Oh wait, this was the boring combat sport, not MMA. No wonder.

After all of his smack-talk about MMA, I’d like to see Floyd take on Sean Sherk, the UFC lightweight champion.

De la Hoya is a very good boxer, but he’s a brilliant businessman (I assume 24/7 was his idea). There are so few good televised fights (so few good and/or charismatic boxers) it makes all the sense in the world to build interest with lead-in mini-bios. Plus it supports boxing’s need to create storylines (usually good vs. evil). Until boxing finds a away to recapture the public imagination, merging boxing and reality tv is a good tack.

About Mayweather, sr: he was obviously in an awkward position, having trained DLH for 7 years, and he tried hard to avoid answering the question. He seems to have agreed with DLH that activity counted as much as punches landed.

Either way, I was impressed that he answered the question at all. Boxing is a mess, but I love the fact that many commentators – emanuel steward, larry merchant, jim lampley to some extent – seem actually to *say what they’re thinking*. So different from other sports, where the commentators serve mainly as cheerleaders.

Now the world awaits the *real* cliffhanger: did the PPV receipts top 2 million!

I agree 100% with your Contender suggestion: i find the terrible editing unwatchable. I refuse to watch the show it bothers me so much. Ultimate fighter’s got it right: show the whole fight with minimal camera swtiching.

First, Mayweather ran the entire fight, and managed to slip in a few punches here and there, but let’s face the facts:

Mayweather can’t hurt De La Hoya. He just doesn’t have the strength.

Now, as much as I hate Mayweather, I will give him the fact that he is one of the most naturally talented boxers alive, if not the most talented.

But where was any of that Saturday night?

Nope, instead it was left to Oscar to press the fight.

And Mayweather is now retiring. I say good riddance.

He’s an amazingly talented fighter who took far more from the fight game than he ever gave.

His boring fights, his brittle hands, his overinflated sense of self and his lack of human decency will all be gladly forgotten.

But, to actually have an opinion on the true point of the article, HBO did a great job of promoting it. It just sucks that this is the fight they did it for.

I can only imagine how much boxing would have benefited had they hyped the first Gatti Ward fight this way. Or any of the amazing drop down, guts and glory brawls that have come since.

For all the smack he talked, he didn’t bring it. Oscar hardly seemed brised or winded when it was over, yet he gets no reward for actually making the fight interesting.

Sidenote: What do we think about the judge who went with Oscar on the split? Methinks Vegas was paying him on the side for screwing over the countless gamblers who had Mayweather with a unanimous decision.

Marc: Yeah, I can’t watch the UFC stuff because about ten years ago someone sent me a video clip of a guy getting his neck snapped in a UFC match and dying instantly (I didn’t know what it was when I opened the clip). He was just getting pummeled with punches and after one of them hit, his head snapped back and every muscle in his body went limp as he crumbled to the canvas. Normally when people get knocked out, it’s a slow gradual sinking to the ground, but this was just instant. It was one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen and I couldn’t get it out of my head for weeks.

PanMan: I definitely wouldn’t say boxing is one of my favorite sports, and yeah, it’s pretty primal, but when you know the storylines of some of these boxers and some of the fights, the drama is hard to beat.

Josh: Yeah, the judge who scored the bout for De La Hoya was either paid off or was trying to reward De La Hoya for being the aggressor. Probably the former, but who knows. Scoring in boxing is something I’ve never been comfortable with.

While MMA competition is occasionally depicted as brutal by the media, there has never been a death or crippling injury in a sanctioned MMA event in North America. The only verified fatality in MMA competition is the 1998 death of Douglas Dedge in a fight in Ukraine. There are unconfirmed reports that Dedge had a pre-existing medical condition prior to the fight.

Dedge took several shots directly to the head before the referee stopped the contest. Dedge collapsed after the fight and died two days later from severe brain injuries at the Kiev Institute of Neurosurgery.

So I don’t know what you saw, but it wasn’t UFC, and nobody else has ever seen someone die instantly in the ring.

Meanwhile (also Wikipedia):

More than 350 amateur and professional boxers have been killed in the ring since 1945; for example, Duk Koo Kim who on November 13, 1982 held a fight with Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini which led to Duk’s death five days later.

Fatality rates per 100,000 participants

1. Horse racing: 128
2. Sky diving: 123
3. Hang gliding: 56
4. Mountaineering: 51
5. Scuba Diving: 11
6. Motorcycle racing: 7
7. College Football: 3
8. Boxing: 1.3

I obviously don’t have stats on how mixed martial arts stacks up in that list, but I would guess that it’s actually lower than boxing, so let’s not pretend that it’s any more brutal. Regardless, there are those who argue that UFC matches, for instance, are less brutal and less dangerous than boxing because of the way that knockdowns, knockouts and standing 8-counts are handled. I’m not a doctor, so I can’t speak with any certainty, but then again, neither are you. I’ll just say that sanctioned fights in the UFC are handled in the same way as sanctioned boxing matches in regards to licensing fighters, clearing them to fight, and keeping doctors on hand to examine the fighters during the match.

Travis said:

Boxing is a classy kind of fight, where its half art/half strengh/half will power (yes i know there are 3 halfs… its a game when you have to give your 133% ;) )
This isn’t “Bash your opponants face in with 0 grace… 0 sportsmanship… etc” this is boxing… I give props to anyone who does it, it takes more then strengh… its actaully mostly their minds fighting.

I don’t want to take over the conversation here, but:

a) Sportsmanship isn’t something a sport has, it’s something an athlete has. You’ll find boxers with and without any sense of sportsmanship, just like you will in MMA. The fact that so many fighter in MMA come from a martial arts background would lead me to believe that you’re going to get a higher level of respect and sportsmanship shown in the ring. And…

b) If you want to see a chess match played out physically, watch the Abu Dhabi Combat Club videos (they’re all over the place) where the best submission fighters in the world meet. Watching these guys roll and grapple and jockey for position in order to pull off complicated multi-step submission attempts is far more impressive than, “Maybe this time I’ll lead with the jab.”

As for Lloyd’s comment, I’ll just point out that boxing certainly has a fine heritage, but certainly not more than greco-roman wrestling, jiu-jitsu, muay thai, or karate which are the roots of MMA. It may be the newcomer, but its roots are just as deep, if not deeper.

Crap – I wrote too much – now I’m officially the troll. Sorry.

With regard to boxing and fatalities/injuries, yep, I agree. It’s a violent sport as well. It’s just a little more palatable because we’re all so used to it and it “seems” less violent (even though it may not be). It’s all about perception.