Fights have always been best judged the day after, when the viewer is poised to watch objectively and not get caught up in the hype. The hype, meaning everything from the crowd’s jeers, the commentators’ biases, the sound of punches landing on the gloves, to the noises that the boxers
Last night’s Brock Lesnar v. Randy Couture Championship match-up exhibited how unrefined mma is even at the elite level the UFC sells itself as. Can you imagine any other established sport in which a guy without vast competitive experience in a given sport can encroach his way onto the professional
A Boxing 10 Point Must Proposal After the ambiguity of the Floyd Mayweather Jr. v. Oscar DeLaHoya and Jermaine Taylor v. Corey Spinks fights, even the most dedicated boxing fans must acknowledge the sport’s flaws in scoring. First, boxing needs to define what is the object of the sport? By
Soft Chins, Hard Temples: The Interpretation of Taking Blows Absorbing shots to the face and body is often a matter of interpretation. I call it “interpreting force.” Some shots, of course, have the impact beyond the realm of interpreting; fighters just get layed-out. But the great majority of hits in
The surge in popularity of mma is causing an influx of average people thinking they can be fighters only because they have the nerve to fight. This is the exact naïveté that makes children believe they can do anything they put their minds to. But fighters are cultivated from birth, not built
The storyline changes once again. Common sense tells us that Manny Pacquiao does not want to fight Floyd Mayweather, Jr. Pacquiao refused to recognize Mayweather as a viable opponent for a couple of years; in interviews, he has been recorded saying that Mayweather wasn’t on his radar. When Pacquiao signed
Since the days before Firpo and Dempsey, the public has had a love affair with the ideal of two fighters going blow for blow, shot for shot, in a violent show of bravado. I remember being enthralled when I watched guys teetering on the brink of collapsing, exhaustion so merciless
Cirque de Soleil of combat. It’s shoved in your face in all its growing clichés. Is it becoming a pseudo-sport of WWE? It is not embarrassing for fighters to be stopped. This causes a culture of quitting, whether it’s unanimous or not. The tapping out and the honor of being
“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” “It’s not how strong you are, it’s leverage.” “Skills pay the bills.” These are some oft spoken training maxims, but pure fitness has always been a center piece of martial arts, romanticized and necessary in its core. Now, with the boom of
The Weakness of Trying to Be The Best I’ve been on a journey to find out what good reason there could be to aim to beat anyone at anything. After speaking to an assortment of people—successful entrepreneurs, athletes who have excelled, and life’s complete failures—it has been decided: people win