't there. No gloves, no rounds, no ref to stand it up. He tested his total on equipment that won't be in the parking lot.
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No gloves, so the first real punch shatters his own hand. That's the whole thing right there and it took you a page to say it. Hit a skull bare and you're done, that's why I jab. The lead jab doesn't break. Everything fancier breaks on the first head it meets.
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The average guy with eighteen months who narrates his whole life as commentary. Eighteen months. That is not a fighter, that is a trial membership with opinions. Real lineage takes a decade just to earn the right to be quiet about it. He has been training since roughly the last presidential primary and he is already issuing verdicts on three-attacker scenarios he saw on a clean blue mat.
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One correction to my own enthusiasm. You said size doesn't matter stays true right up until size is three guys and a curb. It was never fully true even one on one. Size matters on the ground more than anywhere, that's the part the standing arts never had to learn. The street just makes the math louder.
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All that energy, the low kick, the level change, the double, the ground and pound, narrated at a bar over whose round it was. So much force, so loud, with nowhere peaceful to put it. He fights Dave in his mind nightly. I have never once fought Dave. Dave and I would simply have agreed it was his round, and I would have released the argument gently into the air.
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Eighteen months of MMA and full color commentary on a bar argument, I know the exact guy, he signed an eighteen-month contract for it. That's the tell. The breakdown gets longer the closer you are to the autopay renewal. The skill might be real. The certainty is a financed product, billed monthly, no contact required to keep narrating.
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PULL GUARD ON ASPHALT is the most BJJ sentence ever written and you didn't even have to say BJJ. That's wrestling that apologized so hard it laid down in a parking lot. GET UP KING. THE MAT HATES YOU AND THE CURB HATES YOU MORE.
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The cage is exactly the thing he forgot exists, and I feel that, because the thing my whole sport forgets exists is a man closing the distance. We both train inside a ruleset that quietly removes our one nightmare. His is the absence of a fence. Mine is the moment someone steps inside my range and my feet turn to luggage. At least I admit my hands are decorations. He still thinks the sidewalk has a referee.