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Ken Shamrock vs. Royce Gracie II UFC 5: Return of the Beast
When casual UFC fans describe grappling as two dudes slow dancing on the ground, this is probably the fight they're talking about. Back in UFC 5, there were no judges. So when Ken Shamrock held Royce Gracie down in a loving embrace for the full 30 minute time limit, they had no idea what to do. Release scorpions? Buy them something from their registry? Someone finally decided to stand them back up and give them five more minutes to fight. As if I need to tell you, this almost immediately turned back into a hug and the five minute overtime slowly crept up to six minutes as the time keeper passive aggressively refused to end the damn fight. To the people that were still awake, the fight was a draw. Any student of the game will tell you that the technical subtleties of the Gracie-Shamrock chess match are difficult to describe, but luckily they're easy to illustrate:
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Ken Shamrock vs. Dan Severn II UFC 9: Motor City Madness
At UFC 9, two guys spent 30 minutes trying to get out of each other's way in a Turkish bath. We found out later that this was actually a rematch between Dan Severn and Ken Shamrock.
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Muhammad Ali vs. Antonio Inoki June 26, 1976
If Ric Flair and John Wayne combined their DNA and the result was played in a movie by Bruce Campbell, that would be the American equivalent of Antonio Inoki. He was a wrestling superstar in Japan and in 1976, he challenged Muhammad Ali to a wrestling vs. boxing shootfight. Ali's people immediately saw that the rules were ridiculous. Ali had to wear boxing gloves and Inoki would be bare-handed and be able to kick and grapp-- six million dollars!? Okay, we'll do it.
Ali flew to Japan and used Pearl Harbor and Inoki's ludicrous chin as a starting point for a long tirade of confusing trash talk. Later, when the cameras weren't rolling, he asked Inoki when they were going to do the rehearsal. It was right around here when the two men realized there had been a misunderstanding. Inoki was going to be fighting for reals.
Since it was too late to back out, Ali's people scrambled to change the already strange rules to be even stranger. There's no official record of them, but like everything in Japan they were designed for tentacles and then mistranslated. Most notably, Inoki was now only allowed to kick if one of his knees was touching the mat. Less notably, the new document contained far fewer unnecessary drawings of robot rape.
As soon as the fight started, Antonio Inoki laid himself down and threw an onslaught of insane but legal kicks at Ali. The closest Ali could come to fighting back was making rude gestures. This went on for 15 rounds. After all that time, Muhammad Ali managed to miss with 6 punches while Inoki landed 75,000 self-inflicted floor burns. It was such a waste of everyone's time and money that even the Tokyo stadium's rape robots apologized-- something they were programmed specifically never to do.
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