“He’s hurt”. Many fight aficionados, for decades, still get it wrong and it’s always bothered me.
Yes, there is “pain” in boxing. There is hurt in boxing. The hurt and pain? A low blow. A thumb in the eye. Uppercut under the nose. Hook to the liver. Clash of heads, et cetera.
But there is also a “no pain” kinda hurt, in boxing. Left Hook to the chin. Straight right to the forehead. Hook to the temple. Over hand right to the side of the head. Left hook off the top of the head. Right hand behind the ear.
Yes… they don’t hurt… to most who’ve never had the experience, it would appear to be very painful but it isn’t. Not initially.
“Oh Frazier’s hurt! Down goes Frazier!!!” Howard Cosell would scream. Non boxers interpret that as Frazier was feeling sharp pain, but he wasn’t.
There’s a reason why fighters don’t feel pain when receiving head shots (and yeah there’s adrenalin which masks pain), and that is generally, with a strong enough head shot, you’re concussed. The stronger the puncher, the lessor the pain. The punch may actually hurt, but you wouldn’t know that because when the brain is traumatized severely enough, it bypasses pain and goes straight to DAMAGED.
The medical term I believe is “neurometabolic-cascade”.
With a hard enough punch, the neurons are hyper-activated. You cannot control them. Do all the visualization and neck exercises you want. When you get hit right, the only way you get up is if your neurons and synapses connect in a timely fashion.
Ten seconds you are not in control of.
A quick aside on taking a punch: Mike Tyson did the same torturous, grueling neck exercises as did the great Wilfred Benitez. Tyson could take a hellacious punch. Benitez, as great as he was, did NOT take a GREAT shot. Safe to say, it had nothing to do with the neck exercises.
Neck exercises are a false sense of security. You’re either built to take a punch or you’re not.
So when you see a fighter’s body convulse involuntarily (one leg goes left, the other goes right) after getting hit, what’s really happened is the neurons have been hyper-activated. The fighter is no longer in control of his body. But by standard definition, one thing he is not, is “hurt”.
Now with a body shot (liver/solar plexus, especially) you’re conscious, and the pain feels like something is chewing the point of impact. So what I’m saying is, body shots “hurt” more than shots to the head, and that’s because when you hit the body, you pretty much hit a vital organ.
As every boxer who hangs around long enough, I’ve been hit in the floating ribs, kidney, liver, solar plexus, chest and heart and they cause tremendous pain… even more so than the legendary uppercut to the testes.
Low blow.
Hurt doesn’t happen from headshots.
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