Quote:
Originally Posted by highthief
How strange that you pick Sullivan, a fighter from the bare knuckle era - which you say in your first sentence is unrefined and similar to MMA.
Wasn't he a drunk who was afraid to fight black men?
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He actually only had a couple of bare knuckle fights, he was the first heavyweight champion of the gloved era
He did fight black fighters, but drew the colour line once he had the belt.
Yes, he did have a drink problem.
---------- Post added at 01:32 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:22 PM ----------
What some people here suffer from is a lack of perspective.
The TFP is a very north american biased community in terms of its membership. A thread about baseball (a sport taken seriously only in North America) has far more contributions than threads about cricket (which is huge in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, England, Australia, etc)
So first of all the perceived increasing popularity of MMA really is in fact only phenomona in the US and Canada.
I appreciate that these are the countries most of you are from - but please try to understand that there is a wider world. MMA is unknown in the UK for example. I guarantee that not 1 in a 1000 people in the UK would have a clue who Randy Coutre is. Probably 75 out of 100 would know who Ricky Hatton was.
Boxing is a global sport, huge in South America, Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and Australasia. MMA is really only popular in Eastern Europe, the far eastm and Northern America.
Let me make it very clear, in a factual way that I think no one cam argue with, the difference between the popularity of boxing and MMA. From Google:
Results 1 - 10 of about 50,500,000 for "boxing" [definition]. (0.85 seconds)
Results 1 - 10 of about 7,500,000 for "mixed martial arts". (0.39 seconds)
There you go. Please go and try for yourself. Absolutely crystal clear, undisputed.
So when people talk about MMA "burying" boxing... I think they should try and remember that the whole world is not two nations of the American contient (by the way, even in America boxing is more popular than MMA... Im not interested in pay for view figures which only the wealthy middle class can afford - why dont you instead ask how ma boxing gyms there are compared to how many MMA training schools...)