President Bush finally found his way back into the headlines in the past few days, albeit due to some strange circumstances. If you haven’t heard about it or seen the video by now, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at President Bush during a press conference on Monday in Baghdad, which is evidently quite an insult over there. ↵
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↵The real news for this fight fan, however, is not that the shoes were thrown, but the unbelievably adroit manner in which they were dodged. Check out the video below, complete with slo-mo replay, and see why I have now become convinced that, terrible President though he may have been (or, ah ... be), W. looks like a man you would not want to throw down with.↵
W. Is the Wrong President to Fight
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↵When you’re learning to box, one of the hardest things to do, and something that really separates the gangstas and the wankstas in the ring, is slipping a punch properly. The natural instinct when someone throws something at you -- a punch, a shoe -- is to pull back, and it’s an instinct so powerfully embedded in our DNA that it takes years to unlearn. If you don’t unlearn it, though, you’re pretty much screwed in a fight, because pulling straight back from punches is only going to get you punched more often and more cleanly, while granting all the momentum in the ring to your opponent.↵
↵↵To fight effectively, you need to learn how to move into a straight punch, side to side, slipping downwards and ever so slightly forward to one side or the other just enough to let the shot whiz past your ear, and still leaving yourself in a perfectly balanced position and with enough forward momentum to counter. Though every fighter must learn this technique to some extent (you’d never survive much more than a minute in any ring without some rudimentary ability to slip punches), the true masters of the art -- Winky Wright, say -- are marvels to watch, with eyes so sharp and reflexes so quick and precise that they can evade punches by what look like centimeters, moving their upper bodies just enough to not get hit, but never so much that they aren’t in perfectly poised to fire back.↵
↵↵Which brings me back to our still-President. Check out that video again. The way he slips that first shoe is like ... freakin’ textbook. Such a narrow margin of error, and did the man look fazed? Not even a little. He was up a millisecond later like, “try me again bee-atch cause you got nothing.” Actually, I’m thinking Mr. Crazyass Shoe Thrower is lucky he wasn’t within arm’s reach, cause for all his life Bush looked like he would have been more than happy to come up with a left to the ribs and follow it with an overhand right.↵
↵↵Really, Bush knows how to box? I had no idea. By my estimation, that would make him our first boxing Pres since Teddy Roosevelt. Which would be kind of cool, maybe the only fond thought I’ve ever had about W.↵
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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.
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