Scaramanga
My favourite Bond movie is The Man With The Golden Gun. It’s clearly not the best one but Christopher Lee’s portrayal of elite assassin Scaramanga fascinated me as a child. Much of the Bond mythos derives from creating archetypes of the super spy and the super villians he battles. These men distill the essence of male development (mostly the warrior energy of the Jungian male archetype) as channelled through unrealistic life specialisms. I don’t believe it’s about the impossible dreams of perfection or control over your life, some kind of inadequacy and fear in a child’s real life that is overcompensated through living vicariously through fictional ideals. Bond is a flawed man, especially in the books (and later in Daniel Craig’s portrayal in Casino Royale).
“Men want to be him. Women want to be with him”
This famous description of Bond does not arise from his perfection but rather from his pure channeling of warrior energy into something larger than life. Place such a compelling character into a globetrotting, dangerous life, surround him with beautiful women and you have cracking good stories.
But of course every hero needs villians to fight. The greater the villian he overcomes, the greater his heroism. Scaramanga was my favourite because he was Bond’s equal in living the lifestyle. He was no boardroom-dwelling mastermind (like Ernst Blofeld) nor a calculating automaton (the Soviet assassins) nor a powerhungry fantasist (Hugo Drax). Scaramanga lived one hell of a life…. he just also enjoyed killing people and found a way to make it support an extravagant lifestyle.
Consider for a moment a typical day in his life. He wakes up in a wide expansive bedroom with silk sheets and the soft sounds of the Thai sea outside. Dressing in an exquisite lounge suit he walks over to his windows and gazes out across his private island. A midget butler brings his breakfast and asks what sir would like to do. Perhaps a powerboat ride to the city to meet his contact? Take on a job, follow his prey to a horseracing meeting and quietly assassinate him. Then a look around the night market, dinner with a beautiful woman in a quiet restaurant atop a hundred-storey skyscraper, then home in time for Eastenders.
Except for the occasional deadly tussle with a superspy, I can see the appeal.
Scaramanga carried himself with class. His Golden Gun is precision engineering and thoughtful design of a class above even a fine Lange & Sohne watch. Rationalised into several parts, each of which can be carried as an accessory congruent with his lifestyle (pen, cigarette case, lighter).
Consider his interior decorating. A man’s home is both his castle and his playground. I have a boxing gym, a cinema room, a study, and a snooker lounge in my house. These are the things that interest me on days I wish to stay home. Scaramanga’s interests differ to mine so he has a shooting range. Nice.
While in Thailand, Scaramanga’s country of residence, I tried to find a cigar lighter of a similar style to his. The other pieces would be difficult to obtain and incongruent for a non-assassin such as myself, but a lighter is a necessary accoutrement for a man of class. My search came up empty. Finally, in a small cigar specialist shop in Belgrade I found what I was looking for. Gold restrained look, solid weight, clean sharp snap when it opens and closes. Bliss.
I’ve realised too why I like the Hitman series of videogames. They are essentially puzzle games played by human characters rather than tetris blocks. The highest score in Hitman comes from killing your target and only your target, without any security becoming suspicious of you. In the fourth game you can actually construe your murders to look like accidents so the world doesn’t even know an assassin exists. The contracts take place in mountaintop party lodges, Mardi Gras carnivals, English stately homes….. yes, this game is a Scaramanga simulator.
The Japanese super-assassin
The new game comes out this year. I expect I shan’t go out for a while.
Mario Bava and the golden era of Italian low-budget cinema
As a teenager I went through a phase of collecting horror / exploitation movies. This was the pre-DVD pre-internet era so I was literally tape trading VHS tapes with fellow collectors around Europe. I had a strong preference for Italian and Spanish movies, with the odd bit of Jean Rollin thrown in (best softcore lesbian vampire movies of the 1970s – an acquired taste).
Black Sunday
Like every other teenage boy with a taste for the forbidden I started out by collecting the “video nasties” made famous by the 1984 Director of Public Prosecutions list. Back then the newspapers had led a moral panic claiming horror movies on the new unregulated video format were driving kids to violence and murder. It’s a clear case of the media amplification spiral and several books document this particular shameful exercise of government meddling in the liberties of free-born Englishmen. So I was collecting low-budget grot such as Anthropophagus the Beast, Gestapos Last Orgy, Driller Killer and so on. Very quickly I realised that the Italian entrants on the list were frequently good movies from genuinely talented directors such as Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.
It was from Bay of Blood that I stumbled onto the greatest of all low-budget genre directors – Mario Bava.
“Movies,” Bava once explained, “are a magician’s forge, they allow you to build a story with your hands… at least, that’s what it means to me. What attracts me in movies is to be presented with a problem and be able to solve it. Nothing else; just to create an illusion, and effect, with almost nothing”
His impact on the movie industry includes:
- Directing the first Italian horror movie The Devil’s Commandment when contracted director Riccardo Freda walked out.
- Shooting the first Peplum movie Hercules.
- Invented the Giallo genre with The Girl Who Knew Too Much
- Invented the Slasher genre with Bay of Blood. There’s one twenty minute section near the beginning when a group of teenagers show up at a lakeside camp which was in microcosm the entire genre when later ripped-off by Friday the 13th.
Bava was legendary among producers for his ability to wrap up competent movies on time and under budget but more impressive to me is his versatility across genres. He made gothic horrors, sword and sandal, westerns, sex comedies, noir slashers and psychological thrillers. All beautifully shot with oodles of lavish atmosphere. My personal favourites are his brooding whodunnit set with a house of high fashion Blood and Black Lace, and then the movie that inspired Ridley Scott’s Alien – the 1964 sci-fi Planet of the Vampires. Sam Ishii-Gonzales writes:
“A near abstraction on colour and movement, Blood and Black Lace is Bava’s cinema distilled to its cruel essence. This film develops with complete abandon what Bava more tentatively explored in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (La ragazza che sapeva troppo, 1962) and “The Telephone” episode of Black Sabbath. From the opening image (an unhinged sign for Christiana’s Haute Couture banging in the wind) to the last (a telephone receiver off the hook swinging like a pendulum, back and forth) we have a remorseless, inexorable movement, a dissipative force, that levels everything in its path. This movement becomes, in the case of Nicole’s murder in the antique shop, a pulsation of light, by which one means not only the neon sign which flickers off-on, off-on as the woman meets her demise with a medieval iron hook (a variation on the death mask of Black Sunday; later, Mary’s demise by way of a red-hot furnace will duplicate the searing of Asa’s flesh), but Bava’s use of primary colours which throb with an intensity all their own. That Bava’s source of inspiration was a lurid type of pulp magazine itself identified by a specific colour, giallo (yellow, the colour of terror, of fearfulness), couldn’t be more appropriate.”
Watching B&BL is like stepping into a timewarp of a Europe that never really existed where the women are beautiful, forests dark and rainswept, and offices are in gothic country homes dripping in oversaturated colour. I imagine Count Cervantes dating one of these young models.
The Italian movie industry of the 1960s-70s is a treasure trove of unusual boundary-pushing cinematic oddities. A bustling profilific era, every time a major western movie proved to be a hit then suddenly dozens of production companies would churn out hundreds of clone movies within a few years. So for example when Kurosawa made Yojimbo, Sergio Leone remade it in the American West. That movie struck gold and kicked off the whole spaghetti western cycle (which in ironic symmetry was then emulated by the Japanese chanbara movies of which Yojimbo was an example). Other examples:
- A Man Called Horse inspired the cannibal cycle
- The Night Porter inspired the Nazi love camp cycle
- Emmanuelle inspired the softcore love cycle
- Dawn of the Dead inspired the zombie cycle
- Caligula inspired the roman decadence cycle
Truly bizarre. In this era of DVD and torrents you can easily lay your hands on obscure oddities that back in my tape-trading days often took years just to track down a grainy 5th-generation copy. Transport yourself back through time. Get some friends together, put a crate of beers on the table, and have a real grindhouse night. Here’s some sample triple bills:
US theatrical posters for Bay of Blood, Deep Red, Flavia the Heretic
1. Italian bloodiness: Bay of Blood (Mario Bava) / Deep Red (Dario Argento) / Flavia the Heretic (Gianfranco Mingozzi
2. Italian freaky atmospherics: Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (Lucio Fulci) / The Great Silence (Sergio Corbucci) / Caligula the Untold Story (Joe D’amato)
3. Spanish timewarp: Tombs of the Blind Dead (Amando De Ossorio) / Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (Jorge Grau) / Justine: Marquis de Sade (Jess Franco)
The problem of economic calculation
An intellectual hero of mine is the godfather of the Austrian school of economics, Ludwig Von Mises. It’s a disservice to the range and power of his thought to pigeonhole him thus but it’ll serve current purposes. In 1921 he published the weighty Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis and it sent shockwaves through the intelligentsia. For decades socialism had enjoyed a charmed existence in polite circles remnants of which persist to this day. How many times have you heard someone of reasonable education and intelligence utter bland statements such as:
- Socialism is such a good idea in theory but unfortunately it’s never been properly tried.
- Socialism would make society so much fairer and better but there’s too many barriers to it ever actually happening.
Since the late 18th century socialism has enjoyed an Obama-eque free pass because of it’s stated (and unproven) utopianism. Proponents of socialism are taken at face value when they profess their noble ideals whereas in contrast proponents of capitalism are immediately assumed to be greedy, selfish and to be treated with suspicion. This is despite the historical record where every single socialist country was a disastrous shithole compared to it’s capitalist equivalents.
a towering intellect
Mises’ book shattered these illusions and proved unequivocally (and with arguments that haven’t been effectively answered even to this day) that socialism is not only untenable and assured final collapse, but that it necessarily creates a hell on earth that no amount of good intentions can stop. Across 1000+ pages he demolishes the ideology through detailed predictions of what society it leads to….. and this writing only 4 years after the Bolshevik revolution – before Stalin, before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Unlike Nostradamus, Mises made detailed predictions and 80 years of history proved him right.
So if you want to know not just why socialism is inherently evil but also why it can’t work and why despite this people still take it seriously, I recommend you check out his book.I’ll briefly summarise each of the three segments here.
Socialism is evil
Capitalist societies are built upon individual freedom expressed through non-coercive market transactions. Contracts are only entered into if both sides agree to the terms and thus you can’t force any customer to buy your product nor can the customer force the business to provide them a service. In this fundamental manner capitalism supports the individual right of self-determination.
Socialist societies are built upon collective responsiblity expressed through coercive central planning. Contracts are decided by a government bureau and then dictats issued forcing people to comply under threat of negative sanctions. In this fundamental manner socialism suppresses the individual at the expense of the collective.
the workers' paradise
It’s pretty easy to see why this leads to gulags, extermination camps and purges. Imagine yourself for a moment heading the Bureau of Economic Planning and the new Five Year Plan has just been signed off by the Politburo. It is now your job to cascade the Plan downwards by issuing all the orders and regulations to accomplish it. Say, for example, the plan requires X million tonnes of coal to fire the furnaces that produce the traintracks, rolling stock, cars, hammers, cutlery etc. The Plan calculated 10,000 coal miners are needed to extract this coal but currently only 9,000 exist. You need to find 1,000 extra coal miners.
Under capitalism this problem is easily solved. Mining companies calculate the labour value of miners based on the market price for coal produced less various costs. Potential miners evaluate the offered salary and those most interested will apply for the job. If there is still a shortfall of miners and thus coal, the price of the latter increases as rival customers bidding raises demand. Mining companies find it more profitable to offer higher wages (and thus bring in more staff) than to forgo the extra sales. The vacancies are filled.
Socialism has only one solution, after cajoling has failed. Point a gun at the recalcitrant workers and force them to become miners. The Plan doesn’t have dynamic self-correcting features and it is so laborious to construct that the whole thing won’t be torn up just because a few hundred labourers would rather be bricklayers or train drivers than miners. Follow the history of socialist countries and observe how quickly they default to compulsion and labour camps. It’s built into the system.
Socialism will always collapse
Mises showed that socialism cannot ever solve the problem of economic calculation. The problem, simply stated, is this: How do you calculate how to deploy the resources (labour, materials, machinery) of a society in order to produce the goods and services that best meet the needs of the population? For example, English people need tea. How does a society figure out how many cups of tea Englishmen need in 2012? Assuming this can be done, how many kettles will be needed? Is the metal / plastic combination used to make these kettles actually better used elsewhere such as in cutlery, brake discs, watch cases, screws etc?
Under capitalism no-one makes this calculation and yet still Paris gets fed the English don’t take to streets in Tea Riots. The highly devolved market system matches capital and resources to those entrepreneurs who accurately predict and efficiently serve the wants and needs of the population. If you haven’t done so already, take a moment to consider what is abundant and what is scarce in your country. The list may look like this:
- Abundant: cheeseburgers, Budweiser, iPhones, wristwatches, leather shoes, curtains, chairs, roses, chocolate, Xbox games, books
- Scarce: healthcare, education
Those goods and services that are supplied by the market are plentiful, cheap, and ever-improving (consider the functionality of an iPhone 4 compared to the phones of 1990). Those supplied by government are scarce, intermittent, low quality, expensive, rationed. If the government took over management of the Sahara desert there’d be a shortage of sand within weeks.
The biggest reason is that without markets you can’t solve the problem of economic calculation. Markets provide prices information that signal consumer demand and incentivise businesses to increase/decrease production and to innovate in new directions. This information is an emergent propert of millions of micro-transactions conducted by self-interested actors with no concern for the macro picture. Socialism has to perform it’s calculation based on top-down social surveys, almost like a sociologist. This causes many problems.
- Do you know how many pizzas you will eat next year? I certainly don’t. It’s not even theoretically possible to know because often the decision to order a pizza is made five minutes before the order is placed. You were planning to catch a live show at the blues bar in Soho with some friends but the weather turned to heavy rain so you all stay home. Rather than waste the evening you assemble in the cinema room and watch The Godfather. Stomachs begin to rumble and the women have the night off. So you confer and order pizza. This decision was unknowable more than a couple of hours in advance at most. The world is full of consumption decisions made upon a whim of circumstance that are unknowable even to the decision makers themselves. How can a central planning agency collate such information with sufficient accuracy and foresight to formulate a plan? It can’t. This is an epistemological problem that cannot be solved with supercomputers.
- Anyone who’s ever trained in social research (I have) knows that finding out what people think is far more difficult than simply asking them. Imagine taking out your clipboard and approaching twenty strangers with the question “How often do you masturbate?” What’s the bet you get the answers they want you to hear (if any answer is forthcoming at all) rather than the truth? Under socialism interviewees are quite aware that their answers could just as easily disappear into an unmarked draw as to critically redirect production.
The end result of these problems (Mises gives many more) is that central planning is horribly inefficient. Capital is destroyed, resources simulatneously squandered or untapped, and people’s needs unmet. This is why Soviet states had both breadlines around the block and empty stores with dreary unwanted appliances. You can still see this if you visit Cuba.
Socialism can never be eradicated
Karl Marx is indirectly responsible for more misery and squalor than any other historical figure and it all stems from a neat sleight of hand he played in the mid-nineteenth century. Essentially, Marx rebranded socialism from witless utopianism (in which form it had already been discarded twenty years earlier) to pseudo-science. In his brilliant introduction, Mises credits Marx with three rebranding successes that transformed socialism from a stupid failed idea into a stupid successful meme. Importantly, none of Marx’s arguments withstand a moment’s scrutiny but because they appeal to emotions (and particularly the human hunger for meaning) they stuck.
1. Socialism is inevitable due to dialectical materialism. Marx took the laughable “logic” of his mentor Hegel’s dialectic in which every social structure (the thesis) contains seeds of it’s own destruction (the antithesis) which will necessarily be resolved by the emergence of a radically new structure (the synthesis). Hegel used this to show the advance of the human Spirit throughout history and is hopelessly teleological. If you don’t believe me, just read him. It’s nonsensical. Marx tapped into this intellectual heritage to add a sheen of authority to his own rewriting of history in order to argue that capitalism (thesis) creates is own internal contradictions that lead to revolution (antithesis) and it’s final resolution in communism (synthesis). World communism represents a final solution to the dialectic and thus the end of history. People actually bought that. It gave great confidence to motivate socialist agitators that they were pre-ordained with victory while similarly undermining the confidence of those opponents credulous enough to believe it.
2. Socialist institutions cannot be analysed ahead of time. The utopian socialists had been savaged by political philosophers in the early 1800s as their fantasy worlds were shown to be untenable. Marx countered with the idea of infrastructure/superstructure. Put simply, the economic organisation of a society (feudal/capitalist/socialist etc) determines all associated laws, culture, knowledge, arts. People are so constrained by the ways of thinking in any given epoch that they cannot perceive alternatives. The very knowledge that we take as truth are just culturally-conditioned and specific to the form of economic organisation. Again this is ridiculous – as if the engineering knowledge that allowed aquaducts to be built in feudal Roman times suddenly became inaccurate with the shift to capitalism. After all, the aquaducts remained standing! What Marx achieved was to deny the legitimacy of any inquiry into how a socialist society would operate. You can’t know until you get there!
useful idiots
3. Socialism will correct the injustices of an epoch. People don’t like to be taken for suckers and thus if you can convince them they are being played, they’ll believe alot of rubbish (feminism succeeded with women this way). The emotional motivation for socialism is greedy, envy and revenge fantasies against those who occupy a higher social station than the socialist. Marx was able to provide a thin veneer of righteousness to socialism not by waxing lyrical about the win-win paradise of the utopian socialist but rather by justifying the indignation of the vast sea of people who are unhappy with their lot in life. His labour theory of value (which I’ll demolish in a later post) concluded that the poor are poor precisely because the rich exploit them. The riches they have are stolen and illegitimate and thus the workers have every right to take them by force. This sweetens the ugly motivation of revenge behind a pious mask of justice.
I strongly recommend Mises’ work. I’ve merely scratched the surface with this post.
A man must fight
Gene Tunney, arguably the best heavyweight champion in history and himself a renaissance man, titled his autobiography “A Man Must Fight”. Boxing fans know him principally for his dethroning of the beloved Jack Dempsey by shutout decision and then the allegedly controversial “long count” rematch. He also shares with Rocky Marciano and Lennox Lewis the distinction of being the only heavyweight champs to retire having beaten every man he faced. Impressive.
Moments before a fight of legendary savagery
I hold an affection for Tunney because not only was he a well-rounded, cerebal man as comfortable in the social circles of the heiress he married as he was in the prize ring, but he was also a dedicated humble man with incredible courage and determination as exemplified by his first bout with my all-time favourite fighter Harry Greb. Witness his own description from his book:
In the first exchange of the fight, I sustained a double fracture of the nose which bled continually until the finish. Toward the end of the first round, my left eyebrow was laid open four inches… In the third round another cut over the right eye left me looking through a red film. For the better part of twelve rounds, I saw this red phantom-like form dancing before me.
It is impossible to describe the bloodiness of this fight. My seconds were unable to stop either the bleeding from the cut over my left eye, which involved a severed artery, or the bleeding consequent to the nose fractures…..
… The bell rang for the thirteenth round; the seconds pushed me from my chair. I actually saw two red opponents. How I ever survived the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth rounds is still a mystery to me. At any rate, the only consciousness I had was to keep trying. I knew if I ever relaxed, I should either collapse or the referee would stop the brutality. After the gong sounded, ending the fifteenth round, I shook hands with Greb and mumbled through my smashed and swollen lips, “Well, Harry, you were the better man, to-night!” and I meant that literally. Harry missed the subtlety of the remark, for he said, “Won the championship,” and was dragged from me by one of his seconds, who placed a kiss on his unmarked countenance.
A man must fight. There are rituals in all societies marking a boy’s ascent to manhood. The English rural artistocrats would blood their sons on hunting day, for example. Fighting is integral to a fully actualised man’s demeanor. Like saying, “he’s a lover not a fighter. But he’s also a fighter so don’t get any ideas.” You can see the difference in body language and presence between a man who has fought and acquitted himself to his own satisfaction and the lilly-livered pussy who still fears physical confrontation. “How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?” ask’s Fight Club’s Tyler Durden. This doesn’t count as a fight…..
My first fight came in Japan in an amateur kickboxing show. I’d signed up on a whim, having read Kurt Angle‘s biography while on holiday in Thailand and then returned to Tokyo with a drive to put myself into the ring and see what I’m made of. Before then I’d been practicing a sophisticated ego-driven avoidance by training martial arts but finding excuses not to fight. So I sign up and train hard for six weeks with roadwork, good diet, and frequent sparring. By the final week my body is at it’s lifetime peak of fitness. I wake every morning feeling like I’ve won the genetic lottery. I’m full of pep and spring for whatever the day throws at me. It’s a feeling of almost indescribable physical bliss. But I’m ill-prepared for the effects of adrenalin.
A week before the fight a tiny kernal of stress balls itself up in the pit of my stomach and begins growing relentlessly. I get increasingly distracted from my daily tasks as my mind wanders to my opponent and fight night. I struggle to get good sleep and my appetite wanes. The closest analogy I can find is the week before an important exam. I understand now why trainers say most fights are lost in the dressing room. It’s a struggle to master the adrenalin and the emotions it brings. But as fight day arrives I feel good.
The fight itself is a blur. I forget all my higher skills, forced to get by on muscle memory and determination. I take far more punches than in the gym and I can hear my girlfriend shouting “Don’t hit my boyfriend!” But I perserve until the fight finishes with my chasing my opponent around the ring because I hit much harder than he. He gets a well-earned decision based on his good start. We shake hands and as my seconds remove my gloves my girl can’t keep her hands off me. The power of testosterone! I retire to the best shower of my life and for a week afterwards I’m walking on air. I’m blooded. I know more about myself. In the early-going I was battered from pillar-to-post and never gave up.
artist's impression
So as I write I’m sitting in my Thai apartment the morning after watching a gym-mate headline a small hall muay thai show. He’s a 45-yr old former fighter (not high level, just avid martial artist) who wanted one last chance to experience the thrill of the ring. In truth it was a poor fight. He’s shot. I’d only met him that night, as it was my first day in Thailand, but simply watching him perform the pre-fight Wai Kru ritual I knew he was done. His body was too stiff, too ringworn, I knew he wouldn’t even be able to turn his kicks over at the hip. It was exciting while it lasted but eventually he retired on his stool at the end of the fourth with a broken rib and right hand.
Disappointed? You wouldn’t know to look at him. He’d been in the ring with the buzz of adrenalin, the din of a cheering crowd, and the look of satisfaction of having been hit hard but give it back as best as he could. Needless to say the women mobbed him.
Igor Vovchanchyn: King of bare-knuckle fighting
There was a time when Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) was called No Holds Barred (NHB) and it really was. No gloves, no time limits, no referee standups, no Affliction t-shirts. This was before MMA become dominated by West Coast cookie-cutter douchebags with questionable facial hair, tribal tattoos and sloppy kickboxing. Back in the old NHB days (circa 1993-1998) promotions held one-night 8-man tournaments stacked with genuinely interesting fighters with contrasting styles.
IVC in Brazil
The sport was more intriguing in it’s infancy. It was spectacle but it was also psychologically different to it’s modern sanitised incarnation. Murillo Bustamante, himself a great bare-knucle fighter, put it best in an interview with the old Full Contact Fighter newspaper:
Imagine two similar scenarios, that differ in only one detail. A guy flies you by helicopter 100 miles into the desert and leaves you next to a big rock. The sun is high in the sky. He gets back into the helicopter and says “I’ll be back for you tomorrow.” Now imagine the same scenario but his parting words are simply “good luck.” It’s a massive difference. In the first case you hunker down till the time expires. In the latter case you have to start walking.
That’s what time limits and busybody athletic commissions did to ruin NHB. Just compare the vibe and rawness of these two different fights. Don’t get me wrong, the modern fighters are highly skilled athletes and under the modern rule set they’d beat the old timers. But feel the difference between a fight and a sport. NHB is nature red in tooth and claw.
The annals of NHB greatness are stacked with the names of great men: Jose Pele Landi Jons, Mikhail Avetsyan, Dan Henderson, Vanderlei Silva, Kareem Barkalev, Amar Suloev…. but one name stands above all others. The man who won the most 8-man tournaments in history, who put together an unprecedented undefeated streak (his wiki is incomplete), the first kickboxer to regularly beat BJJ players and wrestlers, a short tubby light-heavyweight who consistently fought and beat the best heavyweights on the planet. Gentlemen, I present Igor Vovchanchyn. The greatest bareknuckle fighter who ever lived.
My favourite Igor moments:
- He fights a one-night tournament in Israel (Absolute Fighting Championship 3) with a ten minute win over, then comes back for a titantic struggle to edge past Mihkail Avetsyan (himself a great fighter), and with only ten minutes break takes on a fresh Nick Nutter. He’s beaten on for half an hour until his face runs out of blood to bleed from and then he starts headbutting Nutter from the bottom until he breaks his nose and Nutter taps out from the top.
- In the rematch in Recife, Brazil he meets Nutter in the final of the 8-man tournment. Nutter dives for a double-leg and takes a full-on knee to the face. The fight is over in 10 seconds.
- Mark Kerr is the next big thing in American NHB. He’s won two UFC tournaments, an 8-man tournament in Brazil, and is looking unstoppable. He’s a herculean figure. Igor meets him in Japan for Pride in 1999. Kerr takes him down, dominates position but just cannot hurt the man. Igor grinds him down with rabbit punches from the bottom, kicks himself free, and finishes the fight with knees to the head. Due a recent rule change the fight is declared a no-contest (though everyone knew who got beat up and who did the beating). In a rematch a year later Kerr fights very scared and lays’n’prays for the distance to hand Igor an official decision win.
I love his attitude, his gameness, his heart, his will to win. And that sneaky way of teasing the left hand to draw opponents onto his money right hand. Igor, we salute you!
countcervantes 
