Boxing Freak Show

[John Feeney]

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Glad to hear that someone agrees with my perception that grappling is more interesting than striking.

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I agree it's more interesting than boxing or kickboxing. But I used to find point karate sparring just as interesting - like a fascinating game of tag. Because it was only a round or two, and the fighters didn't have to expend as much energy really trying to hurt each other (though certainly it was no picnic), they were freed up to try a lot of fancy stuff that would be too tiring to do over a longer fight, and some things that simply didn't inflict enough damage to bother with in kick boxing. Also, it's being a game of single points changed the strategies in ways that made it interesting. There was almost a desperation to score points before time ran out, or to hang onto a lead. It was interesting to see the fighters who could really play that game. To do so really well you had to kind of forget, to some degree, about its being a fighting/self defense activity, and just focus on how points were scored - that game of tag.

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Fencing always looked interesting and fun

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I took it for a semester in college. It was fun, though I found the karate sparring more interesting. That may have been a function of my relative degrees of skill in each. But I saw it as like sparring with just one arm.