Big Daddy and I are ringside for the epic Jonathan Lecat Dorian Price double knockout at the Pattaya Max Muay Thai stadium when the unfathomable happens.

Both of us being American, we favor the American fighter, Dorian Price over the Frenchman.  My pal, Big Daddy, who had once been a professional wrestler on international t.v.  wasn’t missing a moment of this unforgettable classic.  Whereas I was missing just about everything. I was too overwhelmed with shooting the video with my Nikon D750  trying to get everything just right.  I had the perfect lens for this event.

The Jonathan Lecat Dorian Price double knockout makes international headlines

This fight, this stadium, this one of a kind epic, is big stuff.  It just made U.S. Today.  And to think that I only have to drive 20 minutes on my motorcycle to cover these great fights.  Ironically, I just bought a new lens for my Nikon D750, a Nikon 2.8 24-70 mm that costs as much as my latest motorcycle.  The pictures this lens and camera can get are unworldly.  They are that good.  And the primary reason for getting it was to get an edge covering these fights.   Two weeks later, a one in a million chance occurs–the Jonathan Lecat Dorian Price double knockout

I was so involved with my camera work that I didn’t even know that Lecat was winning until the Dorian Price double knockout occurred.

Shooting video, especially in low light, is extremely challenging.  For days on end I’ve been practicing, and I have yet to get the results I should be getting.  But tonight I think I hit the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  But I still never got to see the fight until I started editing my video.  I was that preoccupied.  As far as I had been concerned I had videoed the two fighters tripping each other up.  Then both had gone down together in a heap with neither fighter taking a major punch.

I take picture taking and doing video that seriously.  And since Dorian Price ended up winning I had thought him to be the dominant fighter.  Only later while editing my video, did I realize that Jonathon Lecat had been beating the hell out of Dorian when the once in a million double knockdown occurred.  A hundred years from now, this fight will be forever immortalized as the Jonathan Lecat Dorian Price double knockout.

I had seen the two fighters go down.  About 30 seconds later, the American was able to rise to his feet while the Frenchman remained comatose, dead to the world. “In all my years following wrestling and boxing I’ve never seen this before,” Big Daddy, screamed at me.  “I have never ever seen a double knockdown.”

Big Daddy was an international televised professional wrestler

Well, Big Daddy might have been one of the Assassins appearing on television as a professional wrestler, but I had always been a boxer. And I didn’t have the slightest idea of what Big Daddy meant by a double knockout. The concept was impossible for me to grasp. The whole idea of Muhammed Ali and George Foreman knocking each other out in a single second or two was unimaginable.  But here it was, the Jonathan Lecat Dorian Price double knockout preserved for eternity in my  video.

While I was a wanna be college boxing idol

And although I never fought professionally, I had been in more fights than I could count while growing up. Although I had been in several street fights as an adult, I wasn’t really into street fights. But I sure loved putting the gloves on to box strictly for fun. Boxing was my sport.  Always had been and always will.  In my fifties I kept a platform bag setup and heavy bag in my private gym that I had created from a one car garage.  In college I was the best boxer in my dormitory which selected me to fight the best boxer from another dormitory. That wasn’t much of a fight. The gloves were huge and well padded so neither of us were very successful at getting through the other boxer’s guard.  But it wasn’t long after that that I had a very short lived time of glory.

Jack Corbett, promising university Middleweight makes the front page of the Chicago Tribune

I was in the dormitory study room, when a couple of my dorm mates brought in a copy of the Chicago tribune. There I was on the front sports page of the Chicago Tribune. The newspaper had devoted an entire paragraph about me, extolling me as an exciting middleweight boxer from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.  “This would be one of the most exciting Golden Gloves tournaments in Chicago’s History”,  the Tribune had printed. And it was because of exciting young boxers like me, a college boy, who’d soon be fighting in a sport that was devoid of College men.

But it was all a big joke–on me

I was foolish enough to go along with it all.  Most of the guys in my dorm got very excited about one of their own fighting for the glory of Lawrence University in the Chicago Golden Gloves. Suddenly there was a lot of talk about hiring a tour bus to take everyone down to Chicago to watch me tantalize the Chicago crowds with my blazing speed.   It turned out that one of the Freshmen in my class, Scott Lewis, had gotten an application for the Golden Gloves and had signed me up as a joke.

I would have done it. And my classmates were just crazy enough to get up enough money for a tour bus. Then one of the Lawrence wrestlers got a hold of me in the gym while I was suiting up for a Cross Country team practice run.

Jerry Nightingale star Lawrence University wrestler saves me from myself

I still remember exactly how he  looked at me and his exact position as he explained the facts of life.  Jerry Nightingale was a black guy from Chicago.   He was a welterweight, weighing 145 pounds or so, which was about 15 pounds less than me.  Jerry was extremely quick and agile.  Which is why he had  won most of his matches.  Not only was Jerry a very good wrestler, he was also the epitome of cool.

They are going to kill you in Chicago if you compete in the Golden Gloves

“You go down to Chicago and they are going to kill you,” Jerry warned.

“Why do you think that?” I asked. “I’m fast.  And I’ve got an excellent punch. I think I have a  good chance of winning the first round or two in the elimination.”

“These guys in the Golden Gloves are from the ghetto. They’re poor. Most of them are uneducated. The only way out for many of them is fighting.  They will really hurt you if you go in the ring with them,”

Jerry Nightingale becomes my Guardian Angel

I sure as hell respected Jerry Nightingale.  He was a fine athlete.  He had a good head on his shoulders and he was a good guy.  Although I really enjoyed boxing, and was faster than nearly everyone else, the prospect of fighting even faster guys who would relish cutting my face to ribbons  wasn’t appealing. I immediately banished the thought of tour buses and of being the school idol out of my game plan.

For me, boxing is still the king of all sports

Now I’m an old guy.  But I’m still running 12 kilometers in the sweltering heat along Pattaya Beach. I can do it, but I’m exhausted by the time I finish.

But God, I sure love boxing. Even if I’m not doing it anymore.  I’m an avid fan of top boxers like Andre Ward, Sergei Kovalev, and Gennadi Golotkin. I can hardly wait for the Andre Ward Kovalev rematch. I’ve got a few Russian friends now, not to mention a few other Russians I don’t know who I run into at the Centara Hotel physical fitness center. Russians take exercise seriously. Or at least a sizable percentage of them do. That’s why the Soviet Union usually won more gold medals than the U.S. did in the Olympic.

There was more to it than those Communists boarding their best athletes like cattle in modern gulag training camps where they fed them steroids every day. Russians are tough and they pride themselves on their athletic ability. I think they always were this way.  Which is one of the reasons they could defeat the U.S. in the Olympics during the bad old days of the U.S.S.R.   There were also more Soviets than Americans to choose from to field all those Olympic teams. Since the breakup of the U.S.S.R. Russia now has a population of only 140 million compared to 325 million Americans. But I do like having the Russians around because they take fitness as seriously as I do.

Big Daddy and I are still fighters in our hearts

So here we are, Big Daddy and I,  among all our friends who really enjoy fighting. We are at the right spot  to experience first hand that one in a million fight when both boxers go down for the count in this Jonathan Lecat Dorian Price double knockout classic for the ages.  We have already seen another top notch fight between the Tunisian Fadi Khaled and Nueamek Sitjaymeaw of Thailand.

Living here in Thailand I get to experience first hand what the Fight Channel  broadcasts on international television.  My condo’s only 20 minutes from the new Pattaya Max stadium.  It is no secret that many Muay Thai top events come out of Bangkok.  But I’ve just learned that the Pattaya Max Muay Thai stadium is handling just as many top ranked fights. This stadium has a seating capacity of nearly 3000. The men  in front of us are doing the international English television broadcasts that are seen worldwide.

But back to the Jonathan Lecat Dorian Price double knockout. Dorian Price won the fight.  Barely.  But when they meet again, I’m betting on the Frenchman.  It promises to be a great fight.  But it’s going to take years for anything to measure up to this Jonathan Lechat Dorian Price double knockout classic.