I've been watching a lot of old fights lately. It all started because of Ali's birthday the other week. In watching some of these fights, a thought occured to me, something that I was aware of before, but not until the last few days really began to take shape in my mind. Pain.

It is one of the defining characteristics of boxing, and, in the end, determines the outcome of a lot of fights. A fighter's heart is gauged simply by how much pain he can endure. Fatigue, afterall, seems to me just a different category of pain. It's fire in your lungs, or the punch weary muscles in your arms screaming at you. Of course, it's also broken ribs and busted noses, your eye swelling shut. The art of punching is a very interesting thing. Some guys have a natural cannon in their arms. They can put a guy down with a single blow; striking with such concussive force that their opponent is knocked completely senseless, if even for just 10 seconds, long enough to be counted out. But when it comes to boxing that isn't everything. A guy like Sonny Liston had a cannon. He once knocked a man out with a jab. A jab. But then you look at a fighter like Ali. Out of his 56 fights he had 37 knockouts. Yet he was never known for possessing notable punching power. Despite this he knocked out 75% of his opponents. His secret was nothing more than a working knowledge of pain, and being able to push people to their breaking point. If you look at his fight against Floyd Patterson (another legendary fighter) he displayed nothing more than his usual Ali jab. And it slowly, over the course of seven rounds, wore away at Patterson. Until he was broken down, unable to continue, and eventually forced to quit. Ali's fight against Big George is another fine example of this. This in a way relates more to fatigue, but he was able to push his opponent to that threshold, where they want to lay down on the canvas and quit. Where their bodies, despite years of hard work and tremendous conditioning, cannot be convinced to bring them to their feet. Amazing.