By Ben Fowlkes
- Senior Writer
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James Toney swore that he knew what he was doing with this MMA stuff. Of course, he also said he was the most feared man in boxing, so it's not as if his credibility was in mint condition coming into
UFC 118.
Toney showed up for his mixed martial arts debut in Boston on Saturday night looking like he'd trained more for a competitive eating contest than a professional fight. Fortunately his conditioning (or lack thereof) never had a chance to become an issue, as former UFC champ
Randy Couture took him down with ease and submitted him with an arm triangle choke in less time than it takes to make microwave popcorn.
Not that this outcome should surprise anyone. Even if Toney had diligently worked on his ground game since signing a UFC contract, there's simply no way, in the span of a few months, that a 42-year-old boxer is going to learn to wrestle like a guy whose cauliflower ear has cauliflower ear.
That much we knew, or at least strongly suspected. All Couture's win did was remind us, as well as ambitious boxers everywhere, that this MMA stuff is a little more complex than it looks.
But boxers, and boxing in general, should by no means be judged by Toney's sorry performance. As serious as he claimed to take this bout, the physique he sported for it told a different story. You'd think a guy who has to take his shirt off on live TV would hit the gym a little harder, but the 5'10", 237-pound Toney walked into the Octagon on Saturday with a body that looked more like a balled up sleeping bag than a weapon of destruction.
Couture, who still looks like the 'after' photo for a workout supplement at age 47, needed all of twenty seconds to put Toney on his back, meeting with almost no resistance on his first takedown attempt. From there he moved easily to the mount, punishing Toney with a few perfunctory elbows and punches before mercifully ending it with an arm triangle choke at 3:19 of round 1.
Forget defending the submission, I just want to know if Toney could even name the move that did him in.
"He caught me on the ground," Toney said after the loss.
Maybe somebody needs to tell him that, at least in MMA, the term 'caught' usually implies that it was a sudden, one-time mistake. This was a methodical march to an easily predictable outcome. The only thing Toney got caught by was the inevitable result of his own mistakes.
Part of me wants to at least give Toney credit for trying something so far out of his comfort zone. As we've been reminded over and over this week, he was the one boxer who not only talked a big game, but also signed on the dotted line.
Then again, he also got paid well to do it, so it's not as if this was an act of charity. Toney took this fight because the boxing well has begun to dry up for him. He knew he could probably talk his way into an MMA fight, and drive up his own price tag with every semi-coherent insult. In that sense, this fight was a success. In every other sense, it was a joke.
Maybe a few boxing fans who otherwise would have no interest in a UFC pay-per-view tuned in. Of those, maybe some even liked what they saw, despite Toney's embarrassing effort. If so, wonderful. They learned the same thing that the rest of us found out back in the early nineties when the first UFC taught us the value of a ground game. How these people, if in fact they do exist at all, lived so long in ignorance of this fact, I'll never know.
Toney was a poor representative for his sport on Saturday. He showed up looking soggy and ill-prepared, and he played right into all the negative stereotypes MMA fans have of boxers. He did it all too willingly, and he did it for a hefty price. All this fight told us was that Toney needed money or attention or both, and he didn't mind looking like a fool in order to get it.
Odds are it won't change anyone's mind in the MMA vs. boxing debate, which is flawed at its premise and yet somehow continues. Couture picked up probably the easiest paycheck of his entire career, but he didn't necessarily tell us anything about boxing in general. Toney was never in this fight. Whether he even knew what he had gotten himself into when he asked for it now seems doubtful. A man who talks like that, it's often hard to tell whether he's trying to con you or himself.
What I hope is that somewhere, a boxer watched this fight and got mad. I hope someone with the hand speed and the pretty punching skills that boxing aficionados always point to actually took the time to sit down and bear witness, and I hope it lit a fire under him. I hope on Monday he finds an MMA gym and starts working on his sprawl, if for no other reason than to show the world that Toney isn't the best that boxing can do.
Because what really sold this bout was the old school promise of seeing a top boxer against a top MMA fighter. Even after all these years, it's a promise that holds some appeal for us. The way Toney fought, we still can't say we've seen it in the UFC. But maybe thanks to his dismal showing, some day we will.
Read More: ufc 118, James Toney (MMA), Randy Couture (MMA)
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