Boxing Sparring Quotes

It was completely impossible to box with her. She had only one style, which we called Terminator Mode. She would try to nail her opponent, and it didn’t matter if it was just a warm-up of friendly sparring.

Like two figures in the medieval Morality play, Pragmatism and Morality spar in the boxing ring of my brain.

Neel cuts in: "Where'd you grow up?" "Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home. Neel nods knowingly. "The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk." "I don't know about that," Kat says, narrowing her eyes. "I'm pretty good with complexity." "See, I know what you're thinking," Neel says, shaking his head. "You're thinking it's just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules"-- Kat is nodding--"and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?" "Exactly. I mean, sure, I don't know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial--" "Wrong," Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. "You can't do it. Even if you know the rules-- and by the way, there are no rules--but even if there were, you can't model it. You know why?" My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen. Kat frowns. "Why?" "You don't have enough memory." "Oh, come on--" "Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer's big enough. Not even your what's-it-called--" "The Big Box." "That's the one. It's not big enough. This box--" Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond--"is bigger." The snaking crowd surges forward.

Silner's hut" we called it. There he spent his free time, surrounded by boxes and cans (we use the spar deck to store everything that we have no other space for), doing those mysterious things that all photographers seem to do when left to themselves.

Curt Dominick had a reputation for being driven, ruthless in the courtroom, and cold in general. Rav had also told Keith that the man had studied karate with the same dedication he’d studied law, and after thirty years was a seventh-degree black belt who kicked Rav’s ass during sparring about half the time.

A good deal of my horror at his new behavior sprang from the fact that it was so similar to the old and frankly endearing way he used to tease me, and I was as baffled and enraged at his sudden departure from the rules as though—if we had been in the habit of doing a little friendly sparring—he had boxed me into the corner and beaten me half to death.

My first sparring session with him saw him bullying me around the ring, so I thought fuck this, and when he came back in close, I threw the boxing code of conduct out of the window and hit him with a cracking right hand in to the balls! That sapped the energy out of him and that was the end of that. In the end, I could take anything he threw at me and then I’d come back with mine, which he didn’t like and people would comment on how much I’d ‘come on’.

Clay’s quick, light boxing style – ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ – was deemed inadequate to beat Liston. The night before the fight, Harvey Jones, the sparring partner of the young man already known as the ‘Louisville Lip’, presented a poem by Clay. Clay comes out to meet Liston and Liston starts to retreat, If Liston goes back an inch farther he'll end up in a ringside seat. Clay swings with a left, Clay swings with a right, Just look at young Cassius carry the fight. Liston keeps backing but there's not enough room, It's a matter of time until Clay lowers the boom. Then Clay lands with a right, what a beautiful swing, And the punch raised the bear clear out of the ring. Liston still rising and the ref wears a frown, But he can't start counting until Sonny comes down. Now Liston disappears from view, the crowd is getting frantic But our radar stations have picked him up somewhere over the Atlantic. Who on Earth thought, when they came to the fight, That they would witness the launching of a human satellite. Hence the crowd did not dream, when they laid down their money, That they would see a total eclipse of Sonny.

It was the kind of closeness that didn't need conversation to sustain itself: quite often we would meet, travel to the gym, work out on the weights, box a few rounds, spend half an hour sparring at karate, and speak no more than ten words to one another.

There were a lot of Americans in Paris and I sparred with a couple, just to be obliging,” Dempsey said. “But there was one fellow I wouldn’t mix it with. That was Ernest Hemingway. He was about twenty-five or so and in good shape, and I was getting so I could read people, or anyway men, pretty well. I had this sense that Hemingway, who really thought he could box, would come out of the corner like a madman. To stop him, I would have to hurt him badly. I didn’t want to do that to Hemingway. That’s why I never sparred with him. “If you write this and you want to hand the people a laugh, tell it like this. Did I duck Harry Wills? Hell, no. They just never offered me a decent purse to fight him. The only man I ever ducked was Ernest Hemingway. I never ducked a fighter, just a writer.

Even though the grand jury refused to indict, authorities held the two boxers in jail for twenty-four days. They were treated well, however, and sparred daily for the amusement of their jailers. In his book Papa Jack, Randy Roberts claims that Li’l Artha’ really learned to box during these jailhouse sparring sessions with the old pro, Joe Choynski. A short time later Johnson left Galveston for a career in the prize ring. In 1903 he won the world’s black heavyweight title. And five years after that, in Sydney, Australia, he defeated Britain’s Tommy Burns in fourteen rounds to become the first black ever to win the heavyweight championship of the world. Arthur John Johnson—or Jack Johnson, as he was better known—never returned to Galveston, not that he would have been welcome. When Islanders read about Johnson’s famous affinity for white women,