What Matters Most (and Least) in Winning Fights…
I can’t claim to be an expert, but I’ve learned some things about martial arts and fighters. I’ve taken lessons from and trained with many high-level amateurs and pros since I began practicing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu 27 years ago. I’ve watched, as many fans have, countless fights. But also, because of a close association I’ve had with American Top Team, one of the largest and most successful martial arts teams, I’ve sat in the corner of dozens of fights and been in hotel rooms where fighters were being given last-minute counseling on strategy.
This is what I have learned.
Most fighters win because of skill – i.e., when their combination of skills in any particular fight is dominant over the combination of skills of their opponent.
And of all the skills it takes to win, the greatest one is fighting intelligence: the ability to recognize the strengths of one’s opponent and adjust one’s fighting strategy accordingly.
Next in importance is endurance (or gas). At the highest levels of competition, the level of endurance needed to win is extreme. Endurance is not a natural gift. It can be achieved only by extreme training.
Next is tenacity (or heart), which can be improved through practice and coaching but is mostly inherent in the psychology of the fighter before he first steps into the ring.
The least important factors in winning fights are the two that impress amateur fans the most: muscularity and ferociousness.
A massive, well-built body is undeniably impressive. But as anyone who has studied the fighting game for years knows all too well, you cannot judge a fighter’s actual power or strength in the ring by his physique when he weighs in. And as every experienced fighter knows, ferociousness, which is, at best, a style meant to intimidate one’s opponent, derives from mental weakness. You may think that a great fighter like Mike Tyson belies that contention. But notwithstanding how ferocious he looks when he fights, he wins because of his extraordinary skill and his intelligence and his tenacity.
Finally, there’s this: Among the fighters, like Tyson, that make it to the top, there are some that rise even higher. You can see what I mean here by looking at the face of the winner after he’s achieved the victory he ferociously claimed.
Speaking of Fighting…
This Is Blatant Stupidity Born of Evil
I’m writing this before I’ve had the chance to see how Big Media responds to that female Olympic boxer being so quickly beaten into tears by a biological man that the Olympic Committee deemed to be a female.
That something like this was allowed to happen has nothing to do with transphobia. Nor is it a “non-issue” because it is focused on a very small percentage of the population. On the contrary, it is a deeply entrenched, fast-spreading, and extremely destructive intellectual contagion whose consequences reach far beyond post-modern structuralism, intersectionality, critical race theory, and gender fluidity doctrines.
It was never about any of those supremely and transparently stupid ideas. In my opinion, it always was, and still is, about indoctrinating society’s wealthiest, most powerful, and most influential people into a cult of thinking that contradicts everything good and progressive that has occurred in human history since the 18th century.
Megyn Kelly, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, and countless others are correct in calling it what it is – unadulterated evil masquerading as compassion.
