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In October 1993, a few weeks before the start of his second season in the NBA, Shaquille O’Neal released a rap album titled “Shaq Diesel.” In his first season as the center for the Orlando Magic, O’Neal had won the “Rookie of the Year” award in a landslide and been named to the All-Star Team, the first rookie to earn that honor since Michael Jordan nearly a decade before. At age 21 and after just one season, he was already one of the league’s best players and arguably its second biggest star after Jordan. Thanks to his burgeoning celebrity status, O’Neal’s debut album cracked the Billboard Top 40, hit No. 10 on the R&B charts and went on to sell a million copies by the end of the season, earning “The Big Aristotle” his first and only platinum record.
In the 1990s, star athletes putting out music was a growth industry, to put it mildly. Everyone from Deion Sanders to Roy Jones Jr. tried to leverage their sports fame into a side career, and most of the results were embarrassing: hokey, poorly produced records, packed with corny references to the artists’ day jobs. It did not help that in many cases, the athletes themselves were terrible at singing or rapping.
Author's Note: I am so, so sorry.
Virtually all of those attempts banked on novelty — or sports fans’ morbid curiosity, at least — and virtually none experienced the success of “Shaq Diesel.” That includes O’Neal’s own subsequent efforts. His sophomore album, “Shaq Fu: Da Return,” went gold, but his hip-hop career quickly slid out of the public consciousness as he compiled his hall-of-fame basketball résumé, made a dozen movies of variable quality, and racked up so much money through endorsements that he beeped like a Brinks truck every time he took a drop step in the paint.
A strange thing happened on the way to the jock-rap cutout bin of history, though: O’Neal not only kept on making music, but got kind of good at it. After “Shaq Fu,” he recorded three more albums, all of which went largely unnoticed and the last of which never even got an official release. All three are subjectively better than his first two albums. It turns out that, more than the pittance of additional money or exposure — and really, by the turn of the 21st century, it’s hard to imagine how Shaq could have been much richer or more famous — he simply wanted to be the best rapper he could be, even if it meant laboring in the relative shadows. It was surprising and a bit charming to see a guy who could basically print money for himself on demand simply by smiling while holding a sandwich or a bottle of athlete’s foot spray, putting in hard work for little material reward.
PUDZIANOWSKI!!!!
— KSW (@KSW_MMA) May 28, 2022
KNOCKOUT!!!!! #KSW70 pic.twitter.com/m2hlJZ9VrW
In the main event of KSW 70 on Saturday in Lodz, Poland, Mariusz Pudzianowski knocked out former KSW middleweight champ Michal Materla with a crushing first-round uppercut. The 45-year-old former strongman then fielded an in-cage callout from former two-division titleholder Mamed Khalidov, setting up a potential clash between the promotion’s two signature stars. It was the latest eye-popping development in a mixed martial arts career that, much like O’Neal’s musical ventures, continues to exhibit far more staying power and legitimate excellence than we had any reason to expect.
Like O’Neal and his music, Pudzianowski took to fighting having already established himself as a star in another field. The five-time “World’s Strongest Man” winner is by acclamation the greatest strongman competitor of his era and probably of all-time. The parallels between “Shaq” and “Pudz” are there, but if anything, the distinctions between their cases make Pudzianowski’s accomplishments even less likely and more admirable. At the time of his MMA debut in 2009, he was 32 years old, with a lifetime of brutal physical training already behind him. That is an awfully late start even at heavyweight, which is kinder to the elderly than the lighter weight classes. Speaking of which: Pudzianowski had spent his strongman career competing at a not-fat 310 pounds, laughably far from modern MMA’s heavyweight limit of 265. It was fair to ask whether he would ever be able to compete healthily and consistently at heavyweight.
There was every reason to believe that Pudzianowski’s fight career would be a cynical cash grab or even a joke, and I do not mean that as an insult. As a former Pride Fighting Championships die-hard, I’m here for your circus sideshow fights, and KSW, which embodies Pride’s spirit more than any other promotion currently in operation, would have been the perfect place for it. He could leverage his fame — Pudzianowski is a much, much bigger celebrity in Poland than someone from such a niche sport would be in the U.S. — and cash checks two or three times a year for farcical fights against fellow dilettantes or extremely washed-up “real” fighters.
For the first couple of years, that was more or less what Pudzianowski did. He picked up quick and easy wins against former Pride freakshow fave Eric “Butterbean” Esch and his K-1 counterpart Bob Sapp, but when faced with actual decent MMA heavyweights, Tim Sylvia and James Thompson turned out not to be quite washed-up enough, and the results were as humiliating and one-sided as Andre Rison’s collaboration with Ghostface Killah.
The aural equivalent of a 10-7 round. Throw the damn towel.
In the Sylvia and Thompson fights, Pudzianowski displayed the limitations that I, and probably most observers, assumed would shackle him for as long as he cared to keep fighting. Looking more or less like his strongman-era self, he simply lacked the range of motion to strike with proper mechanics, and his gas tank was laughable. Against Sylvia in particular, he turned a shade of purple after about two minutes that was legitimately alarming; I found myself wondering if we were about to witness an actual, non-humorous medical emergency. In the end “Pudzian” lived, but hope of MMA credibility — if there had ever been much — was flatlining. It would have been no surprise if the Polish strongman had cut bait on his MMA experiment after just six or seven fights, or turned into another Sapp: a spectacle opponent and near-guaranteed win for anyone who would pay him.
A strange thing happened to the way to sideshow irrelevance, though: Pudzianowski not only kept on fighting, but got kind of good at it. He has continued to improve his skills — more on that in a moment — and has retooled his physique to the point that he now comes in 10 or 15 pounds under the heavyweight limit. He challenges himself against a surprisingly high level of competition and has shown himself to be completely unafraid of failure. I’m reminded again of O’Neal, whose very first single featured him trying to keep up with Fu-Schnickens, a couple of the most nimble and technically adept rappers of the day. Like Pudzianowski fighting Sylvia in his third professional bout, in hindsight it might have been a clue that he was taking his craft seriously.
In the decade since he smashed a completely disinterested Sapp at KSW 19, Pudzianowski has compiled a respectable record, especially — this bears repeating — for a man who started at age 32 with a whole lot of tread already off the tires. That is not to say that he is a great heavyweight, any more than Shaq is an all-time great MC, even if unlike some, he can hold his own with the Wu-Tang.
Pudzianowski’s dance card still features plenty of undertrained curiosities like Serigne Ousmane “Bombardier” Dia and Erko Jun, and the legitimate fighters he faces tend to be either much smaller (Nikola Milanovic), well past their prime (Jay Silva) or both (Pawel Nastula).
Materla, the victim of Saturday’s mauling, is a very good middleweight, but he’s just that: a middleweight, even if he weighed in at 220 or so this time. That doesn’t change the fact that Pudzianowski leveled him with a punch that he would have been incapable of throwing five years ago. It is perfectly emblematic of his entire fight career, where spectacle has never fully given way to, but has had to make room for, a surprising amount of real-world achievement from a man for whom the pursuit is clearly a labor of love. Enjoy this man’s work while you can, and by all means, bring on Khalidov.