martial-arts Page 4 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Man Smashes Pads
A man smashed some pads last night, or— as is apparently another way to say this—“blasted some mitts.” ...
A Bewildered Jim Ross Called The Weirdest U.S. Fight PPV We've Ever Seen
“Roy Jones Jr. will fight a fan in Phoenix!” the promo reel screamed, and that was just the main event to a bizarre card put on by URShow.tv last night in an online-only pay-per-view featuring MMA, pro wrestling, “grappling,” and boxing as called by an in-the-flesh Jim “J.R.” Ross....
Legendary Fighter Kazushi Sakuraba Brutalized In Depressing Spectacle
Fighting is too young a sport for a descriptor like “legend” to mean all that much, but so far as it does, Kazushi Sakuraba is one of the few people who deserve it. His incredible career has been too strange and interesting to easily summarize, but, briefly, after starting out as a pro wrestler, he ...
Is The Fight Game About To Destroy Yet Another Legend?
Fedor Emelianenko will be 39 years old when he returns to Japan to fight on New Year’s Eve. His comeback will be promoted by an organization so new that it only announced its name—Rizin Fighting Federation—after announcing the fight. His most recently rumored opponent is a relatively unknown, used-t...
Wanderlei Silva Cites Sketchy Vitor Belfort Drug Test In UFC Fight-Fixing Suit
In July, the UFC filed a defamation lawsuit against legendary fighter Wanderlei Silva over two posts he made on Facebook, in which Silva alleged—ludicrously, it should be said—that the UFC fixed fights. Now Silva is trying to get that lawsuit thrown out of court, arguing that there is proof of his a...
A Sketchy Drug Test Didn’t Stop Vitor Belfort From Fighting At UFC 152
Just more than 24 hours ahead of their Memorial Day fight this year, UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman stepped up to his opponent, Vitor Belfort, in public, ready to accuse him of cheating....
<i>Kickboxer </i>Is Even Sillier Than You Remember, And Even Better, Too
I’m pretty sure the first animated gif I ever saw was Jean-Claude Van Damme dancing in a Thai bar in Kickboxer. The image is the sort of thing that sticks with you: his khakis hiked up to a near-Urkel level, his spaghetti-strap tank top just barely managing to exist, his face contorted into what I g...
All White Everything: The Glorious Badness Of <i>Enter The Ninja </i>
Ninjas tend to wear all black because they want to move around in the dark without being seen, right? Like, that’s the whole point of being a ninja? I’m asking this because the hero of 1981’s Enter the Ninja is a white ninja, in both senses of the word: He’s a Caucasian man who’s become a ninja, and...
Jet Li's <i>Fist of Legend </i>Is One Of The Best Fight Movies Ever Made
In the very first scene of Fist of Legend, a group of Japanese karate students burst into a college engineering classroom. They’re mad because there’s one Chinese student in the class, and they think Japan should be for Japanese people only. Their idea, I guess, is that they’re going to find that on...
Why Are UFC Champions Hanging Out With An Accused Russian War Criminal?
Here is a delightful vignette: UFC middleweight champion Chris Weidman doing his best impression of the lezginka, the national dance of the North Caucasus region of Russia, in the palace of Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic. You can see Kadyrov in the video—he’s the short, bearded gentlem...
<i>The Way of the Dragon </i>Is A Stone-Cold Classic For That One Fight Alone
There used to be this DVD store in the Times Square subway station. Maybe it's still there. Probably not. Why was there ever a DVD store in the Times Square subway station? Some things just make no sense. But one day, maybe seven or eight years ago, I was walking through that hellmouth, and I saw ...
<i>Chocolate </i>Is A Martial-Arts Classic If You Just Focus On The Kicking
So Chocolate is not Chocolat, the 2000 Johnny Depp/Juliet Binoche movie where people eat chocolate from a particular shop and it somehow makes them fall in love with each other. Chocolat is the sort of movie where you know it takes place in France because people speak English in French accents. It w...
<i>Iron Monkey </i>Is An Underrated Goof From Hong Kong's '90s Golden Era
Somehow, in the early '90s, the Hong Kong film industry just had the action movie figured out. You'll see something like this every once in a while: A particular locale just going ham on some particular art form. It's like New York rap in the mid-'90s: All these classics coming out at a dizzying s...
The Loopy <i>Project A</i> Is Jackie Chan At His Most Violently Ridiculous
There's a moment in the 1983 Jackie Chan movie Project A where he's dangling from a clock tower's minute hand, clinging for dear life as people watch him from stories below. Chan has always been a big silent-comedy head, and the scene was directly inspired by a famous stunt that Harold Lloyd pulle...
Pretty Hurts: Why The Steely <i>Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon </i>Holds Up
There is a lot of fighting in 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but almost none of the blows look like they hurt. The one really painful attack here—the one where you sort of recoil from the screen—is when one woman tells another woman that they're not friends anymore, that they could never b...
The Crane Kick Heard 'Round The World: Thirty Years Of Daniel LaRusso
They kept going after Daniel LaRusso's leg....
Keanu Reeves, B-Movie Auteur: The Badass Excellence Of <i>Man Of Tai Chi </i>
Neo is more interesting than you realized. Last year, Keanu Reeves, once one of the world's biggest movie stars, released Man of Tai Chi, his directorial debut. It's a hard, unpretentious, generally frill-free martial-arts movie about an underground fighting ring, and it was released direct-to-VOD i...
Sweet ESPN Martial Arts Broadcast A Throwback To Network's Early Days
If you're old enough to remember any of the 80's, you know that ESPN wasn't always the home to 24-hour jabbering analysts and NFL talk shows. In its more fledgling days, the WWL aired whatever content to which it could obtain rights; thus, Americans were introduced to wacky hat-wearing and fingerg...
What Happens When Teammates Rape A Teammate?
This piece originally ran at The Sport Spectacle....
This Martial Arts Video Is An Absolute Mess
If you are a viewer of modern situational comedies, you understand the comedic value of The Extremely Awkward Situation That Gets Improbably More Awkward scene. This is like that. At one point the piece of wood he's supposed to break goes flying and hits a little girl in the face. ...