There’s a stereotype about competitive fighters being dumb and while maybe there’s a correlation when it comes to people getting into it, when it comes to doing well at it it’s the exact opposite.

Fighting is indeed a sweet science - trading off distance, position, momentum, oxygen, blood sugar, muscle fatigue, and blunt trauma, and the guys who are good at it can instinctively recalculate that multivariate equation several times a second while reading their opponent’s body and past behavior to predict his next move while masking their own. It’s like playing chess while doing aerobics and getting punched in the face.

People were surprised when Mike Tyson turned out to be an intelligent guy. Obviously he was. That’s actually kind of a thing, buff ‘80s famous guys who talked weird and were assumed to be dumb. That’s not a terrible heuristic, the speech thing - a lot of speech pathologies do correlate with intelligence in the long (developmental disabilities), medium (brain damage) or short (alcohol intoxication) terms.

But then you had things like Sylvester Stallone, who mumbled - because he essentially had a stroke at birth that paralyzed a lot of his face - but wrote and put together one of the better films of his time; Arnold Schwarzenegger who spoke slowly with simple words - because he was learning a second language by adult immersion - but successively attained the highest available rank in the very competitive fields of bodybuilding, acting, and politics.

In fairness I guess the buffness and the '80sness did kind of translate to steroidness which can generate an aggression that doesn’t negate but definitely can eclipse intelligence.