GGpX
Well-known member
I was listening to a podcast from an MMA journalist/analyst many years ago and he was talking about an incident in MMA when a fighter got kneed in the head (legal strike, nothing bad about it) and that it was probably the worst injury in the history of high-level MMA. You can click on the link to see some of the details if you want, it's not gore or particularly hard to stomach, but fair warning ahead of time.
www.sportsjoe.ie
He mentioned something that I had never really thought about, but agreed with instantly: MMA is a combat sport where the goal, in large part, is to destroy the opponent's body before they destroy yours so that you can be considered the winner. At the end of the contest, both competitors come out damaged, but at a level that is "acceptable". But if you think about it, those of us who watch the sport should consider ourselves extremely lucky that there aren't more incidents like these when you consider the amount of leg kicks that connect to the head, the occasional elbow to the face, etc.
Because if something like that happened regularly, the sport could not possibly be legal.
It made me think about tonight's incident. You always hear about how players feel like they've gone through car crashes every every game and they're beat up the day after; That so many players leave the game with broken bodies and fucked up brains from a full life of getting physically abused by playing the sport. If incidents like tonight's incident happened regularly in College Football and/or the NFL, how could you possibly argue that football could/should be legal to play without massive changes to the game itself?
I saw a video of Marvin Harrison Jr. getting hit during a game this weekend. The sound is terrifying and you can only wonder, how the fuck did that not kill him?
Six months after Michael Venom Page's flying knee fractured his skull, Evangelista Santos retires - SportsJOE.ie
Two decades in the sport
He mentioned something that I had never really thought about, but agreed with instantly: MMA is a combat sport where the goal, in large part, is to destroy the opponent's body before they destroy yours so that you can be considered the winner. At the end of the contest, both competitors come out damaged, but at a level that is "acceptable". But if you think about it, those of us who watch the sport should consider ourselves extremely lucky that there aren't more incidents like these when you consider the amount of leg kicks that connect to the head, the occasional elbow to the face, etc.
Because if something like that happened regularly, the sport could not possibly be legal.
It made me think about tonight's incident. You always hear about how players feel like they've gone through car crashes every every game and they're beat up the day after; That so many players leave the game with broken bodies and fucked up brains from a full life of getting physically abused by playing the sport. If incidents like tonight's incident happened regularly in College Football and/or the NFL, how could you possibly argue that football could/should be legal to play without massive changes to the game itself?
I saw a video of Marvin Harrison Jr. getting hit during a game this weekend. The sound is terrifying and you can only wonder, how the fuck did that not kill him?
