Having just read The Straight Lead by Teri Tom, I was compelled to write about “The Boxing Jab.” The straight lead works as a more powerful jab than the boxing jab, and it indeed has more reach than the classic boxing jab. The problem is that the straight lead serves
Any person who is getting into any area of information exchange must learn the process of the exchange of knowledge and, with an open yet skeptical mind, discern what he/she is being told. This is much easier said than practiced, because people want to blindly follow – it’s just easier.
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