I agree. I didn’t see it that way when I was younger, but there’s a reason they call it the ‘sweet science.’ I commented a while ago about the ‘beauty’ of watching George Foreman, who was an absolute beast, box. To the untrained eye, Foreman looked like nothing much more than just a beast who used his size to overwhelm people. But look more closely, and you see there’s a ton of skill behind his work. His timing. His footwork. His use of angles. How he’d use his left hand to measure fighters before bombing them with his right. How he’d use his jab to set up his uppercut. How he’d use weird angles to deal with Joe Frazier’s constant movement, which frustrated the very best boxers (including Muhammad Ali). Even when Foreman was in his 40s and had slower reflexes, his timing against a much faster and athletic Evander Holyfield was impressive. Just amazing boxing instincts. It’s an art when done right.
I agree that a lot of howling drunks love MMA, but MMA when done right, is also a beautiful thing to watch, especially when you’ve got well-rounded fighters who are good at wrestling and stand-up fighting. It’s fascinating because both fighters go into that fight knowing that they could either lose standing up or on the ground. One mistake on the ground, and the fighter’s in a choke hold. One mistake on his feet, and he’s getting a shin or a fist to the jaw.
And this is why, as far as I can tell, more boxers die in the ring. The boxers may avoid getting cut, but they get their brains rattled. Standing someone up after a concussion so that they can get concussed even further may be indeed hiding boxing’s brutality in the short term, but there’s no hiding the brain damage and slurred speech that comes later.
MMA is simply about one question: who can win a fight between contestant A and contestant B? Boxing was created out a desire for a bloody spectacle spectacle. It was originally started as a glorified tough man contest. They started wearing gloves in part because they didn’t want cuts to end fights; they wanted fights to continue until one could no longer continue. That is barbarity.
4 different title giving associations plus corruption, Don King and holding out for too long on title bouts are why I stopped caring about boxing. Maybe it is better now but it was not when I stopped watching.
I enjoyed the rise of MMA as a legitimate sport, until they started to turn it into a circus with all the pre-fight trash talk and b.s. I know it is fake hype but it cheapens the sport and makes it look like WWE.
For the record, trash talking in boxing is lame as well. I don’t care how funny it is.
I kind of liked early MMA when the fighters came from different martial arts backgrounds, and you got to see what a boxer vs. a karate practitioner looked like. Or even the Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys vs. others.
I guess what I’m getting at is that boxing has had enough time to evolve from being strictly a blood sport in its early bare knuckle, unlimited length fight days in the UK and US, to something that’s got some art and strategy to it and where you can watch it without being motivated by the brutality and violence.
MMA seems, and this could just be me, to be primarily aimed at the people who are there for the violence and macho aspects.
There’s definitely some tremendous finesse, power and tactical thinking going on among the fighters of both sports, but the fans are more what I’m getting at. MMA has more of an… uneducated hillbilly type vibe to me than boxing does.
More than 4, but it’s actually better than the UFC dominance of MMA in the US. UFC runs MMA like a wrestling promotion, the combat in the ring may be real but everything else about it is contrived. Boxers were often cheated out of their winnings in the past but not these days, they may fritter away millions that they’ve won, but unlike MMA fighters they are well paid for their work. There have been occasional big payoffs in UFC but it’s not on Dana White’s mind to make a practice of that. When Bellator names a champion you know they got that title through real competition, but I expect that reaching the success of UFC will simply corrupt them also.
I think that’s a little unfair to the hill folk . People appreciate MMA more readily because it is obvious what is happening in the octagon. In boxing people come for the knockouts but the rest of the action is often a lot more subtle and only of interest to the more dedicated boxing fans. Some boxing matches are just plain boring too, even for the sophisticated boxing fan. Boring matches are much less likely in MMA. Occasionally they get into a grappling lockup that gets no where, but I’ve never seen that among top competitors because they have the options of switching to a different fighting mode, and it’s good strategy because two fighter will rarely be equally matched at the variety of different skills that can be used in MMA. Certainly boxing has variety also, and good boxers take advantage of that, but the scoring system and higher number of rounds make stalling and low action a more viable option in boxing.
I see it oppositely. When MMA first came onto the scene (i.e. early UFC events), there were few rules, open weight classes, and grapplers were constantly taking down stand-up strikers because most fights end up on the ground unless a striker has excellent take-down defense that keeps the fight on their feet.
Modern MMA puts all fighters on a level playing field. Grapplers can’t just come in assuming that they’ll win because they’ll score a take-down. Artists who have a background in karate, tae kwon do, or Muay Thai, know how to defend against take-downs and know how to get out of trouble if they’re down on the mats. In turn, this has forced grapplers to become better at the striking game, and many of them have done just that. So what you have now are fighters who are well-rounded across different martial arts. Each fighter has a base or a strength that they know almost instinctively, like freestyle wrestling or jiujutsu, or karate or TKD, but they have to learn something else to. They can’t just bring their black belt and expect to win.
Interestingly, Western boxing has gained respect in MMA circles. A lot of your good fighters know basic boxing strategy. They’re not as good at throwing punches as professional boxers are because the strategy of using boxing is a little different in boxing than in MMA. In boxing, a fighter stays in a boxer’s stance throughout the entire fight, and he uses his body in ways that only boxers do, whereas an MMA uses boxing as one tactic but has to quickly switch back to another strategy if the fight calls for it. But I see fighters like Nate and Nick Diaz and even Conor McGregor having used boxing as a way to improve their overall MMA game.
Yes, MMA fighters needed time and experience to appreciate boxing skills. But there’s one big difference between boxing and most martial arts, punchers are born, not made. You can be trained in a lot of aspects of boxing but hitting hard is something that only seems to come naturally to boxers. There have been a few greats that lacked serious punching power, but they were absolutely incredible outliers in terms of their other abilities. MMA fighters can improve their punching ability greatly, but one punch knock out artistry is an innate characteristic.
I agree that there is such a thing as raw punching power, but that’s true in both MMA and boxing. There are some MMA fighters who have devastating knockout power in MMA fighting. They can end fights with one punch just like boxers can. They might not be successful in boxing because boxing is just different than MMA. Conor McGregor is an example of this. He has (or had) the ability to end MMA fights with one punch or at least just one punch to knock a fighter down before finishing him on the mat. Yet that power didn’t translate to power in boxing because wearing gloves and fighting according to boxing rules is just an entirely different experience.
I fear like I’m repeating a lot of what was already said, so apologies for the toes I may wind up treading on.
I liked MMA in the earlier days. Not the earliest, when it was all Gracies all the time, but a bit later when people were learning how to counteract the grappling. You could see styles evolve, there was a genuine evolution in fighting technique. Those fighting techniques could, in theory, see practical use as well–a little bit in the same way that things developed for Formula 1 could eventually see use in regular cars bought by the likes of you or I.
When it became the touting of genuinely terrible people like McGregor and Jon Jones, I lost all interest. I wanted more fights and less pageantry, because the fighting interested me technically. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that most of the top-tier competitors are grossly underpaid. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that Belletor had arranged fights I think never should have happened, like Kimbo Slice vs. Dada 5000.
Boxing is pretty hard to surpass for straight punching, but it never really stood up to the “whiff of usefulness” test. That’s a personal choice. I may have also been in a pub, a pitcher down between friends, yelling at the TV during a match between two counterpunchers whose names currently elude me.
It makes perfect sense to me that you might like boxing over MMA. It’s cleaner, it plays itself as less of a circus, the boxers seem less exploited on an immediate level. On a surface level, boxing is less embarrassing to watch. I totally get it.
I’m not sure why the OP has asked the question. It’s not weird to like football (the real kind) but not soccer. I like pro football, but have no interest in college football. Boxing and MMA are both combat sports but quite different in the details. Soccer, basketball, and hockey are basically the same sport with just a few differences but I wouldn’t expect people to like all of them as rule, same with boxing and MMA.
Much more of a boxing fan, but not due to any particular judgement call on the the two sports - they are quite different. Probably the lack of prominent UK fighters in the early days of MMA meant it was under the radar here in that formative time, so didn’t get a lot of exposure.
The cardio requirements of MMA do seem severe, which can make for some quite challenging spectacles (IMHO) where not much appears to be happening to the uninitiated eye. You get this in boxing as well, tbf, at the heavier weights - it’s sobering to see world class fighters absolutely gassed late rounds, shows the incredibly high standard of conditioning needed to compete at world level.
I find the rampant drug use that fuels both sports - especially MMA really off-putting. I get that sports fans in general don’t really care about drug use, they just want to see a spectacle and it is this tacit endorsement that fundamentally drives PED use. Who is it really hurting if someone hits the ball back over the net that bit harder and faster? So we get this happy medium in most sports with soft testing regimes that pay lip service to the idea that drugs are bad. But for combat sports this doesn’t sit right at all - beating another person’s face in should not benefit from pharmaceutical assistance.
Not expecting this to change much - the governing bodies of both sports are way too shady to push a robust drug testing environment. Would turn MMA in particular upside down as it is surely brutal on the body with musculoskeletal injuries.
Just my non-expert experience, I recall when I started wrestling/BJJ, my feeling after a workout was that I was EXHAUSTED from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. Grappling involves the entirety of you body in a way nothing else I’ve ever done has. But, we would grapple for hours. Most NHB matches are only 3-5 5 minute rounds.
My personal experience is that I never found a 3-round NHB match all that physically exhausting. There are considerable opportunities to “rest” while on the ground, whether on top or bottom. How active you have to be largely depends on the rules and officiating.
The most exhausted I ever was from a cardio standpoint was when we would drill to resemble a boxing match - 3 minutes all out, w/ 1 minute in between. The leg and body workout is incredible - enhance, IMO, by the fact that you are trying not to get hit. Each hard shot you take can take quite a bit out of you. Sometimes we’d do it w/ our front foot shoelaces tied together - that REALLY ramped things up!
IMO, the past standard 15-round boxing matches required incredible fitness and stamina.
Pure grappler vs pure boxer is always a curious debate. REAL tough to defend against a super quick takedown.
When we trained, we always looked to whatever “rules” a competition had, and assumed therein likely lay the effective counters. Headbutts, knees, elbows …
DISCLAIMER: I never competed in boxing/kickboxing/NHB in bouts longer than 3x3 minute rounds (and never at a terribly high level - just club vs club). Never felt horribly exhausted after any of them. In some tournaments, you would have 2-3 bouts in a night.
. People appreciate MMA more readily because it is obvious what is happening in the octagon. In boxing people come for the knockouts but the rest of the action is often a lot more subtle and only of interest to the more dedicated boxing fans. Some boxing matches are just plain boring too, even for the sophisticated boxing fan. Boring matches are much less likely in MMA. Occasionally they get into a grappling lockup that gets no where, but I’ve never seen that among top competitors because they have the options of switching to a different fighting mode, and it’s good strategy because two fighter will rarely be equally matched at the variety of different skills that can be used in MMA. Certainly boxing has variety also, and good boxers take advantage of that, but the scoring system and higher number of rounds make stalling and low action a more viable option in boxing.