Mike Fiers. I think if I got low on chet I could flip him on the ground and that's a long way down. Plus he is a kid. And white. Edit: in a ring, it would be tough. He reach might be too long though.
I think even against well trained amateurs it would be very difficult to fight a professional athlete especially an NBA, NFL, NHL or even MLB. The big factor is that these peoples job is literally staying at peak physical fitness. They are paid at least hundreds of thousands of dollars and most millions to do so and have access to state of the art training. So even the guy sitting at the end of the bench on an NBA team or the third string punter on an NFL team is likely going to be in far better shape than an amateur who does golden gloves boxing or BJJ a few times a week.
Cool story bro. I’ve actually fought professional athletes and helped to train someone who went onto the UFC, unfortunately didn’t do very successful. At a workshop I got to step on the mat for a sparring session with Oleg Tartarov in the early 2000’s who has won UFC championships. To start with he outweighed me significantly. That said I threw him and then he ankle locked me. This took about the course of 30 seconds.
I'm not completely untrained but I'm not all that good at boxing, so I'd bet on myself to beat someone who also wasn't a stellar boxer and was a middleweight or less. That should be enough to mitigate the advantage of them being a top tier athlete and me being an old chunk of coal.
I’ve had this argument with other martial artists I’ve always maintained that if I had my choice I would rather coach an athlete who played high level sports rather than someone who just did the martial art in question and did nothing else. Martial artists like to talk about how with training you can overcome raw physical ability. That’s only true to an extent. And I’ve seen this first hand. Consider if you took two a green belt level judoka who had been doing judo for two years and was playing their first tournament against someone who had been an all state basketball, football, or soccer athlete and had only been doing judo for a month. More often than not the latter will win. While they haven’t been doing Judo for as long their physical training in strength and speed is far greater. While basketball isn’t Judo they’ve been physically tested at a high level where things like reaction time and overcoming physical opposition is very important.
Well that's why I'm saying give me a significant size and likely a significant reach advantage along with stating they be a non-boxer to make it "fair". I'd also stipulate that this would have to be an impromptu thing, no training leading up to it. It would be very important that they not know what they are doing. I've been in the ring (when I was significantly younger) with a legit welterweight boxer and they were basically invisible, but I still "won" despite only landing one or two lucky punches to being hit what felt like a million times. If he had been a larger man capable of throwing harder punches, I'd have been unconscious in a heartbeat, the size advantage was the ONLY thing that saved my ass, and I never agreed to do it again. I'm not 100% when it comes to Judo, but a typical rule of thumb in a lot of martial arts is that every 20 lbs is roughly equivalent to a belt. For example, a blue belt in BJJ is probably taking out a brown belt if they had a 60 lb size advantage if everything else is somewhat equal. I think that's along the lines of what you are saying, skill only matters so much when faced with size and strength.
Frank Thomas and Doug Flutie. Then I won't have to see anymore of those damn And she'll like it too commercials
Some say them e-sports players counts as athletes. I think fourumites here can overpower some of them kids.
