t
"TUF N00Bs really missed out on Igor."
Fuckin' A SKARHEAD
1armedScissor - The greatest NHB tournament fighter of all time. Without question.
HELWIG - It irks me that new fans will never understand that at one point a 5'8 230lb guy was the best fighter on the planet.
Knocking out BJJ belts belts in tournaments in like 1996.
All TRUTH.
Igor was the greatest NHB fighter of the tournament era. The only one who could even be mentioned in the same breath with him is Royce. But Igor won more tournaments - and more brutally - than anyone else in NHB/MMA history.
In fact, Igor still to this day holds the record for having the longest undefeated-fight streak in MMA history, going 32 straight fights without a loss (including one draw, and one battering of Kerr that was subsequently changed to a no-contest).
And even after the NHB era had transitioned to MMA, Igor was still the best HW in the sport for a while. His fight with Kerr was truly an epic, defining showdown at the time - pitting the consensus 2 best HW's in the world against each other.
And before Nog and Fedor came along, Igor had been the greatest HW ever up to that point.
And up through 2000, Igor was one of the 2 greatest fighters in NHB history, along with Sakuraba. (And the only others even arguably up there with them at that point were Royce and Frank Shamrock.) And at the time his career ended, Igor was still without question, easily, one of the 10 greatest fighters in MMA history.
Where in his prime, he had been the absolute best fighter in the NHB world. And the most destructively dominant - and BY FAR the most feared - juggernaut that NHB/MMA had ever seen.
An unquestionable all-time great. And the greatest tournament fighter, the greatest bare-knuckle, no-rules NHB fighter ever.
TTMFT!!!
ttt