In modern MMA competition it is very rare to see pure style vs style match ups anymore. While most fighters certainly have things they are exceptional at and prefer to do, nowadays most MMA fighters are pretty well-rounded and can do it all.

That wasn’t the case in this particular MMA fight from 2004 though. This fight featured heavyweight boxer Francois Botha taking on judoka Yoshiro Akiyama in his first ever MMA fight. The boxer, Botha, held numerous titles in boxing as a professional and outweighed Akiyama by nearly 100lbs in this one.

We see in the video though that Botha had no idea how to fight on the ground and regardless of the massive size difference when a pure striker fights a pure grappler the grappler is going to win the vast majority of times.

Akiyama intelligently wastes no time standing and trading with the bigger man and takes him down immediately where he has the advantage.

Akiyama unleashes some pretty brutal ground and pound of the big man before he grabs a hold of an arm and submits with the arm bar just under 2 minutes into the fight.

This would be the first fight of many for Akiyama in Japan under the K1 promotion. He would eventually go on to fight for the UFC where he did not have as much success as he did in Japan, winning just two of his fights and losing five of them.

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ABOUT YOSHIHIRO AKIYAMA:
Yoshihiro Akiyama (秋山 成勲 Akiyama Yoshihiro?)(born July 29, 1975), also known as Choo Sung-hoon (Hangul: 추성훈, Hanja: 秋成勳) is a Japanese mixed martial artist and judoka. Akiyama won the gold medal at the 2001 Asian Championships for South Korea, and for Japan at the 2002 Asian Games. A fourth-generation Japanese of Korean descent, he acquired Japanese nationality in 2001. He is the former K-1 HERO’s Light Heavyweight Grand Prix Tournament Champion.[Source: Wiki]