Who's into MMA?

[quicker240]

Kickin' somebodys a** in a bar is likely to get you shot an hour later as you walk to your car nowadays.While I appreciate the dicipline and respect the skills very much,a smith and wesson beats 4 aces every time.The days of settleing differences with the fists are long gone.Nobody ever wins a fight,its only who loses the most....

[CruxGNZ]

...a smith and wesson beats 4 aces every time.

 

Not at close range. It has been proven that one can get a knife and use it faster than another with a gun. At more than ~15', you better be damn good at knife throwing.

 

!M!

[Guest Magnum Rockwilder]

Here's an article that describes why I stopped fighting. I urge everyone to read it.:

 

Once-fearsome boxer in longest fight of life

 

By Michael Hirsley Tribune staff reporter

 

Gerald McClellan still uses his hands to fight. Not to beat opponents in a boxing ring, as he once did, but to hold fast to visitors as he fights against darkness and confusion.

 

He squeezes the hands of those who come close as he sits in an armchair in his living room. His grip is strong. His verbal jabs are sometimes too quick and clipped to understand until he repeats them.

 

"Your name? Spell it. Reporter? What paper? Your race?"

 

He does not need to have a light on, or the television set that provides background noise. He cannot see and does not seem to hear the TV.

 

"Am I home? How much do you weigh? What's your favorite color? Favorite meal?"

 

He pulls whoever is talking to him nearer and repeatedly asks if they can speak louder and say their name again, even when it is his sister Lisa.

 

She and another sister, Sandra, have been his near-constant caregivers for a decade.

 

When he was a fearsome 160-pound middleweight boxer, Gerald McClellan's fights used to be measured in three-minute rounds. Often that calibration wasn't needed. He had 29 knockout victories in 34 fights and stopped 20 of his opponents in the first round. His last bout, only his third loss, left him in his present condition. It was his first as a 168-pound super middleweight and the first that extended him beyond eight rounds.

 

Now his fight against blindness and brain damage is measured in years, the longest battle of his life.

 

Ten years have passed since Feb. 25, 1995, the night his last bout ended with McClellan kneeling in a London ring and referee Alfred Asaro counting him out in the 10th round of his fight against British champion Nigel Benn.

 

McClellan rose and made it to his corner after the 10-count. Sitting against the ropes, he described to his trainer a sensation of "water running inside my head." Soon he was flat on his back as alarmed medical personnel called for a neck brace, an oxygen mask and a stretcher. McClellan was taken to a hospital, where he slipped into a coma and had a blood clot removed from his brain.

 

No one who saw the McClellan-Benn title fight or its TV replays can forget its savage images. . . . except Gerald McClellan.

 

He landed scores of brutal blows and absorbed just as many, including those that ended the bout. But now, at age 37, he barely recalls them and never will see them again.

 

"Do you remember your last fight?" Lisa asks, repeating the reporter's question.

 

"Nigel Benn, Las Vegas?" he asks in response.

 

Benn in London, she corrects, and asks, "What happened?"

 

"Did I lose?"

 

 

 

She says it was stopped because he suffered a head butt.

 

"Stitches?"

 

"About a hundred."

 

The only detail she offers her brother is that he knocked world champion Benn out of the ring in the first round. .

 

But Benn climbed back inside the ropes before referee Asaro's count to 10 and fought furiously thereafter. Momentum seesawed , with Benn often unsteady on his feet and McClellan often unable to keep his mouthpiece from dangling, as if he were having trouble breathing.

 

Near the end of the eighth round, McClellan floored a woozy Benn. But the ninth brought yet another turning point.

 

Benn, on unsteady legs, threw a wild roundhouse right that missed. He fell to the canvas, but not before his dreadlocked head banged against McClellan's right eye and forehead. As Benn rose, McClellan dropped to his right knee, holding his mouthpiece in his left glove and rubbing his head with the right. Referee Asaro hurried him back into action. McClellan finished the round and came out aggressively in the 10th until two exchanges caused him to kneel twice more. The second time he remained down for the count.

 

On the wall above him in his Freeport home is a painting of McClellan and Benn fighting before a background of their facial portraits and their respective nation's flags, British for Benn and American for McClellan.

 

As Friday's 10th anniversary of the tragic bout neared, Lisa McClellan acknowledged being depressed. She anticipated "a day of reflection and sorrow," but also a day of rejoicing, "knowing it could have been worse."

 

She and Sandra are Gerald's full-time caregivers, fixing his meals, getting him in and out of bed and dressed, putting toothpaste on his toothbrush, helping him walk on a treadmill. Lisa had questioned whether he wouldn't be better off in a nursing home.

 

"I was very angry," she recalled. "It wasn't at Gerald at all. I was angry for him, and angry that I didn't have a life, angry that other siblings weren't equally committed." There are five McClellan brothers and another sister.

 

She also was concerned about his dwindling trust fund and the growing distance of those who once made up McClellan's entourage: "My anger is that the money is gone and so is everybody else," Lisa said.

 

Her dislike of the hangers-on who surrounded her brother when he was a champion was a source of friction between them.

 

"I wasn't his favorite," Lisa said. "We didn't get along because I didn't treat him like he was better than the rest of us."

 

But she has been in McClellan's corner since his near-fatal injury. A solicitous aunt urged Lisa to pray over whether to put Gerald in a nursing home. That convinced her to keep her brother's care as a top priority as she works in a local hospital and attends nursing school.

 

"I don't know of anybody in the world I have more respect for than Lisa," said Jeff Linenfelser, a carpenter and boxing coach in nearby Durand, Ill.

 

When a water pipe burst and flooded the McClellan home, Linenfelser made the necessary repairs. With the help of volunteers and material donations from local businesses, he led an effort to remodel the kitchen.

 

Linenfelser lost his horse farm to bankruptcy and is contemplating moving to Florida. But he visits the McClellans regularly, once bringing sparring mitts and boxing gloves. He put the gloves on Gerald and let him punch the mitts as he sat. "He was hitting them well, throwing a jab, a straight right and a left hook just out of instinct," Linenfelser said.

 

Another McClellan supporter is boxing photographer Teddy Blackburn, who brought him to New York for an awards ceremony three years ago and is finishing a book of boxing photos, with the proceeds going to the McClellan family.

 

Blackburn photographed "G-Man" McClellan in his prime, most notably in his stunning knockout victory over Julian Jackson that made him middleweight champion. Blackburn visits the Freeport home occasionally, although it's difficult.

 

"Once I visited my dad, who was sick in Ann Arbor [Mich.], then drove to Freeport to see G-Man," Blackburn recalled. "I was going to stay the night. But instead, I turned around and drove back to Ann Arbor. I was too emotionally charged."

 

Signs of progress

 

Lisa and Sandra McClellan struggle to avoid such highs and lows in their long hours with their brother. Lisa sees progress whenever he speaks in longer sentences than he used to, or sings a gospel song they knew as children: "Jesus is a way-maker/And one day he'll make a way for me." "He surprises me, lets me know his brain is still working," she said.

 

A year after the Benn fight, the family went to the Mayo Clinic, only to be told "things weren't ever going to change for Gerald," Lisa recalled.

 

McClellan's three children, his father and Lisa's daughter Tyesha ("Lady T") visit periodically. Sometimes friends like Lezzette Gerber spell Lisa and Sandra, sitting on the floor next to McClellan's armchair, their faces and voices just a few feet from his. But Lisa and Sandra are there most often, as Lisa was one afternoon this week.

 

"Do you love boxing?" Gerald asks.

 

"Yes," she answers.

 

"Why?"

 

"When we were growing up, your dad played Tommy Hearns' tapes 24/7 on TV so you could learn to box, and he made all of us watch."

 

Later, she returns the question, "Do you like boxing?" McClellan offers one of his longer, more thoughtful responses.

 

"Do I like boxing? I love boxing. Boxing is my whole life."

 

----------

 

The address for his fund is Gerald McClellan Trust, c/o Fifth Third Bank, P.O. Box 120, Freeport, IL 61032.