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Dan Bobish

A month ago, when writing about Ron Waterman, I said the superheavyweight division in MMA has always been a freakshow, a barely-there division inhabited by non-fighters and ruled, for the most part, by people who realistically shouldn't have been superheavyweights at all. Dan "The Bull" Bobish is one of the purest examples of this. He was a hulking bruiser of a wrestler, an incredibly powerful fighter who bullied his way to victory for years and is one of the few who can honestly claim the #1 superheavyweight spot in the sport during the prime of his career. He also regularly tipped 350 pounds despite being only 6'1", and had trouble breathing when fights lasted longer than a few minutes.

Superheavyweight. What're you gonna do.

Bobish's martial background, however, was entirely iegit. He was an NCAA division 3 wrestling champion and had enough of a reputation as an amateur boxer that he was a sparring partner for Mike Tyson at his peak. The beginning of his mixed martial arts career was crammed into an extremely short amount of time: A full 30% of his fights happened in just four days, between vale tudo tournaments and the UFC 14 heavyweight tournament. Unfortunately, while Bobish was a mainstay of said tournaments, he was also the eternal bridesmaid: He made it to the finals or semifinals of all three of the tournaments he entered and was submitted by bigger, badder competition in each--punched out by Kevin Randleman, choked out by Carlos Barreto, and given the dreaded chin-to-the-eye by Mark Kerr in his UFC stint. Bobish resurfaced in the early 200s, winning KOTC's superheavyweight championship--the only superheavyweight championship in major mixed martial arts. He would lose it two fights later, but it made him notable enough that Japan came calling to fill Pride's desperate lust for huge punchmen.

Dan Bobish is almost solely remembered for his Pride stint by modern MMA fans. He was a sight--an ersatz Butterbean, a 6'1" wall of meat as wide as he was tall, decked out in American flag trunks and wielding an incredible amount of force and roughly three minutes in which he was capable of using it. He went 0-3 during his year in Pride, and his latter two fights summarized him ably as a fighter, seeing him take down Igor Vovchanchyn and Mark Hunt and threaten them repeatedly on the ground, nearly submitting the former and threatening a knockout against the latter, but unable to finish either, the gargantuan man promptly gassed and was victimized by his much more conditioned opponents.

And this, again, is why superheavyweights lose against heavyweights. It is incredibly difficult to carry that much mass unless you're Semmy Schilt-sized. Bobish was a talented, powerful grappler, but only one of his seventeen wins came outside of the first round, and virtually every time he fought a regulation-sized heavyweight, he lost. Most superheavyweights are simply not built to last.

But they are built for professional wrestling, and Bobish made a killing being a large scary man in Japan for a couple of years. They really do like enormous people.

Moveset, stats, logic and four attires (UFC 14 vs Brian Johnston / Pride 28 vs Hunt / HCF: Title Wave vs Alex Emelianenko / HUSTLE wrestling attire). My kingdom for a patch that lets you make incongruent pant legs.