Archive for July, 2014

Recently I read the Mike Tyson story – Undisputed Truth – which is a great book and he tells it like it is. Tyson does not try to make himself sound good, he just tells his story. There is a bit in the book where a shop owner, who Tyson had stolen from, pointed a shotgun at Tyson’s throat and said “if you steal from me again I will blow your head off” or words to that effect.

So what does this have to do with fighting? Well I was brought up in a comfortable lifestyle, my parents were not loaded but were comfortable. I always had food on the table and anything else you need. I am not an aggressive person by nature, I did not get into fights at school or on the rugby field, I am just competitive and intense in the ring. However a fight to me was everything, if I lost it meant the end of the world to me. The fight was the biggest thing that had happened in my life. There was nothing in life that I really had to fight for.

Mike Tyson fought for everything, he had to steal to survive, he had to fight to live. Fighting was part of living. He had death threats, street fights – everyday was a fight.
So Mike Tyson and I have nothing in common, you do not need an essay to explain that. My point is, if you have had to struggle for everything in life and the fight is just part of living then when you get in the ring it is nothing new for you. In fact you are doing it because it feels normal for you, as struggle and pain is just normal. If you have been around violence your entire life then a fight in the ring is nothing and you are likely to push a little more or dig deeper as you have done this time and time again to survive.
Compared to me, a lot of people I trained with had a hard life. Now for some people that helped them in the ring as this was normal for them. However other people just could not deal with more of this feeling and just crumbled under the pressure.

Now, not everyone that has had a hard life is a good fighter and people that have had an easy life are not soft. But if you look at the top fighters in MMA / Boxing / Kickboxing you will see that most (not all) are from hard lifestyles, it just seems to give them more to fight for. The great heavyweight Fedor said that every fight he thought that if he lost he and his family would go back to being poor, over 10 years he was undefeated and found a way to win every fight he was in even when he was in trouble. Having to fight to survive seems to have such an impact on fighters.

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
http://www.Lockdown.co.nz/

The main job for the referee is to protect the fighters, but when they stop the fight they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Recently one of Lockdown’s fighters won by TKO. The first round consisted of him maintaining top control on the ground and dishing out some good bursts of ground and pound. The referee looked like he was going to stop the fight two or three times. In the second round, the guy was gassed and went to Plan B, which was to keep the fight on the feet – unfortunately for him he was getting picked apart with kicks to the body and the head. He then took a push kick which backed him in to the corner and the ref waived the fight off.

Now was the guy ok? Yes. Could he keep fighting? Yes. So why did he stop the fight? The guy had taken a beating on the ground for 3 mins and was swelling up around the eyes. In the second round he was getting hit on the feet and was gassed when he went in to the corner he was about to really get a hiding and the ref saved him from more punishment. The opponent is not a professional fighter and has a day job just like the rest of us, he took the fight because he loves to fight and compete. He was not fighting for money. The ref saved him from taking unnecessary damage and allowed him to be able to go out after the fight and get up the next day with a few bruises but not a concussion. Therefore the ref did a good job (just bad timing, as the end of the fight was very anticlimactic).
The ref has to make sure both fighters have a chance to win and can protect themselves, and if one fighter is taking a beating for the entire fight and is constantly in trouble but surviving the ref should make the hard call and stop it. Yes the crowd might not like it, the fighter on the receiving end will hate the call but this is the referee’s job. On the flip side it is so bad for the sport when a fight is left to go too long. There have been some real shockers in the past all because the ref is trying to give the guy a chance to regain his composure. In MMA this decision is very hard as once it is made the fight is over, not like in boxing where you can give them a standing 8 count.
On the side lines this all seems very easy, but imagine you are refereeing a big fight and one of the fighters gets in a bad spot and you stop the fight, and everyone then goes over and over your decision and calls it a premature stoppage – you may have cost a guy his chance of winning the title and the crowd of seeing more rounds of a big fight. This is what causes refs to let fights go on too long.

Overall I don’t think that you can blame a ref for stopping the fight, if the fighter does not get into trouble then the ref will not stop it. At the end of the day the ref does not want to see anyone taking anymore punches than they need or a joint hyper-extended one cm more than the tap. They have a very hard job, but as a true fighter will never give up it is up to the ref to protect the fighter from themselves.

Gareth Lewis
Head MMA Instructor
http://www.Lockdown.co.nz/