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

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