I just caught Magic & Bird on HBO while hoping, instead, to watch a replay of the Pacquiao-Clottey 24/7, but I sat through the basketball documentary taken aback by the pretense. To me, Larry Bird acted like some monster readying himself to eviscerate his opponents, the greatest of which was
This is a compilation of quotations that I’ve read over the years, each of which have “struck a chord and my fancy” as I have found them to have some relation to the elegant and ultra-violent world of fighting. A crude few are excerpted from my writing, but they are,
A. O’Toole’s comical entries, 12 Reasons Boxing Guy’s Hate MMA and 12 More Reasons You Should Hate MMA, Too, have gotten ShootaFairOne.com a mass push of emails in support for O’Toole as well as a few peripheral death threats. Some feedback was so top-notch that I felt compelled to address
The run-of-the-mill fight gym (and every Yuppy-Mill Gym Program or Martial Arts Chop-Shop as I call them) usually has the basic devices conventionally used to minimally prepare fighters – heavybag, speedbag, some weights, and a few medicine balls. But do these guys ever get the attention to learn why these
Gyms are businesses like anything else, and there a very few gyms that put the fighters first. The number one truth gym owners won’t tell you is that “they don’t care if you quit as long as you keep paying.” Gym owners actually count on people paying their dues and
To state that any generalization has its exceptions and that any cluster implies “not all” is a disclaimer only for children and confounded idiots, bigots or simply the ignorant. So, I’ll just say it to satisfy any unintended readers: this is not a condemnation of any group of people but
Things That Flag You For Being a Know-Nothing JackAss When Visiting a Boxing Club: You are a new or novice boxer stating that your single-minded goal is going to the Olympics. You start conversations and ask boxers their records, not just how many fights they may have. You say that
In the lone corner of a room of fools, away from the bitter old-timers, and farther from the face-fighting wannabe’s, a few of us combat enthusiasts have quietly disagreed with the factors of fight scoring for a century or more—but ours is not spewed from ignorance. People like me aren’t
Besides the fact that grunting sounds feminine for fighters and that it goes against every notion of relaxation with the intensity usually designated to supremely lacking weight-lifters and man-grabbing footballers, it just doesn’t work in any way a fighter may think. Grunting, by definition occurs because “the glottis briefly stops
Boxing is filled—on every level—with questionable artists. Perhaps it’s because of boxing’s mysterious nature. Like many other martial arts, boxing do’s and don’ts can consist of a hodge-podge of hypothesis and myth, but for very few of boxing’s teachers across the world. Boxing is an artful science, and it lends