By Ron Hansen: Former two-time heavyweight champion Rick Bowe (42-1, 33 KOs) has recently announced that he plans on fighting begin fighting in the MMA, with an up coming scheduled bout on December 12th. According to Bowe, “I’ve got to make a living.” Bowe, however, is forty years-old, which would make the likelihood of him finding any kind of success very remote. Not only would Bowe have to take off a considerable amount of weight, he’d have to likewise learn a lot of the MMA submission holds, which would take a lot of time..
At 40, Bowe would have a tremendous amount of work to do with little time with which do it before he’s too old to compete. Even now, it would be miraculous if he could even take off enough weight to enter the ring, although he would probably compete overweight as he did in his last bout in 2005. It’s been two years since Bowe last fought, struggling to win a 10-round split decision over the smallish Billy Zumbrun.
In doing so, Bowe took an enormous amount of punishment along the way and was almost stopped late in the 5th round. At 280, Bowe was grossly overweight and looked like a shadow of his former self.
He still had his excellent jab, but that was the extent of his offensive skills. Bowe’s handspeed had slowed badly, so much so that he could no longer land his right hand with any regularity. Afterwards, it was thought that Bowe would take some time to properly take off enough weight to compete without laboring under his massive bulk.
Though Bowe would still have a big advantage over the average MMA fighter, most of which are short wrestler types, he’d still have to learn enough ground submission holds and defense techniques to have much a chance at the sport.