I'm calling it a night, too, so,
@doozer, here's the answer to my question.
Q. Matt Hume, who is famous for coaching UFC champions Josh Barnett and Mighty Mouse, was a fighter himself. On paper, his 5-5 record might not look that great, but Hume finished his career 3-0 and was undefeated outside of Pancrase, which included back-to-back victories over Erik Paulson and Pat Miletich. What is significant about Hume's victories over those two, i.e. what did both Paulson and Miletich share in losing to Hume?
Both Paulson and Miletich were undefeated. Miletich was legit undefeated, and he always had nothing but respect for Hume, who he said was miles beyond what he'd experienced to that point in his career and who kicked his ass so bad that it inspired Miletich to reach the next level in his own game. Paulson, meanwhile, was the undefeated Shooto champ. Now, technically, Paulson had lost in competition before, but it was in a different org and it involved some bullshit shenanigans where he was a submission fighter entered into a "striking only" bracket of a tournament. He should've just not competed with rules prohibiting him from using his submission skills, but he was such a hardhead that he tried to win anyway, and he lost big. In an infamous fight with boxer James Warring, Paulson had really long hair (he was a Hollywood stunt man at the time and couldn't cut his hair) and Warring didn't just grab his hair like Royce/Kimo: He legit
dragged him around the cage by his fucking hair, and he used his hair hockey style to punch and better than any MT clinch to knee and kick. He even held Paulson to the ground by his hair to stomp on his head. And through all of that, Paulson never went out and he never gave up. The fight was stopped when his corner threw in the towel. Bonkers fight. But that insanity aside, Hume was Paulson's first
fair defeat.
If you want to see some real old school craziness, I've timestamped the vid where Warring first realizes that he can grab Paulson's hair (and yes, that's a young Cecil Peoples reffing):
However, speaking to what
@jeff7b9 and I were talking about previously, and karma being what it is, Warring got his a couple of years later when he entered the K-1 1997 Grand Prix. Like a lot of early MMA strikers (Maurice Smith, Pat Smith, Igor Vovchanchyn, Ryushi Yanagisawa, even Kimo), Warring tried his hand at both MMA and kickboxing, but when he entered the K-1 GP, he ended up across the ring from The Dutch Lumberjack, Peter Aerts, the greatest high-kicker in K-1 history and already a two-time (back-to-back!) Grand Prix champ (1994 and 1995). Since Warring was a dirty fighter, and because he knew he was overmatched, he tried to KO Aerts on the glove touch: Instead of touching gloves at the start of the fight, Warring tried to parry Aerts' outstretched hand and land a haymaker. He failed, and ultimately, like many of The Dutch Lumberjack's other victims, he was chopped down and felled by a monster HK, one of Aerts' most brutal finishes:
