- Thread Starter
- #161
Dude. Come on. You can't claim Anderson Silva. He trained in TKD for a year or two before taking up Muay Thai at 16.
I don't have a lot of time to go through the entire top 100, but scanning the rest, it might be true that many took TKD lessons as an adolescent. Really, who hasn't? But, once again, there is little here to suggest that "most' of these guys or even half can claim TKD or Karate as a base for their elite level MMA careers. Some, sure. But half? Most? Seriously. Take the rose colored glasses off for a few minutes.
In the top 10, you have 2: Cro Cop, Machida and maybe... maybe Chuck Liddell if you're extremely generous with your definition of the term Karate. That makes 1 TKD guy and 1 (maybe 2) Karate guys. A far cry from "most' and not really very close to half.
Silva uses a good bit of blatant TKD....His front kick is picture perfect TKD, and he frequently uses a TKD double roundhouse straight out of the Kukki Handbook.
You also forgot Belfort,
if you bump out Emelianko for pettis ( as emilianko never fought ufc) you get
Pettis
Belfort
Machida
Cro Crop
who all were dedicated to TKD and Karate
4 wihtout a doubt in the top ten, SIlva who blatantly uses Kukki TKD, and Lidell which is American Karate, would actually set the Majority of the top ten.
On down the list you get more who blatantly use TKD and Karate as a big part of their fighting style,
GSP,
Cung Le
Bas
Lawler
Cheick Congo
Nearly all of which are huge names in the UFC.
Even with cross training, claiming you cant sayTKD and Karate isnt prominent in high level fighters when you can see it in how they fight.
Its like claiming an NCAA wrestling champ is only a successful grappler in the UFC because hes a brown belt in BJJ,