Family Night at the Fights

Colby Covington vs Jorge MasVidal

There was a big MMA - Mixed Martial Arts - event at the T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas last night. One of the two main contenders - Jorge Masvidal - father is from Cuba. Osmany is from Cuba and is a big fight fan so naturally we have to watch the fight. It was PPV - Pay Per View - and very expensive compared to most other forms of televised entertainment - $100. $70 was for an annual "membership" and $30 was for this event. I guess I can understand that. They undoubtedly train as much as any other professional athletes, but I imagine they only fight a few times a year. Basketball and baseball players may play 100 games a year. And like all sporting events, only the obsessed are going to want to watch a rerun, so the promoters need to raise as much moola as they can at the time. Not much to be made in residuals.

One of fighters announced that he was donating half of his prize money, $45,000 to a children's charity, which means the prize for that fight was $90,000, and it wasn't the main event.

There were half a dozen or so fights on the card including one fight between two women. We missed that one because we didn't find out about the $100 price until showtime and then we got involved in a discussion of whether we should go to a sports bar to watch it. In the end, we decided to pay the fee. Of course, now we have to navigate the new, modern, convenient way of gaining access to the event. We needed like six pieces of information, some of which was for accounts we didn't know we had. We got there eventually, but we missed the girls.

Mixed martial arts weight classes

There were like five fights in ascending weight classes. The first fight consisted of 3 rounds. The heavier classes had five rounds. Each round was five minutes, so some of these fights went on for 30 minutes. One fight ended early when one fighter got a choke hold on the other. 

This is Mixed Martial Arts, so fights can involve boxing, kicking and wrestling. I enjoy watching the fight when both fighters are both standing up and trying to strike the other, but often one will tackle the other and then it turns into a wrestling match and that is very tension inducing. Not much action, but you tell they are both struggling mightily. Some of these wrestling matches turn very ugly, where the guy on top is beating the guy on the bottom. One fight was almost called because the guy was so badly beaten. But he got up for the next round and landed a big punch that came close to knocking the beater out. One time one fighter knocked the other down with a punch but did not tackle him. Apparently he wasn't a fan of wrestling either.

Lomachenko vs. Rigondeaux

Vasyl Lomachenko and Guillermo Rigondeaux at Madison Square Garden

The kids went to NYC for a long weekend and Osmany managed to see one of his coutrymen in a highly touted fight (Rigondeaux is from Cuba). The fight was kind of a bust. Lomachenko is two weight classes above Rigondeaux. Rigondeaux retired after six rounds complaining about a broken hand. The entire fight is available on YouTube with a Spanish soundtrack.

Fight Night

Guillermo Martinez Ayme

The Russians are staging a fight night this Friday night at the Bren Center at the University of California in Irvine, a suburb of Los Angeles, and Guillermo will be fighting. He's had some success (won 6 of his last 10 fights) in the three years since he last appeared on these pages, but more importantly, he's still in the game. Most of his fights have been in Argentina, though last year he fought in Russia, and he fought in Chile the year before that. Guillermo is a good family friend, even though I have never met him. Funny the kinds of connections you develop in life.

Update Saturday, January 14, 2017. Guillermo won! Fight is on YouTube.

Tales from Cuba

Small Boxers

Eyes Closed Boxing

When Osmany was a teenager, a popular pastime on the beach was boxing with your eyes closed. The two combatants would put on boxing gloves and stand back to back with their eyes closed surrounded by a ring of their friends. At a signal they would start trying to strike their opponent. One technique was to make lightning fast feints with one hand and then, if you contacted your opponent with the feint, follow up with a punch. Of course once your opponent felt your touch, he had some idea where you were and would instantly and simultaneously move to avoid the punch he knew was coming and strike out to where he thought you must be. And of course the crowd of onlookers were yelling all kinds of helpful advice. The fight ended when one person got knocked down or they tired out.

Ring of Laughter

Another popular pastime was for a group of children to stand in a ring and laugh. No jokes or antics needed. Just kids glad to be there with their friends and they would start laughing. Some kids would get started laughing and be unable to stop. Some of them are laughing still.

Inspired by Marcel.

The Dead Lands

Lawrence Makoare as The Warrior / Monster

Here we go back to the stone age which only ended a few hundred years ago in the Americas and New Zealand, which is where this movie is set. It's basically a tale of deception, murder and revenge, as you might expect from blood-thirsty, stone-age savages. There are some things that look a little odd to the modern eye, but they might be accurate portrayals. Hard to tell though since there's been 500 years of cross-cultural contamination.
    A group of Maori warriors comes to visit another village on the pretext of visiting a 'graveyard' and paying their respects to their ancestors. It quickly becomes obvious that that is just an excuse and they are actually looking for a fight. The chief mollifies them with some clever words, but that only works for a bit. They come back in the middle of the night and massacre all the men in the village, all except for one boy who gets pushed down a hill and manages to hide until the killers have departed.
    Most of the rest of the movie is fight scenes. We'll have one or two guys facing down a group of a dozen or more, but the dozen won't rush them all at once, and they don't use their spears. They'll come at him, one or two at a time using their slashing clubs. Perhaps they have some code of honor that requires they make it something of a fair fight, at least when the sun's out. There is a lot of posturing and grimacing prior to the actual fighting, but the old guy dispatches most of the younger warriors easily. Could it be they haven't had enough experience and / or practice and so haven't learned any good fighting skills? Or maybe they are just stupid and didn't think they need any skills. Being big and strong and full of bravado had gotten them this far, why would we need to learn any skills? Wrong lunkhead, whack! and down he goes.