(Respect the tights, or lose the fight.)
Man, you people do have inquisitive minds, don’t you? Not only do you have a ton of questions, some of you even write whole, coherent paragraphs while asking them. The least we can do is try and provide you with some answers in another edition of Ask the Potato.
Got a question of your own? Head on over to the forums (particularly this thread) and let us know. Go on, don’t be shy. Remember your first-grade teacher, the one who said there’s no such thing as stupid questions? Well she was just killing time until happy hour, so forget everything she told you.
I hear so much about "The Best Pound-for-Pound" fighter. Is this really a legit "title" of worth or just a lot of "hooey"? Is it really, and I mean REALLY, a legit argument to crown someone the best PFP fighter? – Old, Bald, & Irish
Is it a lot of hooey (interesting word choice, OB&I)? Yeah, basically. Not only is it not an actual title in the sense that it can be won and defended, it’s also based on subjective judgments and is ultimately a pointless exercise. But you know what else? It’s fun. So that’s why we keep doing it.
The concept of the pound-for-pound title is generally attributed to boxing observers who wanted a way to celebrate “Sugar” Ray Robinson’s greatness. He was a middleweight, and the boxing world has always revolved around the heavyweights, even more so back then. So they started calling Robinson the pound-for-pound best boxer, mostly as a way of giving him the credit they thought he deserved.
In the MMA world, we don’t have the same problem. We love all our fighters, and not just the big boys. But we keep the concept alive because it gives us something to argue about, and because – much like chaos moves toward order and order toward chaos – the day we created weight classes was also the day we started trying to imagine what it would be like without them.
In other words, don’t take it too seriously. Pound-for-pound rankings are more a thought experiment than anything else. And we all know Anderson Silva wins any p4p argument, anyway.
im a Norifumi Yamamoto and Shinya Aoki fan. is there any possiblity that they’ll fight in the US and i was wondering if ufc (aoki) and wec (yamaoto) are interesed in them when their contracts are up. and also when are their contract r up? – eat my buns
