[CommerceComet]

Thanks. Those were interesting videos. I loved the scientific street fighter one. When opponents of Roberto Duran were asked post-fight about him, two themes seemed to commonly arise. First, every punch he threw, no matter how insignificant looking it was, hurt. Second, Duran was really hard to hit. This video shows why. As a master of strategic positioning, Duran was always on balance to get maximum leverage on his punches while being in position which made it hard for his opponent to counter-punch.

[ganeemead]

I watched one of Duran's first fights to be televised in the states and Howard Cossell and Jerry Quarry were announcing and Quarry was a sort of a major student of the fight game. Howard asked him something like "Jerry, obviously what we're seeing here is special but how special exactly?" and I'll never forget Jerry's answer.

He said that you could almost always look at a fighter's face and tell what he did for a living and that it was very rare but every once in a while you'd get a sort of a dance master like Ray Robinson, Willie Pep, or Ali who boxed for a living and never got hit much and it didn't show on their faces, but that Duran was even rarer than that. He said that Duran was the rarest bird in the entire fight game, basically a guy who moved forward and threw heavy punches and STILL never got hit with anything solid and he said that you didn't even need the fingers of one hand to count all of those that there had ever been.