It was May 2010, a few weeks before Mariusz Pudzianowski faced Tim Sylvia at Moosin: God of Martial Arts. Pudzianowski, the five-time World's Strongest Man, had just beaten his second MMA opponent, and Sylvia, a former UFC champion, was still hung over from a few recent losses. Now, atop a competitive and irony-free line-up featuring the likes of Yves Edwards and Rafael Natal, was a superheavyweight freak-show fight. If it was New Year's Eve in Japan, and Fedor had turned down Zuluzinho, this would have been a good substitute.

And when Pudzianowski met Sylvia in Massachusetts, a lot of people wanted to see him fight. I wanted to see him fight. So I asked the promoter: why did we want to see him fight?

"A man as strong as him, who can pull a plane—what if he got someone in an armbar or a leglock or a chokehold?," he said. "That whole thought process scares people. You get people talking about how he could break somebody's skull with his bare hands. We all know he can't, but that's what people think."

But beyond fantasies of cartoonish bloodlust, I was interested because I had seen Pudzianowski before. Before the CrossFit Games filled ESPN 2's tape-delayed feats-of-strength obligations, Pudzianowski was the face of the World's Strongest Man competition, a no-necked Pole with a 915-pound deadlift. In between Met-Rx ads, he proved he was the best at towing airplanes, hoisting heavy logs, and all manner of picking things up and putting them down on five separate occasions between 2002 and 2008—more than any other World's Strongest Man competitor to date. He was a national hero for Poland. You knew his name even if you couldn’t spell it.

Even among his well-proportioned competitors, Pudzianowski looked especially intimidating. Instead of a soft belly and arms like doughy cylinders, he had a turtle shell of abs and the vascularity of Mr. Olympia. (Maybe not unrelated: A failed drug test disqualified Pudzianowski from the 2004 World's Strongest Man. That same year, when an interviewer asked him the last time he took anabolic steroids, he responded, "What time is it now?" And besides an athletic physique, Pudzianowski was also a former competitive boxer and fourth-degree black belt in Kyokushin karate. Those biographical kernels led to an outlandish question: what if Pudzianowski fought MMA?

In time, it turned out to be not such an outlandish question after all. In a 2007 interview with the now defunct Real Fighter magazine, Pudzianowski mentioned that he loved the sport, and that he expected an easy transition if he were to compete. "Should some MMA organization offer me a concrete contract, I could consider switching to MMA," he said. Two years later, after a disappointing second-place finish in his final World's Strongest Man appearance, Pudzianowski put down his last Atlas Stone and put on four-ounce gloves.

When Pudzianowski debuted in 2009 against fellow MMA neophyte Marcin Najman at KSW (Konfrontacja Sztuk Walki) 12 in Warsaw, Poland, it was absurd. Before the fight, according to his Wikipedia page, he channeled Cro Cop in saying, "The left hand brings death, but the right one even I am afraid of." Pudzianowski peacocked during his walk down the ramp while his (slightly less jacked) brother rapped in Polish. When the fight began, he wasted almost no time chasing Najman around the ring with stiff kicks and artless punches in a Tasmanian devil whirlwind. Najman stumbled, and Pudzianowski channeled his amygdala into his fists. Less than a minute after it started, the thumping stopped. It was ferocious. It was ugly. It was great.

In his next fight, however, Pudzianowski was listless and fatigued in a two-round decision win over Yusuke Kawaguchi. When he fought Sylvia two weeks after, the DCU Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, seemed to host the largest Polish community outside of Eastern Europe for the night, but it couldn’t stop the reality of a novice fighting a former UFC champion. After 90 seconds spent clinching and manhandling, Pudzianowski turned tomato red. His muscles were fried. By the second round, Sylvia was fighting a punching bag: In the finishing sequence, Pudzianowski collapsed like he had tripped over a small dog, and Sylvia hit him exactly as much as he needs to before Herb Dean peeled him off.

The Sylvia fight set the parameters for Pudzianowski's MMA career. If he couldn’t manhandle his opponent or finish him fast, it seemed like he might not be upright by the end of the first round. In a sport where resistance is measured in strikes and submissions instead of keg tosses and Fingal's Fingers, his inflated, oxygen-sucking physique was a liability to his lactic threshold. He would draw crowds because of his celebrity, not because of his fighting ability.

But Pudzianowski was different than other freak-show fighters: he was serious. He wasn’t venal or fighting solely for a paycheck. His hammerfists, as sloppy as they could be, were fierce in a way that reflected purity of intent. As he would later prove, when he and his opponent collapsed to the mat, Pudzianowski almost always came out on top. When he buried his head in his opponent's chest and threw labored, sporadic punches, he was immovable. Matt Hughes often talked about strength as an antidote to technique. Pudzianowski had strength in spades.

When Pudzianowski returned a few months later to fight against Eric "Butterbean" Esch, he proved exactly the fight he could be:

You might have missed it, but Pudzianowski has been fighting ever since—at least twice a year up until this one, going 8-3-1 overall. All except the Sylvia fight were for Poland's KSW promotion, whose structure of two five-minute rounds with the possibility of a three-minute overtime was kind to the former strongman's physique. He's not going out in front of his countrymen and facing top-tier killers: Pudzianowski is one of a dozen people on the planet to have given Bob Sapp as many losses in a row. He's not crushing cans for applause either: he has decision wins over UFC vets Oli Thompson and Sean McCorkle. In 2011, Pudzianowski started putting in time with American Top Team. That same year, his first fight with James Thompson—not the second one, which was a shit-show—became one of the most entertaining of his career.

Over time, Pudzianowski's frame contracted from that of a 300-plus-pound strongman to a chiseled heavyweight hovering at the heavyweight upper limit of 265. That's where he was this past December before his most recent fight, a match-up with Pride veteran and Olympic judo gold medalist Pawel Nastula.

Pudzianowski proved he could take down a high-level (albeit smaller) judoka, keep him down, escape his submissions, persevere through dangerous positions, go into the (abbreviated) third round, and win all the same. It was an earnest display of spirit you never saw from latter-day Bob Sapp, or other fighters who bring their names and lust for cash to fights and nothing more when they get in the ring.

One last thing: the victory over Nastula was his third in a row. Five years after first dabbling in MMA, Mariusz Pudzianowski is a veteran on a winning streak. In a sport where fighters descend from contenders to freak-show attractions, Pudzianowski has gone in the opposite direction, earning greater success by showing a kind of sincerity I never expected when I heard he was fighting Tim Sylvia. Still, whenever he fights, it feels like New Year's Eve in Tokyo—even when it's in Krakow.

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