An MMA fighter claims he was offered over $500,000 to fight a chimpanzee, and he seems oblivious to how badly that would end for him.
The fighter, Cole Johnson (wavy.mma on Instagram), is 1-0 in his professional career, even said after his one MMA fight, “I 100% wholeheartedly believe that I could beat a chimpanzee in a brawl.”
The 24-year-old, who trains at City Kickboxing in New Zealand, added, “And all that’s going to p— a lot of you guys off who don’t have a f—— brain. But listen to me, alright? ‘Oh, it’s six times stronger than a human.’ First of all, no it’s not. You’re hearing s— from the internet and regurgitating it.
“A chimpanzee is two times the strength of a human. You know who else is two times the strength of an average human? Me. I’ve been grappling and wrestling my whole life. A chimpanzee is four feet tall and 130 pounds.”
He claims the fight is going to happen
While he says he was joking at first, the joke became real when people online started making him financial offers. He revealed that he was first offered $500,000 to fight a chimpanzee in an undisclosed country in a chat with Instagram user santacruzmedicinals.
That offer turned out to be bogus, but since then Johnson says he has been offered over $500,000 for the fight and that person already has a chimpanzee picked out.
“They’re not going to cut the teeth, they’re not going to cut the claws or anything like that, and there’s going to be people with tranquilizers as well,” Johnson said.
“I want to go against this wild animal and test myself against it. I don’t want to kill this wild animal, and I don’t want to die. We are going to fight until I see, obviously, I’m winning. If it’s killing me, it’s going to get tranquilized.”
Now, supposedly, the fight is set to take place on September 11. It will be livestreamed… somewhere.
He is severely underestimating the damage a chimpanzee can cause
According to IFL Science, a study from 2017 stated “chimpanzee muscle exceeds human muscle in maximum dynamic force and power output by ∼1.35 times.” The report also pointed out that chimps have almost twice as much muscle mass in their forelimbs as humans do.
Another big factor is that chimpanzees are currently unaware of MMA rules, or the rules to any sort of human sport for that matter.
While by and large human competitors know when to stop beating the shit out of their opponent, a chimp wouldn’t know to stop when Johnson inevitably tries to tap out. Tranquilizers would only be useful if the ape hasn’t already (for example) ripped out his jugular.
“I’ve weighed out the risks, I’ve weighed out the benefits. I got a couple game plans here,” Cole Johnson said on Instagram.
“The first plan, I’m going to be keeping it at distance, seeing if I can keep it off me. We’ll go for a couple minutes, I’ll get this thing exhausted and then I’ll go in for a slam or something. Or, which might be the more likely scenario, this thing jumps on me right away, then I have to try as hard as I can to knock this out with a slam.”
Good luck with that.