Later this evening, multi-time UFC champion Randy "The Natural" Couture will be fighting professional boxer James "Lights Out" Toney in what is being billed as an "Mixed Martial Arts vs. Boxing" match at UFC 118. Toney, a decorated but declining competitor in the boxing world, has worked hard to hype the bout as a definitive clash between two of the world's most popular combat sports. The early UFCs were about which martial art could beat which, so this boxing vs. MMA bout is a compelling throwback that has emotions running high among fans of both sports.
James Toney has long been making derisive statements about the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and since the bout with Couture was announced a few months ago Toney's heat machine has gone into overdrive. Like him or not, Toney doesn't mind playing the villain and is a master at generating publicity. Visit any MMA forum and you'll see numerous posts calling for Toney's head on a pike. Most MMA fans, myself included, expect Couture to smite James Toney relatively easily. The "Pros Pick" feature on the respected MMA site Sherdog.com shows that 50 out of 54 professional mixed martial arts fighters surveyed expect Couture to win this bout, likely in the first round.
I don't hang out on any boxing boards, but a quick jaunt over to EastSideBoxing.com shows that this bout is not only on the radar of boxing fans, but that a large number of boxing proponents are picking Toney to win. It's also evident that many boxing fans think of mixed martial arts as something akin to professional wrestling - a sort of sideshow, non-sport that only attracts the uneducated and the bloodthirsty.
Still, in spite of all the hype and the vast promotion machine at the UFC, there's something pretty basic that's being overlooked. "Boxing vs. MMA" is a bout that has been contested before, and the results tend to be pretty predictable. While it's true that no professional boxer with Toney's championship pedigree has competed in MMA, he's still walking a trail that his boxing brethren have blazed before him. 1 Let's climb in the time machine and take look at how straight boxers have historically fared in MMA:
Gene Lebell (Judo) vs. Milo Savage (Boxing) - 1963
In what may have been the first widely publicized mixed martial arts match, judoka and professional wrestler Gene Lebell fought middleweight boxer Milo Savage. The match was made after Lebell responded to an acerbic article in Rogue magazine entitled "The Judo Bums", in which boxing proponent Jim Beck offered $1000 to any judoka who could defeat a boxer in a mixed skills match.
The bout, an edited version of which is posted above, ended in the fourth round when Lebell threw Savage to the mat with a hari goshi and put him to sleep with a rear naked choke.
Royce Gracie (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) vs. Art Jimmerson (Boxing) - 1993
At the very first Ultimate Fighting Championship event, BJJ expert and future UFC Hall-of-Famer Royce Gracie took on former middleweight Golden Gloves champion Art Jimmerson in a match that would go down in infamy. The first few UFC events were bare-knuckled, but Jimmerson, apparently worried about injuring his jab hand, came out for the bout wearing a single boxing glove.
Though he was apparently expecting a prolonged stand-up exchange, Jimmerson was easily taken to the mat by the smaller grappler and submitted almost immediately upon finding himself in a vulnerable spot.
Steve Jennum (Ninjitsu) vs. Melton Bowen (Boxing) - 1994
The early UFCs were full of delightfully unlikely match-ups, and UFC IV proved to be no exception as Steve Jennum, an American ninja (seriously) and the improbable winner of the 3rd UFC tournament, took on professional boxer Melton "The Punisher" Bowen. Bowen outweighed Jennum by 10 pounds and had competed in 38 pro boxing bouts to Jennum's single pro MMA bout.2 he bout was a one-sided affair that saw Bowen being taken down twice, absorbing a large number of punches on the ground, and ultimately submitting to a straight armbar.
Okay, so I guess that about wraps it up. While boxing unquestionably forms a very important part of a modern mixed martial artist's toolkit, it doesn't have the versatility as a standalone style to compete in MMA. Still, just for fun, let's throw in one last video.
Tim Sylvia (MMA) vs. Ray Mercer (Boxing) - 2009
Standing something like 13 feet tall, Tim Sylvia is a former UFC Heavyweight Champion who began his career with 16-0 rampage through several different leagues. In 2009, Sylvia faced off with Ray Mercer, a 48 year-old pro boxer who was making his professional mixed martial arts debut. The predictable result?
Mercer laid Sylvia low in less than 10 seconds.
Wait, what!?!
Yeah, it turns out that professional boxers can hit people really hard. Must come from all that training to hit people really hard, coupled with the way they hit people really hard for a living. Who'd have thought?
The moral of the story is this: James Toney has a chance, a small chance, of winning his match with Randy Couture tonight. Style vs. style calculus is valid to an extent, but it only goes so far. Anything can happen in a fight. That's why we watch.
It's incredibly likely that Couture is going to drop Toney on his skull and pound him out (or submit him) very, very quickly this evening. However probable it is, though, that outcome is not a certainty. James Toney has 44 KO victories in professional boxing, and Couture has been knocked down (though not out) in 3 of his last 4 fights. That's enough of an X-factor to make this interesting, and I can't wait to see what happens.
_____
1.) Alliteration is awesome.
2.) Steve Jennum was an alternate at the UFC 3 tournament. He replaced an injured Ken Shamrock in the tournament final against Canadian judoka Harold Howard. Jennum defeated Howard to become the tournament champion, despite not having competed in the tournament proper.
Showing posts with label mixed martial arts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mixed martial arts. Show all posts
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Remembering the Hits...Literally...
"Remembering the hits and forgetting the misses" is a concept that gets talked about a lot in critical thinking books. Basically it means that we remember unusual or anomalous results more often than we remember routine ones. For instance, if I were a routine lottery player I might be more likely to remember the few times I'd won a prize than all the times that I'd played and lost.* Well, last week a lot of fight fans got a living example of this phenomenon.
You see, a fighter named Corey Hill suffered a grotesquely broken leg during the UFC Fight For the Troops event last week. As you can see from the video above (Pardon the music - that's not my doing.) , it happened when his opponent checked one of Hill's low kicks with his knee and the poor guy's leg snapped like a stick. As pants-wettingly horrific as it is, this particular injury has happened to other folks before, such as this guy, this guy, and this guy. Holy shit! That must mean that you should never, ever, ever throw a low kick, right? After all, you're pretty freakin' likely to snap your own leg like a piece of uncooked spaghetti...aren't you?
If you said "nope", you win a cookie. Even though shocking, unusual stuff like seeing a guy break his own leg throwing a kick really sticks out in your mind, you have to remember that those nauseatingly broken shins account for only four out of the hundreds of thousands of low kicks thrown by various fighters and martial enthusiasts every year. Throw a single low kick and you have only a minuscule chance of actually hurting yourself seriously, but if enough of them are thrown eventually someone's number is going to come up. I follow mixed martial arts pretty closely, and Corey Hill's injury is the only one of its kind I know about for the entire year of 2008. (The other three videos come from further back.) That's one catastrophic low kick injury in a year in which there were hundreds of MMA fights in the United States alone, not mention who-knows-how-many kickboxing matches, etc. That being said, more than a couple of my friends who are only peripherally interested in combat sports now seem to think that this sort of think is a routine occurrence.
Anyway, I'm aware that this wasn't exactly an earth-shaking post, but I thought I'd seize on the opportunity to use a more interesting example of "remembering the hits" than scratch-off tickets.
*Actually, I've won a total of $2 in the various lottery games.
You see, a fighter named Corey Hill suffered a grotesquely broken leg during the UFC Fight For the Troops event last week. As you can see from the video above (Pardon the music - that's not my doing.) , it happened when his opponent checked one of Hill's low kicks with his knee and the poor guy's leg snapped like a stick. As pants-wettingly horrific as it is, this particular injury has happened to other folks before, such as this guy, this guy, and this guy. Holy shit! That must mean that you should never, ever, ever throw a low kick, right? After all, you're pretty freakin' likely to snap your own leg like a piece of uncooked spaghetti...aren't you?
If you said "nope", you win a cookie. Even though shocking, unusual stuff like seeing a guy break his own leg throwing a kick really sticks out in your mind, you have to remember that those nauseatingly broken shins account for only four out of the hundreds of thousands of low kicks thrown by various fighters and martial enthusiasts every year. Throw a single low kick and you have only a minuscule chance of actually hurting yourself seriously, but if enough of them are thrown eventually someone's number is going to come up. I follow mixed martial arts pretty closely, and Corey Hill's injury is the only one of its kind I know about for the entire year of 2008. (The other three videos come from further back.) That's one catastrophic low kick injury in a year in which there were hundreds of MMA fights in the United States alone, not mention who-knows-how-many kickboxing matches, etc. That being said, more than a couple of my friends who are only peripherally interested in combat sports now seem to think that this sort of think is a routine occurrence.
Anyway, I'm aware that this wasn't exactly an earth-shaking post, but I thought I'd seize on the opportunity to use a more interesting example of "remembering the hits" than scratch-off tickets.
*Actually, I've won a total of $2 in the various lottery games.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Human Cockfighting? Nope.
Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA, is the fastest growing combat sport in the United States today. Although it has its roots in the ancient Greek sport Pankration, which was a combination of boxing and wrestling, and its modern incarnation can trace its lineage to Japanese pro-wrestling offshoots like Shooto and Pancrase, MMA didn't start to make much of an impression in the United States until 1993 and the first Ultimate Fighting Championship.
The legacy of the early days of the UFC is two-fold. Most importantly to the evolution of martial arts, it opened the eyes of American audiences to the effectiveness groundfighting and submission techniques in general and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in particular which in turn ultimately led to the modern generation of highly skilled, heavily cross-trained athletes that currently fill the sport's ranks.* Secondly, and less fortunately, the way in which the early UFCs were promoted cemented the image of MMA as a bloodsport in the mind of the public.
"There are no rules" was the original tagline for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which wasn't entirely true - technically you weren't suppose to eye gouge, bite, or fish hook (insert your fingers into the mouth or nose of the opponent to control their movement), but in the earliest days of the UFC these infractions netted only a monetary penalty and would not result in a disqualification. That being said, in its earliest incarnation the UFC had a very limited set of rules - head butts and groin attacks were legal, kicking a downed opponent was legal, no weight classes were imposed, and (until the 3rd UFC) the referee didn't actually have the power to stop a bout. Some early UFC fights, such as Kevin Rosier vs. Zane Frazier at UFC 1 and Pat Smith vs. Scott Morris at UFC 2, were short, brawlish affairs that gave politicians fodder for a new moral panic.
Arizona Senator and current presidential hopeful John McCain (Who, it should be known, is a boxing proponent) came out swinging against the UFC, famously branding it as "human cockfighting" and grimly intoning that it was likely to cause a spate of brutal deaths in the ring. News magazine shows ran pejorative stories on the sport, often replaying a bout from the third UFC event in which Kenpo expert Keith Hackney defeated sumo wrestler Emmanuel Yarborough with a series a fierce right hands. Much was made of the most brawlish aspects of the sport, something which the Semaphore Entertainment Group, then the owners of the UFC, unwisely chose to play to the hilt.
Nevermind the fact that early UFC events were dominated not by power strikers but by technical, methodical wrestling and submission experts like Royce Gracie (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu), Oleg Taktarov (Sambo), and Dan Severn (Wrestling) who employed only very limited striking techniques. Nevermind that choking and joint locking techniques have exceedingly low injury rates, especially when a referee can stop a bout to protect the fighters. Nevermind that using lightweight gloves (as to modern MMA events) or no gloves (as did the early UFC) provides a disincentive for blindly trying to punch your opponent's head off - it's incredibly easy to break your hand if you're punching someone upside the head without a glove.** Nope, the important thing is that MMA looks like it ought to be super-dangerous, and thus, to the media and the politicians, it was.
There was a problem with all this fear-mongering and moral outrage - the in-ring deaths predicted by MMA opponents just didn't happen. According to this article by the British Medical Association, there have been over 140 deaths because of (good ol' socially acceptable) boxing since 1990. *** The statistics for MMA for the same years show only...wait for it...TWO deaths associated with in-ring injuries in the sport. That number's not for just the UFC, it's for the entire sport of Mixed Martial Arts and includes not only the United States, but the entire world. Douglas Dedge died after a bout in the Ukraine in 1998 (after failing to receive medical clearance to fight in the United States) and Sam Vasquez fell into a coma and died after injuries sustained during a Renegades Extreme Fighting event in October of last year. Both of the men apparently had pre-existing brain conditions that made it unsafe for them to participate. In larger, better regulated organizations like the Ultimate Fighting Championship, King of the Cage, and the now-defunct Pride Fighting Championships, there has never been anything remotely close to an in-ring death.
According to a study that ran in 2006 in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, while the overall risk of sustaining some kind of injury in an MMA match is approximately the same as boxing, but most of these injuries consisted of facial lacerations and broken noses. The researchers noted that only 6.8% of MMA bouts end in a knockout, as opposed to over 11% of boxing matches, and further note that the opportunity for fighters to use non-striking techniques and to submit (and thus end the bout) at any time both serve to reduce the risk of severe traumatic brain injuries.
Now to be fair MMA can be pretty scary looking. Facials cuts, the most common type of injury, bleed a lot because your face has of blood vessels close to the surface. Watching a guy get choked out, knocked out, or even just get pinned down and punched a few times on the ground can be a pretty visceral experience that a lot of people aren't used to. So sure, MMA looks really dangerous, but science shows us that it isn't, or at least that it's less so than "acceptable" combat sports like boxing and kickboxing.
Keep in mind also that the whole "There are no rules" shtick is a thing of the past. MMA is heavily regulated now and has rules tailored to maintain the safety of the fighters. The UFC, for example, now has rules banning headbutts, groin strikes, kicking or kneeing the head of a downed opponent, striking to the back of the head or near the spine, blows to the kidneys, and certain kinds of elbow strikes. UFC bouts can now be stopped by either the referee or the ringside doctor, and weight classes were instituted years ago. The sport was relatively safe to begin with, and its safer than ever now.
So why the hell am I bringing all this up on a blog that's usually devoted to dealing with aliens, living dinosaurs, and crazy religious beliefs? Because tonight CBS is going to run a live event by the Elite XC fighting promotion, marking the first live MMA broadcast on network television. It's also an election year, so you can expect the moral crusaders and culture warriors to have a conniption fit about this, especially since they seem to be capable of working themselves into a fury over anything these days. You can bet that there's gonna be a storm of horse shit about this, and as a fan of the sport I just wanted to put an umbrella out there for anyone who wants to know the truth.
*It also helped to expose the relative, and in some case absolute, ineffectiveness of certain popular and highly touted fighting styles in a limited-rules scenario, but that's another story for another time.
** A note on gloves: Competitive boxing gloves do not exist to pad the blows for the guy on the receiving end of a punch, they exist to protect the hands of the guy doing the punching and, to a lesser extent, to prevent cuts. MMA gloves, which are are usually 4-8 oz. open finger jobs, serve a similar purpose. If anything, larger gloves increase the chance of blunt force injury because they make it much more comfortable to punch to the head.
*** In the interest of full disclosure, the I should note that the BMA wants both boxing and MMA to be banned.
The legacy of the early days of the UFC is two-fold. Most importantly to the evolution of martial arts, it opened the eyes of American audiences to the effectiveness groundfighting and submission techniques in general and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in particular which in turn ultimately led to the modern generation of highly skilled, heavily cross-trained athletes that currently fill the sport's ranks.* Secondly, and less fortunately, the way in which the early UFCs were promoted cemented the image of MMA as a bloodsport in the mind of the public.
"There are no rules" was the original tagline for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which wasn't entirely true - technically you weren't suppose to eye gouge, bite, or fish hook (insert your fingers into the mouth or nose of the opponent to control their movement), but in the earliest days of the UFC these infractions netted only a monetary penalty and would not result in a disqualification. That being said, in its earliest incarnation the UFC had a very limited set of rules - head butts and groin attacks were legal, kicking a downed opponent was legal, no weight classes were imposed, and (until the 3rd UFC) the referee didn't actually have the power to stop a bout. Some early UFC fights, such as Kevin Rosier vs. Zane Frazier at UFC 1 and Pat Smith vs. Scott Morris at UFC 2, were short, brawlish affairs that gave politicians fodder for a new moral panic.
Arizona Senator and current presidential hopeful John McCain (Who, it should be known, is a boxing proponent) came out swinging against the UFC, famously branding it as "human cockfighting" and grimly intoning that it was likely to cause a spate of brutal deaths in the ring. News magazine shows ran pejorative stories on the sport, often replaying a bout from the third UFC event in which Kenpo expert Keith Hackney defeated sumo wrestler Emmanuel Yarborough with a series a fierce right hands. Much was made of the most brawlish aspects of the sport, something which the Semaphore Entertainment Group, then the owners of the UFC, unwisely chose to play to the hilt.
Nevermind the fact that early UFC events were dominated not by power strikers but by technical, methodical wrestling and submission experts like Royce Gracie (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu), Oleg Taktarov (Sambo), and Dan Severn (Wrestling) who employed only very limited striking techniques. Nevermind that choking and joint locking techniques have exceedingly low injury rates, especially when a referee can stop a bout to protect the fighters. Nevermind that using lightweight gloves (as to modern MMA events) or no gloves (as did the early UFC) provides a disincentive for blindly trying to punch your opponent's head off - it's incredibly easy to break your hand if you're punching someone upside the head without a glove.** Nope, the important thing is that MMA looks like it ought to be super-dangerous, and thus, to the media and the politicians, it was.
There was a problem with all this fear-mongering and moral outrage - the in-ring deaths predicted by MMA opponents just didn't happen. According to this article by the British Medical Association, there have been over 140 deaths because of (good ol' socially acceptable) boxing since 1990. *** The statistics for MMA for the same years show only...wait for it...TWO deaths associated with in-ring injuries in the sport. That number's not for just the UFC, it's for the entire sport of Mixed Martial Arts and includes not only the United States, but the entire world. Douglas Dedge died after a bout in the Ukraine in 1998 (after failing to receive medical clearance to fight in the United States) and Sam Vasquez fell into a coma and died after injuries sustained during a Renegades Extreme Fighting event in October of last year. Both of the men apparently had pre-existing brain conditions that made it unsafe for them to participate. In larger, better regulated organizations like the Ultimate Fighting Championship, King of the Cage, and the now-defunct Pride Fighting Championships, there has never been anything remotely close to an in-ring death.
According to a study that ran in 2006 in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine, while the overall risk of sustaining some kind of injury in an MMA match is approximately the same as boxing, but most of these injuries consisted of facial lacerations and broken noses. The researchers noted that only 6.8% of MMA bouts end in a knockout, as opposed to over 11% of boxing matches, and further note that the opportunity for fighters to use non-striking techniques and to submit (and thus end the bout) at any time both serve to reduce the risk of severe traumatic brain injuries.
Now to be fair MMA can be pretty scary looking. Facials cuts, the most common type of injury, bleed a lot because your face has of blood vessels close to the surface. Watching a guy get choked out, knocked out, or even just get pinned down and punched a few times on the ground can be a pretty visceral experience that a lot of people aren't used to. So sure, MMA looks really dangerous, but science shows us that it isn't, or at least that it's less so than "acceptable" combat sports like boxing and kickboxing.
Keep in mind also that the whole "There are no rules" shtick is a thing of the past. MMA is heavily regulated now and has rules tailored to maintain the safety of the fighters. The UFC, for example, now has rules banning headbutts, groin strikes, kicking or kneeing the head of a downed opponent, striking to the back of the head or near the spine, blows to the kidneys, and certain kinds of elbow strikes. UFC bouts can now be stopped by either the referee or the ringside doctor, and weight classes were instituted years ago. The sport was relatively safe to begin with, and its safer than ever now.
So why the hell am I bringing all this up on a blog that's usually devoted to dealing with aliens, living dinosaurs, and crazy religious beliefs? Because tonight CBS is going to run a live event by the Elite XC fighting promotion, marking the first live MMA broadcast on network television. It's also an election year, so you can expect the moral crusaders and culture warriors to have a conniption fit about this, especially since they seem to be capable of working themselves into a fury over anything these days. You can bet that there's gonna be a storm of horse shit about this, and as a fan of the sport I just wanted to put an umbrella out there for anyone who wants to know the truth.
*It also helped to expose the relative, and in some case absolute, ineffectiveness of certain popular and highly touted fighting styles in a limited-rules scenario, but that's another story for another time.
** A note on gloves: Competitive boxing gloves do not exist to pad the blows for the guy on the receiving end of a punch, they exist to protect the hands of the guy doing the punching and, to a lesser extent, to prevent cuts. MMA gloves, which are are usually 4-8 oz. open finger jobs, serve a similar purpose. If anything, larger gloves increase the chance of blunt force injury because they make it much more comfortable to punch to the head.
*** In the interest of full disclosure, the I should note that the BMA wants both boxing and MMA to be banned.
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