Boxer Critical after Fight

[Tommysixfingers]

Originally Posted by MorseMoose

I don't and won't. Just don't be surpirsed when something like this happens. But where is the enjoyment in watching a guy get his brain knocked around inside his skull?

I guess you don't like football (the american sport where the foot seldom touches the "ball") or hockey much then? Those tackles sure knocks the brain around from time to time.

One shouldn't fool himself and say that boxing is harmless though, beacuse it is not. The question is if it is more dangerous than other contact sports, including the two I just mentioned.

All respect if you don't like boxing though. It's not for everyone.

Edit: Didn't see Bababuis previous post. I blame boxing =)

[Carplos]

But where is the enjoyment in watching a guy get his brain knocked around inside his skull?

Well, it's not my skull!

(Note: I'm not a boxing or MMA fan in general, but there have been periods where I enjoyed boxing and I like a few specific MMA fighters.

[Dagrims]

When people get in a fight in high school or at a bar, why do people watch?


Because it's interesting.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Combat sports, like boxing and MMA, ave always been controversial. While they ave had fans and certainly make a lot of money for some people (especially promoters), there have been some who consider them an affront to human dignity in a way other rough sports like football and hockey are not.

I'm not saying I agree with them, mind you.

[Prodigal Son]

Boxing is a little much. Repeatedly getting thumped upside the skull, taking brain damage one punch at a time for thousands of punches in a career. How many boxers over the age of 55 have anywhere near normal cognitive function?

I find MMA much safer. A couple of strikes to the head now and then isn't going to do the same damage as the thousands of instances of blunt force trauma that boxers undergo. And a lot of MMA fighters don't even get punched in the head/face for several fights in a row. I think if someone just watches the knockout highlights they will think MMA far different than it actually is.

Boxing seems barbaric in comparison. I'm not really a big fan of the sport. Pretty much all sports can have negative health effects, but that's not an excuse to be ok with them. If we do Roman style gladiator matches, is that ok as long as the contestants are willing participants? The point is just that you have to draw the line somewhere. For me, I don't support boxing, and I'm far from a guy who generally gets upset about this sort of thing.

[Lawley]

Would of expected to see this kind of news in an MMA fight, seeing how everyone thinks that is so much mroe barbaric and dangerous.

I do hope he gets better though!

[Syd Thrift]

MMA is horrendous, which is why I can't bring myself to watch it. There's usually around 20 seconds of punching followed by grappling for the next 4 minutes, 40 seconds. Then the next round starts and so on. Boxing isn't exactly a pure form of fighting. It's fighting that's been distilled over 300+ years to be at once the safest and the most punishing form you can get. It's true that boxers occasionally die in the ring or by complications from fights. It's also true that a significant percentage of people who box for a living in their athletic years end up getting pugilistic dementia. Of course, football linemen and professional wrestlers get pugilistic dementia as well (see: Mike Webster and Chris Benoit), but people still put that solely on boxing for whatever reason.

The reasons I like boxing:

- It's a sport of courage and character, much more so than any other team or individual sport out there. When a guy's getting blasted, who can't see well because one of his eyes is swollen shut, but keeps going out there because he doesn't believe in ending the fight early, that tells a lot about that man's character (see: the Juan Diaz - Nate Campbell fight earlier this year). Conversely, when a guy starts to lose a lead (let's call this guy Mike Tyson) and then starts hitting below the belt and biting, you know something about that man's character as well. Every single boxing match has character-defining moments like that.

- The strategy and personal intelligence required to be a great boxer. Of all the sports, boxing might require the least amount of pure athleticism. In many cases, that athleticism is replaced with the acceptance of getting hurt badly whenever one practices their sport. Because of the fact that boxers aren't as pre-selected for the ability to run really fast or jump really high or hit a baseball, there's a much greater variety of skillsets that come into the sport and out of that comes a huge amount of strategy. Boxing IMO has as much if not more strategy in terms of "armchair quarterbacking" availability as football, and football is played by 22 guys, not 2.

- And because boxers have to work that strategy themselves, IME no athlete from any other sport is able to talk about their game as much as boxers are about boxing. Whether you're listening to an interview by Chazz Witherspoon or Ali on a Cosell special from the 1970s or Ray Mancini or Sugar Ray Leonard or George Foreman, I just don't see athletes in any other sports able to articulate quite why they won or why they lost as well as a boxer.

Boxing is a bloody, brutal sport, and as such it is a sport for artists. No sports movie comes close to "Raging Bull" in terms of greatness. While there are lots of good sportswriters out there, particularly for baseball, boxing seems to have a Joyce Carol Oates or Ernest Hemingway extolling its virtues every generation. It's an ugly sport, but when you get into it a very pretty one as well.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Lawley

Would of expected to see this kind of news in an MMA fight, seeing how everyone thinks that is so much mroe barbaric and dangerous.

I do hope he gets better though!

One reason MMA doesn't produce this sort of thing so much is that the fighters don't spend a lot of time doing things that would physically incapacitate the other guy in the long term, and when they do their hands are so unprotected that they're more likely to break a knuckle than to give a guy a concussion. MMA really isn't "more barbaric and dangerous". That's just the spin Spike TV puts on it. I'd say it's significantly less dangerous than boxing. "Barbaric" is just a silly word to use in conjunction with sporting events. Even the Roman gladiators were the opposite of barbaric.

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by marioh

That viewpoint is why you'll probably never like most combat sports (which I'm not saying is a bad or good thing).
You see it that way, I see form, technique, athleticism, style and strategy in both boxing and MMA.

A street fight I'd agree with you.

I'd rather watch a 1 on 1 evenly matched street fight than a heavyweight boxing match, I just find boxing, especially heavyweights, boring

Originally Posted by Dagrims

When people get in a fight in high school or at a bar, why do people watch?


Because it's interesting.

Exactly.

[bababui]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

MMA is horrendous, which is why I can't bring myself to watch it. There's usually around 20 seconds of punching followed by grappling for the next 4 minutes, 40 seconds. Then the next round starts and so on. Boxing isn't exactly a pure form of fighting. It's fighting that's been distilled over 300+ years to be at once the safest and the most punishing form you can get. It's true that boxers occasionally die in the ring or by complications from fights. It's also true that a significant percentage of people who box for a living in their athletic years end up getting pugilistic dementia. Of course, football linemen and professional wrestlers get pugilistic dementia as well (see: Mike Webster and Chris Benoit), but people still put that solely on boxing for whatever reason.

The reasons I like boxing:

- It's a sport of courage and character, much more so than any other team or individual sport out there. When a guy's getting blasted, who can't see well because one of his eyes is swollen shut, but keeps going out there because he doesn't believe in ending the fight early, that tells a lot about that man's character (see: the Juan Diaz - Nate Campbell fight earlier this year). Conversely, when a guy starts to lose a lead (let's call this guy Mike Tyson) and then starts hitting below the belt and biting, you know something about that man's character as well. Every single boxing match has character-defining moments like that.

- The strategy and personal intelligence required to be a great boxer. Of all the sports, boxing might require the least amount of pure athleticism. In many cases, that athleticism is replaced with the acceptance of getting hurt badly whenever one practices their sport. Because of the fact that boxers aren't as pre-selected for the ability to run really fast or jump really high or hit a baseball, there's a much greater variety of skillsets that come into the sport and out of that comes a huge amount of strategy. Boxing IMO has as much if not more strategy in terms of "armchair quarterbacking" availability as football, and football is played by 22 guys, not 2.

- And because boxers have to work that strategy themselves, IME no athlete from any other sport is able to talk about their game as much as boxers are about boxing. Whether you're listening to an interview by Chazz Witherspoon or Ali on a Cosell special from the 1970s or Ray Mancini or Sugar Ray Leonard or George Foreman, I just don't see athletes in any other sports able to articulate quite why they won or why they lost as well as a boxer.

Boxing is a bloody, brutal sport, and as such it is a sport for artists. No sports movie comes close to "Raging Bull" in terms of greatness. While there are lots of good sportswriters out there, particularly for baseball, boxing seems to have a Joyce Carol Oates or Ernest Hemingway extolling its virtues every generation. It's an ugly sport, but when you get into it a very pretty one as well.

An outstanding post. The points couldnt have been made better.

[rudel.dietrich]

A few years ago espn.com got together a group of dozens of sports physiology experts and experts in sports medicine, managament as well as doctors and therapists.

They studied the human body and took over 60 different sports and studied them over a range of different skill sets like raw strength, hand/eye cordination and flexibility as well as dozens of others.

I do not remember much about the rankings but boxing easily came out #1 as the hardest and most demanding of any sport.

It would be cool is someone could find that report. I think it was linked through the boards when it was released

[boilermaker]

Do people even die in MMA competitions? Or at least the mainstream ones?

It would seem obvious that boxing is a far more dangerous sport because of the drawn out nature of the violence.

[boilermaker]

I was begging the question on my last post but I'd like to take this time and profess how superior boxing is to me than MMA.

What are some appropriate metaphors?

Boxing is jazz and MMA is rap-rock.

Boxing is a book and MMA is a magazine.

Boxing is the History Channel and MMA is SpikeTV.

Boxing is grocery store brand whiskey and MMA is Mike's Hard Lemonade.

[Prodigal Son]

Really? I think there is a lot more real strategy in MMA, and a lot of the strategy in boxing is arbitrary.

I could sit down today and design a sport that is incredibly demanding and has a ton of strategy. How about we send two people through the eliminator in American Gladiator 20 times in a row while carrying a laptop and playing a game of Civ IV against each other with a 45-second turn timer. Would that be the best sport ever? The point is that a sport being physically demanding and heavy on strategy doesn't make it great. I can definitely see boxing's appeal, and I wouldn't say I dislike the sport, but let's not glorify it beyond what it is. It's a drawn out brain trauma contest with some arbitrary rules intended to add strategy so that boxers who aren't the best brain bludgeoners can still be successful in the sport through other means.

If MMA is rock/rap, then boxing is avant-garde noise, like Yoko Ono doing a concert that is all guitar feedback. It's not natural music. It's really arbitrary. In MMA you have a guy strategizing how to knock the other guy out or how to choke him out or how to do the most physical damage to him to win a decision--criteria that accurately represent the real, natural state of fighting. In boxing you have a guy trying to run around the ring and tap the other guy with a huge red pad on his hand so that he can get more tally marks on the judges' scorecards.

In boxing, you punch the other guy. In MMA, you punch, kick, elbow, knee, grapple, wrestle, twist, leverage, and choke the other guy. You incorporate striking, Muay Thai, JuJitsu, and any number of other disciplines and styles to properly defend against your opponents and generate a varied, versatile offense.

I just don't see the comparison. Boxing is incredibly bland compared to MMA, IMO.

[boilermaker]

Of course this is all just subjective taste.

However, if the argument that a fighter in MMA can do more things than a boxer can in boxing (and therefore MMA is more entertaining), I would insist that what really defines a sport is not what you can do but what you can't do. Would baseball me more entertaining if base-runners didn't have to stay on their base-lines? Wouldn't it be more entertaining if a base-runner caught in a run down be able to just sprint into right field and marathon his way around the outfield to a bag? Well it just wouldn't be baseball if that were allowed.

That's how I feel about MMA as a boxing fan. By allowing less constriction of the rules, you've deflated what made the "sport of fighting" interesting in the first place.

[Michael Hopcroft]

To get back to the original topic, doctors are now saying that Oscar Diaz is going to survivie his injuries. the fact that he was in good phsyical condition, they said, helps in his recovery. Of course, his boxing career is over, but at least he's going to live.

Boxing - Boxing News - Boxing Coverage

[Syd Thrift]

Here's how 99% of MMA matches play out:

Fighter A throws a punch at fighter B. He hits him and knocks him down because he has a crappy guard technique, or else he gets knocked down by a counter or something. Whatever is the case, they go to the ground.

4 minutes, 30 seconds of crawling around on the ground ensue. The entire process on the ground is getting your opponent to the point where there's a threat of injury rather than the real thing. For the uninitiated, this is probably the most boring aspect of any sport in existence, including curling and dominoes because at least in curling and dominoes you can tell what the guy's trying to do. Even for those with a background in wrestling (I wrestled in high school, for example), it's just not all that exciting because at all times the guys on the floor are 2 or 3 levels removed from actual danger.

Cue the next round. Occasionally a guy will get up and initiate another 20-30 second string of punching or kicking before they writhe around on the ground again.

Boxing on the other hand has a couple hundred years of people saying "wow, grappling is incredibly boring, let's get rid of that" and "hey, now that we've eliminated grappling, there's no reason for guys to grab so let's let them wear gloves to protect their hands from being broken in the middle of a fight because that's boring too" followed by "okay, so now we've created a sport in which you see guys knocking the crap out of one another with some regularity. Let's let the referee or better yet a ring doctor determine when a guy is about to be killed in the ring and stop short of that". You don't see kicking in boxing because it was decided long ago that kicking doesn't work unless you hit the other guy in the groin or the hips, and allowing that sort of thing also leads to more boring fighting. It's not that boxing as a whole forgot about this stuff. It's that everything that's not expressly about meting out or receiving punishment has been removed.

And what the hell does "the strategy in boxing is arbitrary" even mean? That sounds an awful lot like a throw-away line from someone who doesn't understand the sport. There's a huge reason why you hear that cliche "styles make fights" like every other nationally televised match there is. It's because it's true. Styles make fights. I'd explain this in more detail but frankly it'd be like explaining the 4-4-2 to somebody who's convinced that the highest level in strategy in soccer is who cuts up the orange slices beforehand.

Anyway... yes, MMA is probably more "pure" than boxing is. Guess what? Purity is often unexciting. The purest form of running is, well, running. What's more exciting, the 100 yard dash or watching a wide receiver in football try to outrun a cornerback? I know which one I'd watch every single chance I had, and it ain't the Olympic event. What's more exciting, the Home Run Derby or an actual baseball game in which events short of home runs can also be rewarded? The Home Run Derby's certainly the purer test of hitting.

[Raderick]

Originally Posted by boilermaker

Do people even die in MMA competitions? Or at least the mainstream ones?

It would seem obvious that boxing is a far more dangerous sport because of the drawn out nature of the violence.

There has been only one known death in the 20 years of organized MMA (and it was this year, believe it or not).

[wireman]

OK, I admit I live in the past. But if the boxing I remember had been nothing more than brain-beating, Earnie Shavers would have been heavyweight champion for 20 years and nobody would ever have heard of Willie Pep. I'm just sayin'.

But if you want REAL strategy, you gotta go with chess boxing.

[Syd Thrift]

For that matter, I'm not sure who would be the heavyweight champion right now but it sure as heck wouldn't be Wlad Klitschko. Come to think of it, I think I want more brain-bashing.