Indigenous Ability

  The Old Man’s Premise : We are always wiser to take our self-help advice from Men & Women of action. People who have lived much, who burn the wick to the end. Be they athletes, explorers, adventurers, frontiersmen, survivors, or “average” men and women in tough spots, their words, their insights should be weighted far heavier than anything offered from a chair, “brain-cycled” from an app, “discovered” reclining on a sofa, or hoped for with an affirmation. That in a nutshell is the entire premise of our upcoming book, The Frontier Stoic: Life Lessons from Those Who live a Life. We must never forget, advice offered that was not lived is false, it is untested. Much advisory eloquence is simply well-turned prose that was never lived. Edifying in the way of a fine poem but just as ephemeral. Words from the trenches, acts that provided solace in real trying circumstances, well, that My Friends, that is something worthy of mulling and putting into practice. One such ex...

  “Dirty Boxing” in today’s parlance has a specific connotation, a more sportive one at that. Dirty Boxing as it applies to 21 st century MMA is the combination of striking, clinch control and takedowns that take place in the variants of the over-under clinch. We have an entire course on that topic titled, surprise, surprise Dirty Boxing. [ Click that link to view.] The term “Dirty Boxing” prior to the 21 st century, particularly from the 1920s thru the 1990s referred to all the fouling aspects of the game, be they intentional or accidental. There was an entire cadre of fighters in the 1920s thru the early 1940s in particular, who made extensive canny “hidden” use of a bewildering arsenal of “dirty” tricks. This arsenal, for the most part, thinned and all but disappeared in the great culling of talent that was World War II. The dirty boxing that remained in post-war years was a clumsier more haphazard variety. For a compendium of these early “dirty tactics” see our c...

  Let’s talk Tough. Tough with a capital T. No, let’s make that two Capital Ts. John Pesek was TTough, no ifs, ands or buts. The man was a notorious taleteller, a yarn-spinner par excellence, so there is always a little separating the wheat from the chaff to get at the truth. And by the way, the truth is Tough enough without the man’s exaggerated additions. Pesek was something of an autodidactic anomaly. His wrestling is primarily self-taught augmented here and there by tips, tactics, and tricks he picked up from travelling carnivals and AT shows moving through Nebraska in the first decade of the 1900s. [Pesek’s autodidacticism bodes well for all hard-chargers who buck the dogma of “the necessity of lineage.”] This self-taught Nebraskan was not merely “good” for self-taught, he was simply, well, excellent. He held the esteem of most old school early wrestlers of the Golden Age both in the pro circuit and of those in the top tier of the amateur world. Robin Reed ...

  January 15, 1925 Lightweight Champion, Benny Leonard announced his retirement from boxing. At that date, Leonard had already been boxing for 14 years, had been champion for almost 8 years and had engaged in 181 professional fights. 181 fights in 14 years averages to one professional fight per month. The actual calendar shows that to be around the correct mark—with some tics on the little more than a month side of the ledger, and some tics in the more than 2 fights inside a month side of the ledger. Now, stop for a moment and think about what you just read. We’re not talking 1 sparring session a month. We’re talking about 1 bona fide professional fight per month in an era packed with hot and heavy talent. There were no multiple boxing organizations to spread the titles around and water down the talent pool with “ So and so is ranked 3 rd in this organization, but only 11 th in this one and…” Nope, none of that statistical tweaking noise. Each weight class h...

  [Start with the boxing film review, stick around for the behind-the-scenes gossip. Trust me, it’s wilder than most any film the man made.] John “The Duke” Wayne. Should require no introduction, but if he does…well, I’m not really sure what to make of you. For those who haven’t checked him out in a while or allowed the memory to dim, allow me to say, at his best he was a larger-than-life presence on the screen. He possessed a toughness mixed with a gentle charm. Those who knew the man and worked with him said, what you saw on the screen wasn’t too far off from the truth. Let us look to a little-viewed 1936 boxing picture titled Conflict . [aka The Abysmal Brute.] A low-budget affair produced by Universal, Wayne may be the star here, but this is before he become THE John Wayne. He’s still a hopeful hand at this point. Directed by David Howard, with a screenplay by Charles A. Logue and Walter Weems based on Jack London’s famous boxing story The Abysmal Brute. The scr...