Indigenous Ability

Today Las Vegas, Nevada is known as the fight capital of the world (both boxing and MMA) and the reason for that has a long history. Prizefights had been conducted throughout the US Western frontier from the 1840s onward with supervised bouts being held in saloons, railway stops, mining camps, in short, anywhere you could get two fighters together and draw a crowd. Despite the reputation of being the Wild West, the sport was considered neither respectable nor was it necessarily legal. One of the early adopters of making prizefighting legal was, you guessed it, the state of Nevada—they did so in 1897.           Like most good decisions a bit of greed was at the heart of it. Nevada had fallen on tough economic times after a long boom period. Carson City (one of the nation’s smallest capitals at the time) was only a few miles from the Comstock Lode-one of the biggest silver lodes in US history. Miners (and all those who profit from min...

Mr. Mayweather “ Facer your wha?” Today’s titled historical offering borrows a bit of lingo from fisticuffs, or The Fancy [Early Boxing] circa. 1780. A Facer was a “blow to the face.” Whereas a “Muzzler” is an early term for an upper-cut. Today’s historical look-back is less about vocabulary than about a bit of lost tactical advantage when it comes to the use of the muzzler. First, let’s look to today’s upper-cut. It is crisp, sharp, cleanly-thrown and cleanly landed [if we’re lucky.] If we are throwing it well we have set it up with a wisely chosen preceding blow that masks our upper-cut intent as there is no punch more unforgiving than a poorly set-up upper-cut, or God forbid, an upper-cut thrown without set-up at all. The upper-cut of today is primarily an inside tool, that is, thrown from close-quarters, and in MMA, absolutely legal and wise to throw from the clinch. If we are throwing from the outside, it is wisely thrown from the Bridge , that is, ...

Fisticuffs, now there’s a word we’ve all heard. Conjures up images of old-timey bare-knucklers striking upright long-guard poses, while wearing tights and sporting waxed mustaches. That image is exactly how the word has come to take its current form, as a synonym for boxing or an archaic word for a fistfight. But...originally there was a bit more to it than that. To get to what that “more to it was” let’s first digress into the world of historical fashion. Take a gander at woodcuts, paintings, lithographs or whatever medium moves you of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Look not for depictions of various royals and courtiers lounging and feasting and dallying. Look to images of soldiers, look for images of the working class. I want you to look at, surprise, men’s cuffs. With the middle-class and the aristocracy, you will find frilled cuffs, lace cuffs, loose billowy-cuffs. If you look hard enough at the lower and working classes you will see t...