MENU

November, 2017
Archive

On November 28, 2017 By In Mixed Martial Arts

What’s Legacy Got To Do With It?

“Having a legacy is the closest we can get to immortality. It’s how we combat the transience of our lives and the fact that most of our time is spent doing things that will be forgotten shortly after they’re finished. A legacy, though, outlives all of that. It etches our name in memories and record books and keeps us alive long after we’re gone.

It’s no wonder that the idea of a legacy is so important to professional fighters, whose job exists at the edges of mortality; it gives purpose to the life-shortening danger of their work beyond collecting a paycheck. We still talk about athletes from 100 years ago, and in a sport as young as MMA, legacies have less historical competition and thus are more up for grabs than in other sports. However, as recent events have shown, a fighter’s legacy is more complicated than it seems…”

 

Read more at Sherdog

Read more

On November 16, 2017 By In book review

Book Review: ME by Tomoyuki Hoshino

“The title of Tomoyuki Hoshino’s new novel comes from a common hustle in Japan called the “me-me scam,” whereby a con artist calls an elderly person and only identifies himself by saying, “It’s me.” The victim, believing that they are talking to someone they know, is then swindled into sending money to the perpetrator, who claims to have gotten into financial difficulty. Scammers in Japan collectively extract $400 million every year from unsuspecting victims in this way.

ME begins with a similar scam, yet it transforms from a simple act of petty crime into an exploration of identity and individualism in a modern corporatized society. Hoshino, who writes both fiction and nonfiction, has won several major Japanese awards and had a number of his works translated into English. ME, first published in Japan in 2010, has now been translated as a result of winning the Kenzaburō Ōe Prize, named for the Nobel-winning Japanese author…”

 

Read more at Harvard Review Online

Read more

On November 14, 2017 By In Mixed Martial Arts

The UFC’s Old Epidemic

“Even for a sport as reliably strange as ours, the past week was a particularly bizarre one. Between the bookends of two excellent fight cards in UFC 217 and UFC Fight Night 120, a month’s worth of weird went down. Yet aside from Conor McGregor’s shenanigans at Bellator 187, a common theme permeated the goings on of the last seven days: the repercussions of getting old in the fight game, or, as I like to call it, MMAging.

Bad portmanteau aside, there’s a difference between getting old in regular life and getting old as a professional fighter. It’s not so much a defined age — though it often is that, too — as it is an accumulation of fight-related erosion…”

 

Read more at Sherdog

Read more

On November 7, 2017 By In Mixed Martial Arts

Are You Not Entertained?

“In the aftermath of any big fight card, hyperbole is certain. It’s as inevitable as a George St. Pierre victory or MMA’s capacity to entertain and surprise us. Yet in the wake of UFC 217 on Saturday, it is no exaggeration to say that it was easily the best card of the year and one of the most memorable shows in a long, long time.

There was a lot to like about the undercard, from Ricardo Lucas Ramos’ spinning elbow knockout to Ovince St. Preux’s lights-out head kick, but the true highlights belonged to the three title fights at the top of the card. Only two other UFC events have ever had three title fights on the same card: UFC 33 and UFC 205. At UFC 33, often considered one of the worst cards in Ultimate Fighting Championship history, both Tito Ortiz and Jens Pulver retained their titles while Dave Menne won the inaugural middleweight belt. At UFC 205, the company’s first event at Madison Square Garden and one of the most memorable shows in recent memory, two of the three champions retained their titles. Then, at UFC 217, all three titles switched hands. That alone made the event special, but more than the mere swapping of belts, the ways in which the fights went down made UFC 217 truly great…”

Read more at Sherdog

Read more