[Blarg]

Scotty, on a couple of your points, by way of agreement.

The idea that eye gouges are not effective or you can't train for them -- whole styles are basically built around the eye gouge, like Wing Chun and Jeet Kune Do, and some other Chinese styles too. And they train intensively on how to get there.

The idea that you fight the way you train is absolutely critical, too. It is very hard to adapt freely when you have trained according to rules. Your reactions become very fine and you only have a split second to apply them, so you naturally respond to take the openings that you have trained for, definitely not to take ALL AVAILABLE openings. If you have not trained to use knees, for example, you are much less likely to use them even when the rules make that available. Same with pretty much everything. You fight, or compete, the way you train, because your reactions become highly specialized, as do your choices. Things like eye gouges and throat strikes are not all that easy to do, but if you don't train for them, there's no way you'll just be able to spontaneously do them anywhere near as well as you can do execute the rest of your arsenal.

A highly trained sport competitor will very likely instinctively pass up opportunities to do some of the most damaging things, as they are disallowed by his sport so he is highly trained to focus on other things. This is a big advantage someone not trained for sport fighting will have over the sport fighter, no matter how much we idealize sport fighting and kid ourselves it's the real thing. It's not.

However, no matter how much we idealize special forces soldiers, being more naturally trained to go for the kill doesn't mean they are in the shape that UFC fighters are in or are as good fighters. If a sport fighter is faster or just in whatever way better than you, it may not matter that you are much more oriented toward realistic fighting. It's still usually the first guy to land the first blow who wins. Faster. better timing, better coordination -- they're still big hurdles to surmount for someone who simply doesn't put full time practice on hand to hand combat.

Both types of people have their advantages. Both have to overcome the advantages of the other.

But basically it's as foolish to say that the average special forces guy is in as good fighting shape for hand to hand combat as a professional sport fighter as it is to say that sport fighting transfers fully and easily to life and death encounters against people who are trained to kill you, not fight you.

People sometimes forget sport fighting is a game. Battlefield survival has no game in it. All respect to the great shape and highly practiced skills of sport fighters. But a sport fight is not a real fight by a considerable measure.