Ever stumble across one of those Wikipedia pages where the more you learn, the more questions you have? Mariusz Pudzianowski has one of those. It’s only fitting, considering the life he’s lived and the many different careers he’s dabbled in. Professional strongman. Mixed martial arts fighter. Disco band frontman. Amateur rugby player. General Polish celebrity and tabloid lightning rod. And sure, he’s also owned a trucking company and a school for professional bodyguards. Because a man has to have hobbies.
If you were around and following fight sports back when Pudzianowski made his MMA debut in Poland’s KSW promotion at the end of 2009, you probably thought the same thing the rest of us did: Oh good, another freak-show act.
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The sport had no shortage of them back then. MMA was blowing up and finally bulging into the mainstream. Washed-up athletes and C-list celebrities came from all over to revive their fame in the cage. MLB slugger Jose Canseco. Longtime boxing sideshow Butterbean. Former NFL player Johnnie Morton. It was a hell of time.
Mariusz Pudzianowski has been a surprisingly resilient attraction in Poland’s KSW fight promotion and will face fellow strongman Eddie Hall this Saturday at KSW 105. (Photo by Foto Olimpik/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
(NurPhoto via Getty Images)
So when word spread that Pudzianowski, a former World’s Strongest Man, was set to strap on the little gloves and sling some leather, we thought we knew what to make of it. He’d fight once, maybe twice (if the first one wasn’t a total disaster), and that would be it. We were, of course, very wrong.
Now it’s 15 years later and Pudzianowski is still at it. He’s made an entire second (or third or fourth) career out of it, which is almost never how these things go when someone wanders into MMA from some other niche sport. It’s been a couple years since Pudzianowski has won a fight, but this Saturday, at the age of 48, he returns to action against Eddie Hall, a British strongman who recently fought two (much smaller) men at once.
Now he takes on Pudzianowski at KSW 105 on Saturday in Gliwice, Poland. If you think it sounds like a gimmick fight, you’re mostly right. It’s been occasionally billed as “the world’s strongest fight,” which honestly is not bad as far as taglines go, though some have simply chosen to focus on the nearly 600 pounds of humanity packed into this one bout. But just because it’s a little silly doesn’t mean it’s not also serious business.
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Pudzianowski has had a fascinating life all around, but his MMA career is especially interesting. It’s the kind of career you can’t even really have anymore.
He is almost entirely a local attraction — huge in Poland, with only a handful of fights outside his home country. He fought a former UFC champion (shouts out to Tim Sylvia, who beat “Pudz” via TKO in 2010). He fought a couple of former PRIDE heavyweights (shouts out to James “The Colossus” Thompson and Bob Sapp). He even fought a member of the illustrious Gracie family (he actually knocked out Rolles Gracie Jr. in 27 seconds back in 2015). He fought “Butterbean” himself — the boxer whose parents saw fit to name him Eric Esch — and made him submit to strikes.
It’s been a long, strange, and surprisingly profitable trip through the MMA ranks for Pudzianowski, all without ever really becoming anything other than what he was to begin with — a regionally famous strongman who also fought sometimes.
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That’s not to say Pudzianowski isn’t a real fighter or that his skills haven’t improved over the years. You don’t make it this long in this world, with 27 pro fights and almost twice as many wins as losses, if you don’t know your craft at least a little bit.
But Pudzianowski seems to know what he is. He’s a star in KSW, where he’s fought all but one of his MMA bouts, and a freak show almost anywhere else. His value is his celebrity, but he’s a vastly bigger (no pun intended) celebrity in Poland than he is any place outside those borders.
That brand of Polish celebrity is sometimes a complicated thing for Pudzianowski. Glance through Polish news and/or tabloid-type sites and you see all kinds of stories about him, both positive and negative. They don’t miss many chances to stick his name in a headline, even when it means calling him out for perceived offenses ranging from driving a gas-fueled Hummer to luring his fans into buying train tickets to a soccer match, only to then (allegedly) get off at the first stop and take a plane the rest of the way.
It would be easy for the strongman celebrity to become a kind of joke simply through overexposure. You look at the proportions of a guy like Pudzianowski, and it almost seems like a parody of weightlifting or bodybuilding culture. For instance, look at these pictures of him going down a water slide.
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There’s something inherently funny about them. To look like that, to be such a massive example of the human form, and yet to still strike the posture of any regular 12-year-old having a good time on the water slide? It’s ridiculous yet somehow delightful.
If Pudzianowski had come over to North America to make a serious go of it in a promotion like the UFC, you can pretty much guess how it would have gone. It would have squeezed his novelty value for all it was worth while also publicly regarding him with a sort of arm’s-length skepticism. Then it probably would have overmatched him so it could trumpet the supremacy of its product. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before (just ask James Toney and Sean Gannon).
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Instead, Pudzianowski has stayed where he is most appreciated. In the process he has proven that you don’t necessarily have to be great at fighting in order to have a long and prosperous fighting career. You do, however, have to know how to pick your opponents carefully.
Hall is about a decade younger than Pudzianowski and a little bit bigger. He has far less fight experience, but from what we’ve seen, he’s a big man who hits hard and would mostly prefer not to have to move around that much. He’s supposedly been training with UFC interim heavyweight champ Tom Aspinall ahead of this one, but you can imagine there’s only so much a novice and a seasoned pro can really say to each other on the mats.
Pudzianowski comes into this with two straight losses. Normally, this is where you’d start calling these fights a must-win for a nearly 50-year-old fighter. But then, Pudzianowski is not a normal fighter and never has been. He could probably keep doing this as long as he wants to, since it’s not like ticket sales to his fights have ever been driven by a burning desire to see the best heavyweight in the world.
Pudzianowski works as a fighter because he’s an attraction. And at this point, he’s an attraction because he’s an attraction. You hear “World’s Strongest Man,” and you get curious. If you know what kind of show KSW puts on, you also know that you will, one way or another, be entertained.
And isn’t that enough? Isn’t it something, at least? Because this world has plenty of MMA fighters. More than anyone could reasonably keep track of. But it really only has one Pudzianowski.
