Comments Thread For: Photos: Golovin Punishes Rid**** Bowe, TKO in Two

[The Hammer]

[Slip Stream]

"Freakshow," the Last Stage Of a Fighter's Career - Part III

"A man by his sin may waste himself, which is to waste that which on earth is most like God. This is man's greatest tragedy and God's heaviest grief."

~A.W. Tozer~

When I look at this photo I'm left to wonder why fighters keep making the same mistakes even after they've seen the human tragedies before them. How many great fighters were riding high when they were winning only to eventually lose it all and end up fighting long after they should have retired?

I think at the core of this the fighter is ultimately to blame and his environment. A lot of these fighters come from nothing, broken homes and the rest of it. People that come from an environment like that aren't the sort of people MIT is looking for, these are people who learn to survive with a brutal skillset. So when fame and fortune fall into their laps they have an ifinitesimal understanding of how to manage it responsibly, its like winning the lottery: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/op...ning.html?_r=0

These big fighters get wrapped up in an entourage and a lifestyle they can't afford and the next thing you know the career is over and so are the parties. You still have all of the trinkets of fame but no cash flow to continue to subsidize a grand life and so it goes, all of it. The man in that photo should be sitting in a mansion somewhere slapping his women on the butt, instead he was in the ring getting his unsteady legs kicked from under him.

I don't think Bowe knew what hit him.