The following is from a piece I read in an opinion magazine yesterday: Not that I agree, but it does relay the general impression that a lot of people have over here of American football. I for one read the first chapters of Better Angels of our Nature today - I wonder if he's got something to say on this."The US has, despite what they may believe, a culture of violence. I don't know another country where violence is so close to civilized society as the U.S. Just look at American football: it's a sport made for Americans. Nobody else plays it because they just don't want to. It's a sport about destroying your fellow human beings. It is about being tough, about smashing heads together. One guy wins and another gets carried away on a stretcher. It's about the fight to be the best, often by crushing the other, and that mentality seeps into the entire society. You need to be a winner, number one."
Lucha libre is stylized violence, just like pro wrestling. Ice hockey the contact is incidental; tackling is a foul in hockey. Rugby? I say this because, whereas F#$&ING 96 PERCENT of dead NFL players are reported to have CTE, in a 2013 BBC article, a neuropathologist with a great name, Dr. Willie Stewart, recorded, perhaps, the first ever confirmed case of CTE in a rugby player. As noted in the article, Stewart claims that “one or two” rugby players may develop CTE every year, and that it’s far more likely for American football players, who “suffer repeated head trauma and concussions,” to develop the condition. Within five years, high schools will start going flag/touch football. Within ten, so will college. Mark my words.
Football is to rugby as eating an entire raw pufferfish is to eating a California roll. Unless you choke on a splinter from your chopsticks, the probability of dying from your sushi is very slim. But, an uncooked pufferfish will for sure kill you.
Replace lucha libre w MMA, then. The fact that violence isn't officially sanctioned by the rules of hockey doesn't mean it's not there culturally. Why else would the NHL be so scared of concussion research? Point taken re rugby, but it's still not totally clean
MMA is a keenly American phenomenon. veen's basic point is that American sports tend to more violence - in the rules - than sports in the rest of the world. Hockey players, worldwide (green = lots): https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/icehockey/images/c/c9/Hockey_Map.PNG MMA advertising by country: Meanwhile, you've triangulated to "rugby is not totally clean" which, c'mon. It's considered the most violent sport in the world by most people. You're a long way from "lol bullshit" son.
Bullriding and NASCAR were also mentioned in that piece for similar reasons. A good friend of mine plays ice hockey and sometimes gets in a bit of a brawl, but it is a sport only marginally more popular than Quidditch here and most of the brawls are consensual (as in, it only escalates if both parties want to escalate).
God, fucking NASCAR. "Let's take an 8 liter V8 and then give it stenosis so people can't kill each other." "Then let's make them go around and around in a goddamn circle for two hours and bump into each other." Fucking NASCAR. I mean, Formula 1 is stupid. But nothing is as NASCAR stupid as NASCAR.
I would say that, as far as combat sports are concerned, due to the rulesets MMA is probably a little bit easier on the brain than boxing. There are less rounds, stoppages are more frequent, there's no standing ten count. I mean, it's still not exactly safe and I think boxing is the more entertaining of the two sports to watch, but there's probably something there to the rules.
My dad lived with a guy in college. They were in Hawaii and this guy was a boxer. He paid his rent by finding karate hotshots at bars and sharking them. They could do any goddamn roundhouse crane kick bullshit they wanted and he'd even put on the gloves. And if he didn't have them ten-count-out in five minutes, he'd give them double their money. he paid his rent this way. Boxing is, at base level, an endurance competition. Successful boxers are the ones that can give and take more violence over a prolonged period than their competitors. MMA is over too quickly for it to be about anything other than stylized violence... which is why every ten-fifteen years we need to have the hot shit in not-boxing get annihilated by whatever boxer will do it for the least money.
Well, there's a lot of differences about Boxing and MMA, and most of them come through in the rule set. That said, I wouldn't quite say that MMA is anything more than stylized violence. There's actually a lot of skill and training that goes into it and I think the pedigree of styles that become dominant baselines reflect that. If we look at the history of the UFC for example, pretty early on it was basically a way for the Gracies to show off BJJ. One of the things that become apparent though, was that people that came from combat sports, such as boxing, muay thai, judo, olympic wrestling, etc. did much, much better than people that came from traditional martial arts kung fu, wing-chung, tae kwon do, etc. A large reason for that is that in traditional martial arts, many competitions are light contact and points based, while combat sports involved actual fighting. Continuous and sustained. You had people that weren't afraid of getting hurt and weren't afraid of hurting other people. That's why, as far as traditional martial arts are concerned, Kyokushin Karate and Judo actually did relatively well in MMA, because when it comes to competing, people didn't fuck around. There's a step further in all of this though. Because people in combat sports are training to win, they don't have time to entertain techniques and theories that aren't proven to work. So while a certain kick might do you well in a point base system because it's quick and flexible, if it has flaws, like for example it doesn't actually hurt or it leaves you easily open for counters, it's not going to be adopted by people in combat sports. What that eventually evolves to is combat styles develop better and more effective techniques for actual combat than traditional martial arts because fighters learn the hard way over and over what does and doesn't work and they have to drop what doesn't work. This also leads into rule sets. For example, if you have rules that don't allow blows to the head (look at competitive tae kwon do for example) you're gonna have people that don't know how to properly guard their head. Conversely, if you have rules that do allow blows to the head but no blows below the waist, you're gonna develop a defensive style that favors that. You're leg stance is gonna be set up in such a way that makes you more mobile but all of the sudden if you're in an MMA setting you're vulnerable to having your legs being kicked out from under you or easily being sweeped by a tackle. Similarly, boxers can bob and weave all they want, but in an MMA setting, if they pull that shit, they're begging to get kneed in the head. Which leads me to this . . . Every time you train for a certain rule set, you're gonna be competent in that rule set. If a career MMA person steps into the boxing ring with a career boxer, they're at an extreme disadvantage. That boxer has a decade plus years of experience in strickly boxing, where the MMA fighter doesn't. Their fighting style has been catered to match the rules and min-max the fuck out of them for their advantage. The MMA fighter on the other hand doesn't have the same experience with rules or styles. Even when rules are similar but enough has changed, there will be a disadvantaged fighter. Somewhere out there is a video of an exhibition match between an American Kick Boxer named Rick Roufous and a Thai Fighter named Changpuek Kiatsongrit. American Kick Boxing didn't allow leg kicks. Thai Boxing did. Rick Roufous did not know how to intelligently defend against leg kicks, to the point where his opponent won by TKO because he basically destroyed the fuck out of Roufous' legs. In an exhibition match, a champion kick boxer lost to a thai fighter because the rules did not favor him. There are similar vidoes out there of boxers losing to thai fighters for the same reason, BJJ wrestlers losing to Judoka when it comes to stand up game and Judoka losing to BJJ wrestlers when it comes to ground game, and on and on and on. While not necessarily recorded, you'll hear similar stories pre UFC days. MMA isn't actually something new. Cross style exhibition matches are part of the game and are often used as both marketing opportunities as well as good will events between different nations and cultures. The guys behind the UFC though? They just figured out how to really capitalize on shit and the ball has been rolling ever since. Also, it goes without saying, what your dad's friend did was pretty stupid, but I think we both already knew that. :)MMA is over too quickly for it to be about anything other than stylized violence.
Which is why every ten-fifteen years we need to have the hot shit in not-boxing get annihilated by whatever boxer will do it for the least money.
Professional wrestling actually has a high rate of brain and other bodily injury due to the nature of the stunts I'd imagine Luche Libre would be similar, just because it's staged doesn't mean it's not without risks. While I don't know about Rugby, I know there are concerns about CTE in soccer in players who have a tendency to head the ball. As for other "violent" sports, Boxing is a beloved sport throughout the world, MMA is gaining popularity, and countries like Japan and Russia have combat sports such as Judo and Sambo respectively. I hope you're right about football for pewee, high school, and college players, but talking to parents of grade school and high school kids? They wanna see rules changed for the sake of safety, but they still want "traditional football." It's crazy yo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_traumatic_encephalopathy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_brain_injury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquired_brain_injury Wikipedia has some very interesting summaries on brain injuries. The introductory section for Acquired Brain Injury has one of the most oversimplified summaries as to why this stuff can be so scary . . .While research has demonstrated that thinking and behavior may be altered in virtually all forms of ABI, brain injury is itself a very complex phenomenon having dramatically varied effects. No two persons can expect the same outcome or resulting difficulties. The brain controls every part of human life: physical, intellectual, behavioral, social and emotional. When the brain is damaged, some part of a person's life will be adversely affected.
It makes me wonder about a lot of shit. Kind of makes me wonder if we're taking the first steps into a whole new world of psychology and pathology. Kind of makes me wonder if all those people who had bike accidents, fist fights, football games, etc. as a normal part of growing up would turn out different. Someone told me that there was a direct correlation between removing lead from gasoline and a drop in violent crime (was that you?). Makes me think about sports differently.
