Читать книгу Ali vs. Inoki. The Forgotten Fight That Inspired Mixed Martial Arts and Launched Sports Entertainment онлайн

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“Ninety-nine times out of one hundred the wrestler would win,” Corbett wrote in 1919. “About the only chance for victory the fighter would have would be to shoot over a knockout punch before the echo of the first gong handled away. If it landed, he would win. But if he missed, he’d be gone. And every ring fan knows that the scoring of a one-punch knockout is almost a miracle achievement in pugilism. Years ago Bob Fitzsimmons attempted to battle the debate. Fitz was a powerful man, almost a Hercules. His strength was prodigious. And Fitz knew quite a bit about wrestling—and how to avoid holds and how to break them. So he scoffed when someone remarked that in a contest between a wrestler and a boxer that the former would win.”

Ernest Roeber, a European and American Greco-Roman heavyweight champion, ended up stretching Fitzsimmons straight.

Rules defining boxing became hyperfocused on one aspect of the discipline—molding the acts of punching and defending punching into the “sweet science.” Boxers still use clinch skills traceable to the days of London prizefighting, though so degraded is the notion of boxers maintaining meaningful clinch games, that a modern-day question persists about whether Ronda Rousey would throw Floyd Mayweather Jr.—the best boxer of his time and a stone heavier than the female judoka—on his head in a real confrontation. By the early 1960s, boxers hadn’t needed to earnestly practice holds in the clinch for nearly a century. Those tricks managed to survive through grappling-based systems, like judo and catch-as-catch-can, which LeBell practiced at a masterful level.