Cross Match

There is a weird fight coming up at the end of August.

It is between perhaps the best boxer of all time, and a UFC fighter.

It has a lot of people all abuzz, but it is nothing but a freak show. The two types of fighting are totally incompatible.

It has been proven on numerous occasions that even a very good boxer cannot win under UFC rules against a decent MMA fighter. This won't be a factor, as the fight will be with boxing rules.

So what does that mean for the match-up? It means that the MMA guy is under an insurmountable disadvantage.

Let's say you have two equally skilled fighters from these two styles. Why can't the MMA guy win under boxing rules; they do a lot of boxing in their training?

Let's divide everything that an MMA fighter does into two areas; standing and ground. Boxers focus all of their efforts into strictly standing. That means that they will have put far more time and effort into the standing game compared to the MMA fighter. As they are fighting under boxing rules, there will be no ground fighting of any kind.

Even the standing training isn't equally focused. MMA people spend a lot of their standing training around how to get an opponent down, and defending against getting taken down.

Even the striking portion isn't the same. MMA people have to deal with and deliver kicks, and elbow strikes. Boxers focus strictly on hands.

Even with everything else eliminated other than hands, the two fighter types don't train the same.

For example; the MMA fighter is used to competing at a longer range than the boxer. It is normal to stay just at outer kick range, which is far outside of the zone that boxers inhabit. They are used to zipping into and out of range rapidly to avoid and deliver strikes, and to perform other attacks and to close for grappling. Boxers need concern themselves with none of this.

They also strike differently. Boxers have to train for their fists to perform both offensive and defensive roles. In offence, they can strike harder due to the larger, hand-protecting gloves they wear. MMA gloves afford nothing like the same level of hand protection, limiting the damage it is prudent to take in delivering power blows.

The gloves also provide boxers with a defensive-cushion form of blocking. It is quite normal to block an incoming gloved fist with one's own gloved fist. It is also possible to prevent punches from getting through a defensive posture just by merit of the incoming fist's bulk. The smaller MMA gloves mean that this style of defence is that style of combat.

So the contest is not an equal one by any means. They will be fighting under exactly the rules that the boxer is used to, and that he has trained for his entire life. A lion's share of the MMA fighter's training is irrelevant to this contest, and even his striking work has all been done under a paradigm where different tactics are the norm. He will be striking and defending strikes in a manner different than is what he is used to.

In this contest, the only hope that the MMA gentleman has is that he might be such a vastly superior athlete that he will win anyway. It doesn't look like this is the case.

The boxer has faced the elite of boxing, and currently has a record of 49-0. The MMA fighter's record is 24-3. About the only area that the MMA guy has in his favour is age. He will be 29 years old on fight night, as opposed to the boxer, who will be 40, and who will have not fought for almost 2 years.

Taken all together, how do I see it all going.

I assume that the pace will be dictated by the MMA fighter if he uses his brain at all. He will be more used to distance changes, and should be able to keep well outside of punching range should he chose to. About his only advantage will be that he should be able to zip in quickly, and then retreat out again. In comparison, the boxer will seem plodding.

In a very real way, this will be meaningless. The boxer has by far the better punching ability, and hand speed, and should be able to win every exchange that the MMA guy allows to happen.

It could also well be that the MMA guy, whose ego knows no bounds, will come out trying to beat the boxer by using traditional boxing methods. If he does this, the fight will be very one-sided indeed, and likely quite short.

The Girl was Back

It was a normal Monday for me at first.

On the road by 7:15am to catch the 8:25 ferry, followed by a string of buses, coffee at Starbucks, and training at North Vancouver Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu's noon class.

The way home is where it strayed. In a way it remained perfectly ordinary, full of buses and ferries, but in another manner it was not. My friend Elizabeth trains at North Van BJJ, but today she was coming home to visit her folks after class. Really, her home is in Vancouver now, but she started here on the Coast, and it's where her family still lives.

That meant I had company for the trip home, which was a very pleasant change. Somehow the travel time seemed less harsh. The boat was running quite late, but even so Elizabeth went strolling up her parents' driveway at a little after 5pm.

Her plan was to spend the following morning and afternoon at home, and to train at our Jiu-Jitsu school's advanced class later in the evening. It's where she started her martial arts journey, and she rarely gets to see the old gang.

Everybody was glad to see her, and several said they would figure out a way to get to a few Vancouver classes, and Elizabeth was also making plans to get back on our mat again as soon as she could. It was really nice. I tried to take a back seat, as I get to see her in the city almost every Monday.

Getting back to a hometown can be nice.

Nope

Cruising is fun, but I think the assorted lines are under-exploiting one of the most profitable segments of the market.

Several cruise lines run around-the-world voyages. They are always the most expensive trips for guests on a fee-per-day basis. The list price is fairly comparable to shorter sailings, but this is an illusion.

World cruises always completely sell out far in advance, and always at full price. On shorter cruises, the lines are forced to have a very flexible pricing system to prevent vacant cabins. It is normal to get rate reductions of 25% as a matter of course, and 50% off is not unusual. Sometimes even better bargains can be had. This never happens on world cruises.

With all of this in mind, you'd think cruise lines would want to run more world voyages than they currently do.

In fact, they don't.

Right now it is impossible to do better than to be wait-listed for any of a number of world cruises departing in January of 2018. They are all completely full, and at full price.

The lines don't even utilize large ships. They tend to send out small ones, which further limits the number of cabins. These days a small-to-medium sized cruise vessel is around 75,000 tons and carries about 2000 passengers. The usual vessel that Princess uses for their round-the-world voyages is under 20,000 tons, with room for only 750 passengers. It's also almost 50 years old. Holland America uses bigger vessels, but still nothing like the industry standard.

There are people who swear by small ships, but they are crazy. On the bigger vessel I already mentioned there is 50% more space onboard per person than on a littler ship. That means more comfort, amenities, and things to do. They are also vastly more modern, efficient, and less prone to breakdown.

Of course, if the lines flood the market, the prices would have to come down which would defeat the appeal to the corporations involved, but there is clearly room for more added capacity before that happens. By increasing service conservatively, they would still sell out at full price, but perhaps only 6 months ahead of the sailings.

Four years ago when we retired, Helen and I considered doing a world cruise, but rejected it on the basis of the outrageous price-per-day, and less than attractive vessels. Spending 105 to 120 days on a cramped, old ship just wasn't appealing, especially at a premium price.

Ever since, I've kept an eye on such trips. Most such sailings are done by super high-priced luxury lines, but Holland America and Princess do them in a price range that we could swing if we wanted to.

Of these, some are instantly rejected if the ship is too tiny, or old. Of the few still in the running, most get themselves scrapped due to unattractive itineraries. Holland America has one in January (sold out) on a 63,000 ton ship built in the year 2000. That's new enough, and just barely big enough for our tastes.

It starts out in Florida, which is really good, but other than that single city the route misses North America altogether. It also totally skips South America, and Europe, although to be fair it does do a lot of stops in Africa if that is your thing. This itinerary failed for us.

A year off in June of 2018, Princess has a ship sailing from Sydney, Australia (not great for us to start and end in), in a newish, ship of sufficient size (77,000 tons). It has a lovely route, if a bit skimpy on Asia, that covers Australia, Europe, and both Americas nicely. It also manages a stop in Iceland, and two in Greenland of all places. The only missed continent is Africa (and misses Antarctica, which none of these trips ever visits). It is a bit rushed as world cruises go, being only 106 days.

The deal breaker is the price-per-day, and the price in total. We could easily piece together an equally long holiday consisting of a number of cruises, with land segments, and lots of flights in between, and do so at a substantially lower cost, and actually see more places.

But I do enjoy looking at them.

Longshot Bet

You can never, ever know.

Our advanced class currently has 6 regular members. There have been no injuries at all in quite a while.

The other night, we had a lovely lesson. The moves were simple, and easy to perform safely. No problem.

After that, we all rolled around for about half an hour. This is always safe enough, but even more so that time around. The instructions were to not worry about submitting each other, but rather to try different things, and also to allow them to happen when our partner tried theirs. We defended, but not to shut things down.

It was fun, and we changed partners every so often. All was well.

I was rolling with our instructor when the final round ended. Mere seconds after we stopped, his knee went boing. He was OK; it does that sometimes to him.

As we were gathering together at the time, everybody noticed, and both Tawha and Cosme said that their knees went out in the last roll, too. Worst of all was Rob, whose bum knee is of a different magnitude.

His went right out, and he could barely put any weight on it at all. Within a period of only a couple of minutes, 4 out of the 6 of us were hit with knee issues. There was no common cause; no similar movements, and nobody felt particularly tired. Seems like a fluke.

All were pretty much fine again by the next evening, even Rob. He wisely did everything carefully, and was still able to roll, although with some extra caution.

Four had been hurt, within minutes of one another, and all the injuries were to knees.

What are the odds of that?

Renaissance Man

Now is the time of my personal Renaissance Age of Jiu-Jitsu; a time of flourishing Science and Art.

Let us look at what has recently passed, and what will soon be.

There is a system in place that rewards students for managing to attend a large number of classes within a set period. The reward is usually a little stripe on their coloured belt. The number of classes is often difficult to accumulate without going well overtime.

Partly in response to this, six months ago I started attending an extra class each week by travelling to nearby North Vancouver to train with Gracie Black Belt Marc Marins. This has eliminated any issues with attendance totals, but the real result has been a significant increase in my Jiu-Jitsu.

You see, Marc is a top-notch, highly-experienced and respected teacher of the art. When he does any lesson, even one I know well, he emphasizes tiny little differences. Sometimes, he steps outside of the official curriculum altogether, and we do things that blow my mind. He is also beyond value when I have a question I need answered.

This doesn't mean I train even one second less at home. If anything, it has me trying to find more fragments of time to work on what I've learned, and to share it with others.

I also had an extra chance to train with Rener Gracie. Back in February I did my usual, yearly two-week visit to Los Angeles to train. This is always good, but the extra chance came just last weekend.

Rener was giving a seminar at the Greater Seattle police training facility. This was my fifth time that I'd been able to do this with him, or with his brother, and it was by far the best. I walked out of the gym exhausted after 8 hours of training, but with a head bursting with new concepts and techniques.

All that extra work, from assorted points of view has made me much, much better. I find holes in people's movement when they occur, rather than right after they close up like I usually do. Understanding of new material comes faster, and deeper. I am rolling more fluidly.

The future is also inspiringly bright.

The head of our school Shawn Phillips has been living part-time in Mexico for the last year and a half, and had just arrived back for a nice, long stint. He is a great teacher, and fits my learning style very well. Not only will he be teaching our regular classes, he has expressed a desire to do extra training outside of the timetable.

In a similar vein to that, Tawha and I have been working hard on the material for one of the technical exams. That will be continuing, along with all the normal classes, and alongside the extra work with Shawn, and my weekly visits to Vancouver.

Renaissance men do not allow anything to interfere with their pursuit of learning, and a road-bump is coming up in the fall.

Helen and I will be off to Britain, France, and a Mediterranean cruise. I am greatly looking forward to this, but it will punch a great big hole into my training. Certainly, I can catch up after we are back, but there is an opportunity to start the repair work before it even happens.

August is always a week training month, as our school shuts down for a bit more than a week. A normal month contains 12 to 13 advanced classes, but August will only have 9.

My Monday visits will boost this up to 12, but this just isn't enough for me. With the Summer ferry being in effect, it will be possible to stay later in Vancouver attending the evening class as well, and still get home. The total jumped to 15.

This lead me to reconsider the school shutdown in another way. By straying outside of Monday, it seems that I can add 3 more Vancouver classes. The total becomes 18.

This doesn't even take into account any August extra training with Shawn, or with Tawha on the exam material, or with anybody else who wants to hit the mat.

I shall fly off to Europe quite content that everything possible to prepare my training has been done.

And wasn't the Renaissance followed by the Age of Enlightenment?

Or was it the Thirty Years War?

Skill Drop

So far this week I've rolled 4 times. Only one of my partners was chosen by me.

That was the first roll, while training in North Vancouver. Elizabeth was my partner during class, and we stayed together for the first roll. She is fast, and clever, and we are of a similar skill level.

When we roll, I try and use similar strength, and to not emphasise my larger mass. If I do that, I need hold back in no other way. We were actually supposed to be doing a swapping type of roll where the partners take turns going for submissions, but it just kind of slipped into being a regular free-roll.

Against all of my other partners, I had to hold back on something other than just size and strength.

For the second roll, the instructor put me with with a young gentleman who was attending his very first advanced class. It was officially free-roll time, but he didn't even know what that meant. He asked me whose turn it would be first and I replied by explaining what was really going on.

I didn't have to concern myself with not over-powering him, or out-sizing him. However, it would be all too simple to over-awe him with technique and experience. Therefore, I brought my level down to something similar to his own, and away we went.

For my third roll, the instructor put me with a young lady. Compared to my previous partner, her rolling level was much higher as she'd been in the advanced class for several months. As when I'm with Elizabeth, I minimised my strength and size advantage, and like the young gentleman earlier, I restricted my trickiness, just not as much.

Roll four was back on the home mat yesterday with my friend Michael. He is also of limited experience, and so again I matched myself to his level, more or less.

So what do they get when I play below my best game, and what does it do for me?

They get to try things, and to do so with some chance of success. The better they perform, the better their opponent becomes.

I let them get me into bad positions, which is good practice for them, and even better practice for me. They get my back, and can attempt to control me there while attempting to gain a submission. I get an opportunity to practice defending the choke, and eventually will perform an escape. They get to defend against the escape at a low level, and then again if they succeed as I take it up a notch, until they can hold me no more, or just perhaps I can't get out at all.

I end up in a great number of horrible positions that I have to survive, or maybe I don't. Likewise, they end up in some bad spots, but ones they might manage to survive, and also to experience and practice gaining the upper hand. In every case, I tapped more than did my partner.

It is also a heck of a lot more fun. I enjoyed every one of these rolls. Each of my partners finished with a big smile on their face.

This is how I like it to be when I am faced with higher-skilled opponents.