Last night the latest film in ESPN's 30 for 30 series featured a documentary about the Larry Holmes Muhammad Ali title fight entitled Muhammad and Larry.

The film began by erasing any doubt of what the fight was: a beating, an abomination, a tragedy.

Ali never stood a chance against Holmes, end of story. 

How did this fight come to be? Money, pure and simple greed. Ali was offered eight million dollars to fight Holmes, a purse that size will make any person climb into the ring despite the risk. 

At 38 years old Ali was already beginning to show signs of neurological degradation. The film shows that in the lead up to the fight Muhammad struggled with neurological tests at the Mayo Clinic, where he couldn't touch his nose with his finger and failed short term memory or recall tests. Signs of Ali's deteriorating mental capacity were evident in the long stretches of footage from Muhammad's training camp. Ali's speech was slow, he mumbled and appeared sleepy during interviews. On top of that Ali had clearly lost a step as his sparring partners regularly got the better of him. In one particularly shocking sequence Muhammad Ali struggled with a speed bag. Clearly his coordination was going if not in its last throes. 

It didn't help that before the fight a doctor "diagnosed" Ali with a thyroid condition and prescribed him thyroid hormones, which Ali promptly overused causing his already damaged kidneys to work in overdrive in addition to tiring his muscles out. One account had Ali unable to run over a mile another said that he couldn't walk up the stairs to get into the ring for a four round sparring session. 

Simply put the fight never should have taken place and Ali never should have been given a license by Nevada State Athletic Commission, who granted Ali a license based upon the Mayo Clinic's report. 

Why should this matter to MMA fans?

The film raises the great fear of every fighter; that they will be unable to walk away from the ring (or cage) and as a result will put their long term health at risk. 

This is why fighters need medical tests in order to be licensed by state athletic commissions. In the case of the Ali-Holmes fight the commission fundamentally failed to fulfill their lawful duty.

At this moment in MMA there is a generation of career fighters who are in their late thirties or early forties and are on the precipice of retirement. Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture and Mark Coleman are all older than Ali was at the time of the Holmes fight. Couture fights later this year, Coleman will fight in 2010 and Chuck Liddell is thinking of fighting again. While MMA is a different animal compared to boxing, Muhammad and Larry is an excellent reminder of the specter of long-term health damage for aging fighters. 

Another issue that is raised is the power of the referee to stop a fight and how tremendously important it is for a referee to exercise that power.

In MMA referees are required to stop a fight when a fighter is no longer intelligently defending themselves. Sometimes this requirement causes premature stoppages but in the case of the Holmes-Ali fight a referee stoppage was warranted. Muhammad landed less than ten punches in the eleven round fight and Larry Holmes repeatedly look to the referee to stop the fight. The fight finally ended when Ali's manager passed word to his corner to stop the fight. In the aftermath Larry was crying. He had just beaten to a pulp his old sparring partner and friend who had barely put up a fight.

Somehow Muhammad Ali fought again. Three years after his last fight he was diagnosed with Parkinson's Syndrome.

I want to end this by saying Larry Holmes has been criminally forgotten for his reign as heavyweight champion. A disservice to a great athlete and unfortunately WKR has been complicit in this by failing to mention Holmes until the end. Why did we do this? It is because the themes that presented themselves in this documentary that affect MMA do not involve Holmes and his masterful reign as a heavyweight boxer.

P.S. Our old friend Bill Gallo was at the writers round table.