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Sorry Mark Hunt  Wait... should I feel sorry that we collectively considered him NOT Tank Abbott....? 
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Jun 12, 2023 11:34
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| # ? May 28, 2024 21:26 |
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The way you make Mark Hunt sound the only reason this isn't the Mark Hunt tournament is because Tank came first.
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Jun 12, 2023 11:42
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ChrisBTY posted:The way you make Mark Hunt sound the only reason this isn't the Mark Hunt tournament is because Tank came first. If you don’t know Mark Hunt, my friend, you need to get introduced to Mark Hunt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgHVAH_NIjA He’s got a cinderblock for a head and would just sit there and trade with anyone early in his career. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZvrf0yLsHA This also led to some downswings, such as getting flattened by Melvin Manhoef. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLZBlDGASuk The UFC let brock lesnar juice like a madman prior to his fight with Hunt and Mark sued them after Brock sat on him for fifteen minutes and then popped positive for peds post fight. Mark Hunt is just a dude who is tougher than poo poo after growing up in a household where his father beat the gently caress out of him and his siblings basically daily. He has won millions in fight purses and pissed it away on video poker rooms and meth. He’s generally a decent dude after escaping some of the trappings of his upbringing. His autobiography is great. His KO of Roy Nelson was the first time ever Roy had been knocked out. He’s also extremely gently spoken. Real quiet dude.
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Jun 12, 2023 14:15
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Pb and Jellyfish posted:feels like the kind of thing Tank would have posted had he been able. I’m pretty sure Tank is literate and can tweet. The typo on his book titles might disagree I suppose.
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Jun 12, 2023 14:28
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It's too late now, but I'll make the case that Mark Hunt is a greater Tank than Tank. At first, I thought the comparison was insulting. But I think Mark Hunt is the guy we always want a Tank Abbott to be. Not only does he land devastating knockouts, he has enough gas in the tank that the fight isn't a write-off if it doesn't end in the first round, and he's well-rounded enough that the fight isn't a write-off if he's in someone's guard. This also didn't stop him from suffering scary knockouts as well as delivering them. Hunt also continued to learn and develop somewhat during his career, something I don't think Tank ever did. (Which is not to say Tank was dumb. I think he actually smartened up after the fight with Oleg, and realized that not everyone in a dogi was a glorified daycare worker.) I don't know how we track "generations" of MMA fighters; are they like consoles? We could say Hunt was Tank 2.0, but MMA continued giving us guys who were as good-bad as Tank while Hunt was a legit excellent fighter. He also fulfilled his moral responsibility to us as a celebrity athlete, by becoming insane after he retired.
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Jun 12, 2023 15:32
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I like mark hunt as well because if you say his name fast enough you get probed in gbs
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Jun 12, 2023 16:14
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I’m not sure how much of a Tankie this makes him, but I like that Mark Hunt walks away when he knows he’s knocked someone out. Very classy.
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Jun 12, 2023 16:35
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 JIMMY AMBRIZ vs ALEXANDRU LUNGU IN THE RED CORNER:  JIMMY AMBRIZ 6'0" / 286 lbs Retired at 17-21-1 Winning ratio: 44% Victory method ratio: 65% KO, 29% SUB, 6% DEC King of the Cage super heavyweight champion, International Sport Combat Federation champion Best win: Rich Hale Worst loss: Pawel Nastula Record against other Abbotts: Beat Johnathan Ivey, loss to Alexandru Lungu Jimmy Ambriz was the first victorious competitor in the tournament, and said victory was not only an impressive two-to-one beating, but a philosophical statement about the true nature of a Tank, as his journeyman, road-warrior ways won out over the massively more successful Tai Tuivasa, who was deemed, ultimately, just too good to be here. Ambriz's giant body, his awkward victories and his No Doubt hair made him an unexpected favorite. That favoritism now must carry him through a smaller, tighter bracket. Ambriz slew a giant to get here, but now he faces something worse than giants: Survivors. His unassuming record, his numerous knockouts and his sheer dedication to Moat Fighting got him to the dance, but will they help him dance with the eight true Abbotts? IN THE BLUE CORNER:  ALEXANDRU "SANDU" LUNGU 6'0" / 352 lbs Active at 21-5 Winning ratio: 81% Victory method ratio: 48% KO, 52% SUB, 0% DEC Once disqualified in a kickboxing match for shooting a takedown and throwing ground and pound Best win: Tom Erikson Worst loss: Tomasz Czerwiński Record against other Abbotts: Beat Jimmy Ambriz, lost to Chris Barnett Alexandru Lungu and his comically enormous abdomen took out a huge fan favorite, Chris "Huggy Bear and/or Beastboy" Barnett, in one of the first round's most contentious votes. His victory ultimately came just 60% to 40%, as Barnett's addiction to jumping, spinning wheel kicks and other advanced techniques fell to Lungu's "throwing takedowns in a kickboxing match" violent chaos energy. Now Lungu has to stand on his own. And that's a big ask, because historically speaking, standing for more than several minutes at a time has proven difficult for him. But he'll be punching for most of those minutes, and by god, he will punch you and smother you until you stop, and what more can one ask of an Abbott than that.  These were two of our least assuming entries in the round of sixteen, so it's oddly appropriate that they have wound up matched against one another. These men are both extremely close to the Tank Abbott spirit. Ambriz is a fearless wrestle-brawler who, like the man himself, is most at home chucking his prey to the floor and punching them into dust, and oddly enough this has given him a higher knockout ratio than Lungu, the consummate striker, who tends to wind up on the ground more because his opponents fall over than because of his well-intentioned attempts to get them there. But that gets us to the real differentiating factor between them: Their success vs their strength of schedule. Alexandru Lungu is, clearly, a far more numerically successful fighter. He, in fact, is the most numerically successful fighter left in the entire tournament. But that comes with a considerable caveat: The vast, vast majority of people Lungu beat were rookies and bums. Almost 40% of his victories came over fighters who'd never won a fight--and most of them hadn't fought before at all--and only two of his victories came over fighters who could at any point have been considered relevant. Lungu, in fact, has a fight booked at the end of this month against Dejan Bubic, who is 0-4 in MMA, 0-1 in kickboxing and 2-7 in boxing, which is particularly impressive when you realize he's only been fighting for two years. Jimmy Ambriz, by contrast, spent his career mostly fighting and losing to actual fighters. A full 1/3 of Ambriz's losses came against people who were at one point top heavyweights, like Josh Barnett, Ricco Rodriguez, Sergei Kharitonov and Jeff Monson, and even more came to big-league veterans like Tommy Sauer and Chris Tuchscherer. He had his share of can-crushing, and even some of his better victories were against rookies who would go on to later become relevant, but he was consistently attempting to fight quality opponents. There is, however, an elephant in the room, and if you paid attention to the stats, you've already seen it. These men fought each other in a midcard MMA match at a K-1 event in 2010, and Lungu won. It wasn't the definitive ending you'd hope for--the ringside doctor called the fight after the second round thanks to an eye injury--but it doesn't change the fact that they threw punches and Lungu came out on top. Jimmy Ambriz could not best him. Which adds a dose of literalism to this exercise in abstraction. Alexandru Lungu is the more traditionally aggressive brawler, but does his positively un-Abbottlike winning ratio hurt him? Does his proclivity for fighting nobodies make him more or less of a threat to this bracket? How much credit does Jimmy Ambriz get for, like Tank, at least attempting to fight his actual peers? Does Lungu beating him make him the superior Tank, or, in beating him, has he made himself too much better?  CAST YOUR VOTE
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Jun 12, 2023 18:36
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Jimmy Ambriz, King of the Moat, King of our hearts, King of the Tanks
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Jun 12, 2023 19:27
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lungu is scared or contemplative. not good.
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Jun 12, 2023 20:39
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I'm voting for Jimmy Ambriz. Not for longwinded intellectual reasons. I'm voting for him because he looks like they started with a very fit, sexy man and inflated him with a bicycle pump.
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Jun 12, 2023 20:50
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Mr. Nice! posted:Mark Hunt is just a dude who is tougher than poo poo after growing up in a household where his father beat the gently caress out of him and his siblings basically daily. He has won millions in fight purses and pissed it away on video poker rooms and meth. He’s generally a decent dude after escaping some of the trappings of his upbringing. His autobiography is great. One of the wonders of watching Mark Hunt is that he hits so hard that he can be totally gassed, hands down, looking slow, then knock someone's head off their shoulders with a single shot.
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Jun 12, 2023 23:27
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The belly is the aircraft carrier for the fists. In this way, Hunt beat Roy Nelson at his own game.
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Jun 12, 2023 23:40
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voted for lungu's gut
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Jun 12, 2023 23:57
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Liquid Communism posted:One of the wonders of watching Mark Hunt is that he hits so hard that he can be totally gassed, hands down, looking slow, then knock someone's head off their shoulders with a single shot. His hands were only down so he could hike his shorts back up
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Jun 13, 2023 00:52
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Also voted for Ambriz for one simple reason: being a violent weirdo who only throws haymakers is easy when you only fight people who are bad. If you're going for big techniqueless swings in fights that matter, that means more. Besides, if Lungu wins CarlCX is going to have to talk more about all the no-name fighters he beat, and they deserve to write about something more interesting than that.
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Jun 13, 2023 03:16
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Yeah, Ambriz actually fought real competitors, that gets him the nod.
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Jun 13, 2023 06:42
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Voted Lungu because he's the closest shaped human to Kyriakos Grizzly we'll probably get in this tournament
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Jun 13, 2023 19:12
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  Alexandru Lungu, the Judo Abbott, has been eliminated. The final match of the round will be up later today.
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Jun 14, 2023 10:12
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Just missed the voting, but was going Jimmy anyway. Being stupid enough to take on decent fighters while being that untalented is exactly what I'm looking for
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Jun 14, 2023 17:24
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 DERRICK LEWIS vs BUTTERBEAN IN THE RED CORNER:  DERRICK "THE BLACK BEAST" LEWIS 6'3" / 265 lbs Active at 26-11 (1) Winning ratio: 68% Victory method ratio: 81% KO, 4% SUB, 15% DEC Won and defended the Legacy FC heavyweight championship, unsuccessfully challenged for the UFC heavyweight championship twice Best win: Francis Ngannou Worst loss: Matt Mitrione Record against other Abbotts: Beat Roy Nelson, lost to Tai Tuivasa and Mark Hunt It would have been impossible to hold a brawler's hall of fame tournament without Derrick Lewis, the most prolific brawler of the modern age. Despite his fan favorite status, or possibly precisely because of it, Derrick Lewis faced one of the closest votes of the round of sixteen, prevailing over the giant jobber Zuluzinho by a margin of just 56%. Some concerns were raised about Lewis's level of success, but Zuluzinho's lack of accomplishments ultimately damned him. Lewis punched him out of competition, and yet, it is hard not to feel the spectre of his success haunting him. Will having such a close brush with failure return to trouble him as the competition gets progressively tougher? Will he stand up to the test of tougher Tanks? Will his balls, in fact, prove too hot? IN THE BLUE CORNER:  ERIC "BUTTERBEAN" ESCH 5'11" / 378 lbs Retired at 17-10-1 Winning ratio: 61% Victory method ratio: 47% KO, 53% SUB, 0% DEC Multiple-time boxing superheavyweight champion, Elite-1 MMA Superheavyweight champion Best win: James Thompson Worst loss: Jeff Kugel Record against other Abbotts: Beat Zuluzinho and Wesley Correia, lost to Correia in kickboxing International icon and famous movie star Butterbean faced by far the closest competition in the round of sixteen. Fellow big belly brawler Roy Nelson gave him an incredible run for his money, but just as MMA judges had done to Roy in life, internet judges did to him in digital death: Butterbean won by just 52%, 26 votes to 24. But Butterbean's boisterous brawling background battered Big Country before banishing him from the bracket. Butterbean's celebrity was a massive boon to his ultimate success, with the degree to which he somehow integrated himself into pop culture and the very fabric of combat sports despite spending most of his career in the amateur toughman boxing circuit keeping him afloat. We're closing out the quarterfinals with another big one. Despite both men just barely scraping by in the first round both have a solid argument for being two of the most Tanklike competitors remaining, which makes it only fitting that only one may survive. They've both got an excellent argument for the title, but both arguments come with inevitable asterisks. Having a Tank Abbott tournament without Derrick Lewis in it would be missing the point. In some ways, Derrick is a great modern analogue for Tank: He's a big, heavy-handed wrestle-boxer who punches with the force of an eighteen-wheeler hurtling off the side of a cliff and landing on an orphanage, and his backup skill, rarely exercised, is the traditional double-leg takedown. He was perpetually not quite in great shape, the "Derrick Lewis took his cardio super seriously for this fight" stories have been an annual fixture for years only to continually reinforce that he, in fact, did not, and his most famous knockout only happened after four and a half rounds of getting the poo poo kicked out of him. But the question that has plagued all the top seeds in this tournament plagues Lewis: Where do you set the line for an unacceptable level of success? Tai Tuivasa was clearly over it, and his two-round dusting of Lewis bears that out; Mark Hunt was questionable, and he, too, beat Lewis. But there's an argument to be made that Lewis is more successful than either of them. Unlike Tai, Derrick Lewis made it to heavyweight championship contention, and unlike Hunt, Lewis did it twice. Unlike either, Derrick Lewis has been a top ten contender in the heavyweight division for seven straight years--even now, 1 for his last 5, he's #11--and you have to go all the way back to 2015 to find an embarrassing loss on his record. Has his success outstripped his Tank classification? And then there's Butterbean. Eric Esch is unquestionably a Tank. He is, inarguably, Tank as gently caress. He's a huge, messy guy who operates through a mixture of mass and rage; a boxer who started winging haymakers in 1994 and was still fighting the same exact way twenty years later. He was never in shape, he was never technical, he subsisted on a diet of punching people in their goddamn head as quickly and angrily as possible. He has a knockout victory in Pride by way of vicious, repeated and totally unpunished rabbit punching. His commitment to harming men with his fists is greater than that of the near-total history of the human race. But most of that happened in boxing. His mostly unsuccessful mixed martial arts career is, oddly, marked by more submissions than knockouts. He would get effortlessly worked by fighters who knew what they were doing--he was submitted by the middleweight Ikuhisa Minowa and, most famously, the lightweight dance sensation Genki Sudo--but against fellow superheavyweights and the othersuch large men of the world, he became surprisingly adept at using his mass to control men on the ground and tap them out. His fight with fellow gargantuan brawler Zuluzinho ended not in an exchange of fisticuffs or a well-aimed haymaker, but in a takedown reversal, a belly-to-belly sweep, and an Americana. Does eschewing the boxing arts in favor of submissions take him out of Tank contention? As has happened so often in this tournament, it's a question of style and accomplishment. On the mass spectrum of fighters who were too good to be Tank Abbotts, is Derrick Lewis above or below the line? Does Butterbean's dedication to submissions take away from his history of violence or bring him closer to the real Tank's wrestle-boxing ways? CAST YOUR VOTE
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Jun 14, 2023 20:20
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For me, Derrick is the true successor to Tank. Yes he was in the top ten at heavyweight, but try to remember that this is heavyweight, aka trashweight. Is he too successful? I don't think so, especially because I think we're now seeing the wall he's hitting by fighting more skilled opponents. He loves to punch no matter what, just stands up when people try to do cowardly ju jitsu on him, and beat up a guy who was trying to steal his car and blamed Herb Dean. Yes, Butterbean is very Tanky, but he was also Tanky at the same time and in the same era as Tank himself. He couldn't out Tank the man himself because he was in such a similar situation/time. Derrick is what you get when you put a Tank in the modern era.
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Jun 14, 2023 21:29
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Getting subbed by Minowa should earn you extra points in this tourney. For me, Butterbean is too successful in another sport and too humdrum in MMA. I also never got the impression that he liked hurting people, it was just business and meant he didn't have to do cardio. But maybe I'm overrating that time he gave Johnny Knoxville brain damage as nicely as possible.
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Jun 14, 2023 21:58
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for me hunt was tank 2.0 but in his absence my balls are now hot and i'm voting lewis
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Jun 14, 2023 22:11
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Halloween Jack posted:Getting subbed by Minowa should earn you extra points in this tourney. Butterbean thought that the WWF had bought him in to work a fight with Bart Gunn and put him over only to be told that no they'd be fighting for real.
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Jun 14, 2023 23:19
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Pb and Jellyfish posted:For me, Derrick is the true successor to Tank. Yes he was in the top ten at heavyweight, but try to remember that this is heavyweight, aka trashweight. Is he too successful? I don't think so, especially because I think we're now seeing the wall he's hitting by fighting more skilled opponents. He loves to punch no matter what, just stands up when people try to do cowardly ju jitsu on him, and beat up a guy who was trying to steal his car and blamed Herb Dean. Yes, Butterbean is very Tanky, but he was also Tanky at the same time and in the same era as Tank himself. He couldn't out Tank the man himself because he was in such a similar situation/time. Derrick is what you get when you put a Tank in the modern era. I think i agree with this
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Jun 15, 2023 00:16
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I'm not even sure where to vote here. There's a good case for either. This is the closest to a toss-up so far.
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Jun 15, 2023 00:32
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Halloween Jack posted:Getting subbed by Minowa should earn you extra points in this tourney. Honest question, was Butterbean a good boxer? I'm looking over his record but it looks like a bunch of nobodies.
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Jun 15, 2023 00:56
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mariooncrack posted:Honest question, was Butterbean a good boxer? I'm looking over his record but it looks like a bunch of nobodies. Definitely top tier for guys >300lbs. There aren’t a lot of people in that weight class that are worth a drat, though. Butterbean beating the snot out of Bart Gunn since Gunn pissed off Vince is still funny to me.
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Jun 15, 2023 01:02
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Lewis. Throwing wild haymakers in boxing isn't as Tank as doing it in MMA.
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Jun 15, 2023 01:12
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Pb and Jellyfish posted:Derrick ... beat up a guy who was trying to steal his car and blamed Herb Dean. I already voted for Lewis, but please tell me this story!
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Jun 15, 2023 01:47
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The biggest issue for me is that Butterbean is a semi-boxer who got into MMA once the going got good. When you think of Butterbean, it's with the 12 ounce gloves knocking over cans. I can't, in all fairness, crown The Tankiest of Them All to someone the vast majority of people don't even view as a Mixed Martial Artist. Besides, the quintessential Tank moment is falling on his rear end in his one championship opportunity. As mentioned, Butterbean's is knocking out Johnny Knoxville. Success vs failure. Voting Lewis.
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Jun 15, 2023 02:17
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ilmucche posted:for me hunt was tank 2.0 but in his absence my balls are now hot and i'm voting lewis Yeah, this is mostly how I feel (aside from the burning balls) - Hunt was Tank 2.0 so I voted for him in vain and now I'm voting for Lewis (Tank 3.0?).
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Jun 15, 2023 03:19
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Still think every so often about Lewis realizing he can just stand up to get out of a hold 
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Jun 15, 2023 03:33
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Jerusalem posted:Still think every so often about Lewis realizing he can just stand up to get out of a hold Just Stand Up is an absurdly funny article to have exist
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Jun 15, 2023 08:36
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Jerusalem posted:I already voted for Lewis, but please tell me this story! So this is regarding a couple of ground punches on Curtis Blaydes who was already out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlsSaZxuCMo "Herb Dean's fault" became kind of a meme after that, being used to excuse any and all behaviour regardless of context. Then this happened: https://www.mmafighting.com/2021/5/18/22442406/video-derrick-lewis-claims-to-have-stopped-alleged-car-thief-shows-off-bruised-knuckles And when Derrick tweeted about it (or instagramed or whatever) he included the hashtag herbdeanfault
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Jun 15, 2023 10:05
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ilmucche posted:Just Stand Up is an absurdly funny article to have exist It really is absurd. He'll have one of the best grapplers in the world holding on to him on the ground and he'll just decide "ok we're standing up" and stand up. It's absolutely absurd how he does it to anyone who has the temerity to take him down.
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Jun 15, 2023 16:20
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Video of lewis deciding the floor is lava also featuring one of our abbotts Big Country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4ZW4389EeM
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Jun 15, 2023 16:23
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lmao big country has him in a crucifix and lewis just "nopes" out of there. when kimbo asked "how do you get the moon off of you?" everyone thought he was being rhetorical. nope, need to Just Stand Up
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Jun 15, 2023 17:03
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| # ? May 28, 2024 21:26 |
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Mr. Nice! posted:Video of lewis deciding the floor is lava also featuring one of our abbotts Big Country. This is incredible
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Jun 15, 2023 17:08
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