https://youtu.be/YyNRBwFacyo
Saturday, June 19, 2021
Wednesday, June 16, 2021
Big George Foreman
Who can beat a man who does roadwork with a heifer on his shoulder? Muhammed Ali managed the super human feat.
Here is the famous picture of Foreman lifting a cow and carrying it on his back. If I had to “guesstimate” this cow looks like it weighs around 300kg +. The nearest powerlifting exercise that equates to this position is probably the squat so I think we can assume that Foreman excelled at squatting. But I doubt very much if Foreman squatted this cow up from the ground- more likely the cow was loaded onto his back directly from a cattle truck. Also you have to take into consideration the shape of the cow which is more awkward than a conventional barbell in a gym. However there is another variable to consider here & that is a live weight ( a cow) vs a dead weight ( barbell).
In the modern era of boxing, Foreman is generally regarded as the most physically empowered HW specimen and his pure feats of strength are seriously freaky.
Here we see him pulling a jeep on a slight uphill incline. Given that this vehicle probably weighs somewhere in the region of 2 tonnes- this is another jaw-dropping feat of strength- at least by boxing standards. So Foreman was SERIOUSLY strong & he successfully incorporated this “real-world” strength into his boxing. I think when he man-handled Joe Frazier way back in ‘73 that was as much to do with superior strength as it was with superior punching power. Several times he pushed Frazier away with comparative ease that was clearly the result of his superior strength.
Now professional strongmen pull aeroplanes so although Foreman was tremendously strong- his strength is measured compared to his field, which was boxing. So it is unlikely that he would have been strong enough to compete as a professional strongman, not impossible mind you but he would probably finish last. Also remember those guys weigh well over 25 stone+ in the off-season whereas Foreman in his prime was around 20 stone in the off. In other words, it could be that Foreman’s P4P strength was the equivalent of a pro-strongman but in order to successfully compete he would have to bulk up.
Jim Brown fabled NFL hall of famer, wrote an article about George Foreman, Jim was talking to a young Foreman and George casually picked up a yearling horse and walked around with the horse around his neck!
Brown who had been around seriously strong men all his life said it was the greatest feat of strength he had ever seen!
As to being a strongman, why would George lower his monetary standards to do that? Heavyweight champion boxers are very well paid
The big question is—Was the cow to experiment with the first models of “The George Foreman Grill”? Did anyone tip the cow off about the grill?
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
The Love of Boxing
"It's like being in love with a woman. She can be unfaithful, she can be cruel, but it doesn't matter. If you love her, you want her, even though she can do you all kinds of harm. It's the same with me and boxing. It can do me all kinds of harm but I love it." - Floyd Patterson
Sunday, June 6, 2021
Nonito Donaire's head trainer, wife Rachel
Rachel Donaire blazing trails as first woman head trainer for a world champion boxer
Kevin Iole
·Combat columnist
Fri., June 4, 2021
Nonito Donaire
Naoya Inoue
His bout with Naoya Inoue was the 2019 Fight of the Year according to Yahoo Sports and several other outlets, but that was of little consolation to Nonito Donaire.
He lost, and his dream of unifying the bantamweight title before he retired was slipping through his fingers.
Losing to Inoue, one of the elite talents in the sport, was nothing to be ashamed of, but it was how he lost to Inoue that disturbed him.
“Too offensive,” Donaire muttered. “All offense, really.”
He neglected during training camp to work on his defense, and it cost him significantly.
His wife, Rachel, had been telling him for a while to focus on his defense. A former amateur taekwondo star, Rachel Donaire managed her husband and was always heavily involved in his career.
As time had passed and Nonito had kept putting up big win after big win, he learned to listen for her voice in the crowd. And so he asked her if she would train him.
She’d taken plenty of abuse on social media for her role in managing her husband, first with the legendary Cameron Dunkin and then later on her own.
“I was branded these horrible names, these really awful, sexist names, and [training him] was a whole different side,” Rachel said. “But there have been managers who are women, but this being such a male-dominated sport, I knew it was going to be a lot harder. It’s a brutal sport and people were going to question what I knew. Most women don’t get the respect for their knowledge of a sport, not just boxing but all sports, that they really deserved. I knew it was going to be tough.”
But she did it and, just like her husband, she set a record on Saturday in Carson, California. Nonito Donaire knocked out Nordine Oubaali in the fourth round at Dignity Health Sports Park to become, at 38, the oldest bantamweight champion in history.
In the process Rachel is believed to be the first woman to serve as head trainer for a male boxer in a successful world title bout. Hall of Famer Lew Jenkins was a world lightweight champion and his wife, Katie, trained him for a while, but there is no evidence she trained him in a world championship bout.
Rachel did that. She watched film of Oubaali, spent hours in the gym with her husband, occasionally stepping in to spar, and formulated a game plan.
It was based entirely on creating offense from his defense.
Nonito Donaire and his wife/head trainer, Rachel, celebrate after his fourth-round KO win over Nordine Oubaali to reclaim the WBC bantamweight title on May 29, 2021 in Carson, California. (Sean Michael Ham/TGB Promotions)More
The seeds of this were sown years ago. On Nov. 9, 2013, he was facing Vic Darchinyan in a rematch of a 2007 fight he’d won. As he often did during a fight, he glanced over at his wife, who was seated near the ring.
What she said wasn’t kind, and was brutally honest.
“He looked over and I was sitting in the front row and I said, ‘You’re losing the fight,’” she said. “Then he went out and knocked Darchinyan out. When he came to the dressing room, everyone is giving him high fives, very pumped for the win and excited about what had happened. He had come over and asked my opinion and I said, ‘You don’t want to hear my opinion right now.’
“He asked me why and I said, ‘I don’t know what you were trying to do. I don’t know if you’re trying to get brain damage, but I’m not here for this. I’m not going to watch that happen.’ And he was upset with me for a while.”
He knew she was right. He had the defensive skills necessary, but fell in love with his power and his ability to dazzle the crowd with his offense.
Like many athletes, he worked on what he was good at and what he enjoyed, and began neglecting the other parts of his game. Eventually, after losing to Inoue, Nonito recognized Rachel was correct.
“For years, we’d talk about fighting or she’d watch a fight and say, ‘Well, this is what is going to happen based on what they’re doing,’ and then ‘Boom!’ just what she said would happen,” Nonito said. “She’d predict things before they’d happen. She’d say, ‘He’ll throw this punch and then that will happen,’ and she was right so often.
“So I knew she had the knowledge. I knew she could do it. She has the intelligence and everything that’s needed to do that job, so it made sense for her to do it.”
Nonito is all but a lock for the International Boxing Hall of Fame given his fabulous career. He’s 41-6 with 27 knockouts and has won titles at flyweight, super flyweight, bantamweight and featherweight.
Becoming the oldest bantamweight champion only put an exclamation point on his Hall of Fame résumé.
But Rachel may find herself there one day, as well. Being a trailblazer is never easy, and certainly not in a sport like boxing where many of the central figures behave like it’s still 1950.
“Oh my God, if that were to happen, it would mean the world to me,” she said. “That’s breaking the glass ceiling in a way I’m not sure anyone ever imagined could be broken. I have two young children in addition to being his wife and his manager. I have to deal with his contract and his career and, with COVID, I’ve been home-schooling the kids. I’ve been training Nonito and there’s the laundry. My God, laundry. There’s this seemingly endless pile of laundry I need to do.
“So I had to make some personal time for myself in the gym each day to make it all work. But that [getting elected to the Hall of Fame] would make it all worth it. And not just for me, but for other women who have the ability to do what I did, but who don’t get the opportunity because they’re women.
“That’s something I hope that comes out of this. There are a lot of very knowledgeable women who could do this. I hope you see more of them getting the opportunity so it won’t be a big deal like it is now.”
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