Tommy Morrison: Successful Boxing To MMA Crossover Fighting Style
By Robert Brizel, Head RCM Boxing Correspondent
One angle boxing fans seemed to have missed regarding Tommy ‘The Duke’ Morrison is he was more than just your typical stereotyped Rocky movie tough guy. Tommy, was, in one strong sense, the successful barroom version of Butterbean. On the way up, Tommy fought with an unequalled no-holds-barred approach: anyone, anywhere, anyplace, anytime.
Recently I noted a number of bouts of different types Morrison fought and won which are either partially boxing, or not boxing at all. Morrison was indeed the sort of boxer who could ‘do it all’ on his best day. There were many sides of ‘The Duke’: the public boxing side; the lady’s man private side; the good times; the bad times; the mature side; the immature side; and the MMA side.
Truly there is a great deal to about Morrison and his life, particularly the ‘missing decade’ between 1996 and 2007, which no boxing writer has even tried to explore in its mysterious complexity. Tommy was not ordinary. He was a fighter-in every sense-to the bitter end. Tommy tried to tell the deeper aspects of his life and put them on paper while there was still time. No reporter has yet properly explored-to any degree of true depth and dimension-Tommy’s level of self-understanding as his life entered its final phase.
The Mixed Martial Arts side is one aspect of Morrison’s persona not covered in his 52 professional bouts. After Tommy’s bout with Marcus Rhode in Japan in November 1996, Morrison disappeared off the radar. Had Morrison continued his career at that point, and not retired, he would have fought Mike Tyson in the MGM Grand Las Vegas boxing arena, and what resulted would probably have been a much closer bout than critics would have anticipated if both fighters were in condition.
More interesting, and which is being argued here for the first time, is Morrison could have gone on to have become a kickboxing, MMA, wrestling and Muay Thai champion. Morrison was headed in that direction, as evidenced by his later MMA bout.
Why was Morrison a successful MMA fighter? Because he was a multifaceted style of fighter. Ray Mercer, who beat Morrison at boxing and Tim Sylvia in MMA, was also a very good MMA fighter. Riddick Bowe tried to fight Muay Thai and failed. Regina Halmich tried kickboxing and got knocked out by Naoko Kumagai. Others such as Muhammad Ali, Chuck Wepner and Leon Spinks have tried boxer versus Wrestler. Morrison and Mercer are the only legitimate heavyweight champions past and present to have achieved a measure of success in the MMA realm. Street fighter Kimbo Slice has been a decently successful boxer and MMA fighter.
Boxing, wrestling, and grappling are interrelated. The concept is a throwback to the time of Jack Johnson, Sam Langford and Sam McVea, where the old school boxers frequently grappled and held for position. The different worlds of fighting were more interconnected reasons ago. Morrison, the quintessential tough guy, was perhaps a throwback to a different era.
Morrison entered the steel cage with 340 pound Eric Stover in an MMA match at Cliff Casino at the Yavapai-Apache Nation in Arizona in June 2007. Slamming his larger opponent against the cage several times, the strange scene ended two minutes into the three round contest when Morrison broke Stover’s nose and took him out. Supposedly, knees, elbows and kicks were disallowed. Yet in Morrison’s final known bout, a first round knockout of Corey Williams in January 2009 in Laramie, Wyoming, knees were allowed, and Williams can be seem kneeing Morrison on the ropes Muay Thai style under modified rules which would not be allowed by other fighters. Although the Wyoming bout, which was fought for the vacant Wyoming State heavyweight title, does not appear on BoxRec, I found it at http://boxing.about.com/od/records/a/morrison.htmI classify it is a strangely allowed boxing bout in a jurisdiction without a boxing commission, rather than an MMA bout. Such a bout with ‘gray’ categorization, in my view, is classic Tommy. Trying to figure the bout out is like trying to figure Tommy out. No can do. Not a simple subject.
One of the keys to decoding the mystery to Morrison’s personality is he was uninhibited as a fighter. While personal circumstances may have played a part in his more open fighting style in his later years, Morrison was clearly willing to go where other fighters had not gone before, basically fight anyone anywhere anytime, a sort of modern day Bruce Lee mentality with ‘no-holes barred’, that is ‘no rules’ as rules. That being the case, it is a shame Morrison did not get to fight Mike Tyson in 1997 as originally planned. The two of them would have chewed each other up in an offensive display of anything goes the way the public wanted to see it, a hyped television heavyweight super spectacular with boxing, wrestling and whatever else mixed in the boxing public never got to see, which would have surpassed Golota-Bowe I, Ali-Foreman, Leonard-Hearns and Holmes-Cooney.
Commenting on the contrast between boxing and MMA in an interview, Morrison noted Mixed Martial Artists had to learn to take a punch before even considering stepping into the ring with somebody like him. According to Morrison, “That goes for all these MMA guys. You cannot just get in there, and think you are the baddest son of a bitch in the world without being conditioned to take a shot. If you get nailed on the chin, you are going to go down. That’s the nature of the beast.”
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