Oh boy. This is one of my favorite topics. Probably because, indeed, we have gotten to see a lot of these "freakshow" fights play out in Pride, and it seems to be one of the largest misconceptions in fighting in the public eye. So it's hard to know where to even begin. I'm going to just put my hat out there that I think any 155 top fighter, even maybe 145, handily beats most/if not all giants. You assume it'd be like a drunken bar fight, where they just square up and start swinging or sloppy grappling. That literally defeats the entire purpose of being a trained fighter. What it'd really be like, especially if there's a
significant size difference, is that the smaller fighter would just evade and make the big guy work to catch him, which invariably ends up with him gassing within a minute. I don't recommend you look this up, because you'd literally be witnessing a murder, but there's a video of an average sized MMA guy fighting a big bodybuilder in a parking lot. The MMA fighter was literally charged with homicide, because he went too far. And how did he drop the big guy? Just kiting, and eventually winging a literal 360 wheel kick type thing as the big guy ran into it. Would a trained fighter fall for that? Forget falling for it. He had no awareness he could even get dropped.
So, then, you could
at least pit trained fighter vs. trained giant. Someone posted Fedor vs Hong Man Choi, which is a good example, but he was/is literal heavyweight goat. Here's Minowaman, a middleweight, also fighting and besting Hong Man Choi!
Minowaman was famous for fighting giants. He didn't always win, but he often did.
The truth is, it's much easier to pick out average sized men who beat giants than giants who actually had any success in the ring. Being exceptionally large is NOT an advantage. You have Hong Man Choi, Butterbean arguably, Bob Sapp. Bob Sapp is an interesting one, because if you see his fight with Big Nog, before he started throwing fights, he was legitimately ferocious. Which leads me to believe, as best I've witnessed, 6'5 329 pounds (Sapp's supposed stats that fight) is the "upper limit" on somebody actually being athletic enough to pose a threat nearly everywhere. And that physique is 99.9% unattainable without heavy PEDs. Sapp seemed to have no training, but the natural ability to throw a punch, and get aggressive. But he couldn't take a punch. 220 pound Cro-Cop broke his orbital and fighting spirit with a single shot.
Here, I think, is where one of the biggest misconceptions comes into play:
don't laugh. ye, these guys suck at fighting but all it takes is one shitty punch to knockout/kill a man
The truth is, a lot of people seem to have no idea how to actually, instinctively throw a decent punch. There's talent involved, and other factors. So if you
don't have a Sapp, imagine what adding raw bulk does to your ability to actually mobilize your kinetic chain, aka
deliver force via your body mass x speed. A 50 pound arm punch is squat compared to a 200 pound man hurtling himself fist first into a vulnerable spot, like the chin. You don't have to be huge to put somebody out cold. An actually small fighter could conceivably even win the fight with something simple as a trip. IMO, being big past a certain point is just a detriment to fighting.
I forgot someone. Semmy Schilt might be the most successful giant-sized fighter to have done it. But, obviously, he was also very well-trained! In kickboxing
