Whenever these sorts of hypotheticals are floated, you'll usually see a few of the 'easy' low imagination answers floated, based on identifying a number of different prominent features of some prominent fighters, and saying if you slapped all those together, you'd have 'the perfect fighter'.
Naturally, this kind of nominalistic grab-bag 'cut and paste' approach to 'imagine something really great' always bothered me on some level. Since, if you actually had a guy who actually had enough talent to be that good at all those different things, he would kick
ten times as much ass with a more optimized training focus, including the ass of his grab-bag doppelganger too.
Basically, it's imperceptive of what 'deeper reality' may be at work beyond contingencies; not seeing a 'greater form' of things, transcending particular expressions instantiated in the form of any one given fighter; levels
beyond the levels you merely see; the excellence that an excellent competitor is
participating in, to a better degree or worse degree, rather than something that is
encapsulated by them; to see the best there is and see
better still; to see not simply better, but
better ways to be better; what essential contours of Being that they access, that they channel, that they embody; what which influences victory in a given context; what which are
more influential than others.
Or in short, to have a standard where man is not the full measure of things.
In order to be better than the crowd you have to be different from the crowd.
You know a lot of people say this... which is ironic. That in itself is good reason to give pause and think again i wager.
I think if there is one word you could use to describe a great deal of foibles a man might have, it might be, 'laziness'. Including and especially intellectual laziness.
One unfortunate tendency i've too commonly noticed, in people in martial arts circles (and really life in general), is too much of a tendency to cast about for 'hacks', 'workarounds', or 'rAre techs' upon encountering the first sign of resistance or difficulty in a path they are taking... rather than maintaining focus on best practices, since most don't like to consider a thought that maybe they simply
aren't that good any ways. Or rather... they desire a mythical 'hack'
precisely because they fear (or in their heart of hearts,
know) they don't actually have the same level of talent as the people they hope to beat; that if they tried to do things similar in way to what they did, they wouldn't measure up.
Ironically, it would be that very fear, and subsequent attraction to marginalia, that would actually hamstring their competitive potential
even lower than it might otherwise have been, relative to
people on their own level. Their insecurities poison them.
It's a matter of reframing your outlook; rather than a question of, 'how do i beat the best', it is a question of, 'how do i
be the best i can be'. If a certain kind of competitor haunts the nightmares of your peers, if sherdog is daily filled with threads about 'what strategies should i use to counter [X] ?', then in many cases, the answer is seductively simple:
you become [X]. You
be the thing that haunts the nightmares of contemporaries as they fruitlessly spend hours agonizing over any way possible to overcome the problem... save the obvious. You look at that super scary and intimidating prospect people worry about having to face, and
you use it.
To get consistent success against a wide range of top opponents with a wide range of different specialties, one ought, to borrow a phrase from GSP, 'use the best weapon'. If another guy could beat you with your 'best weapon', chances are, he could beat you were you trying
most anything else too. Sometimes a better fighter is just that: plain better. And because of that, its foolish to try and base a game plan around figurative cases of such a nature. If you adopt a losers mentality, then naturally, you'll be a loser. A big dog doesn't game plan to merely 'counter' the big dog, they game plan to
be the big dog.
It's almost like, the intimidation they feel when considering someone with a formidable skill, somehow sublimates itself into
the prospect of acquiring such skills themselves feeling intimidating to them, resulting in fatalism on the subject.
Too be sure, there is an element of meta-gaming to the whole process; even a highly marginal strategy can be(come) adaptive if few others are gameplaning or spending training time on the matter. Or, if so many are overspecializing into an essential 'meat' that was popularized in previous years, that the field then becomes vulnerable to more secondary 'potatoes'. Certainly it would behoove one to make sure to have at least
one guy in their camps that are each a specialist at different popular metas, if only for the purposes of camp preparation.
The question becomes, at what point does trying to go 'uphill' through more essentially disadvantageous TTPs stop being contingently advantageous? I think in a lot of cases that margin in fact is fairly narrow, and if you've got a world class talent on your hands, and you're in charge of grooming them to stand on the podium, i think trying to make them a fighting hipster is in fact doing them a disservice; the easiest way to beat the best is to do what the best do
better (which is actually the hard way; which is the easy way).