After the heavy tone of my last entry, I thought I'd lighten things up with some gratuitous savagery in the form of some of my favourite YouTube highlight reels.

First off, click HERE for "Best Tae Kwon Do Knockouts", a video that was highly recommended to me by actor Ty Olsson and stunt coordinator Dean Choe. Man, building a style around highly advanced kicking ability and then staging fights between combatants who fight with their hands around their waists is an excellent formula for putting people to sleep in a highly entertaining fashion!

Next on the list is the very aptly-entitled "Devastating Brutal Knockouts" PART ONE and PART TWO, the first installment of which begins with the classic 1919 bout between "The Manassa Mauler" Jack Dempsey (great nickname!) and incumbent champion Jess Willard. This bout has been called "the worst beating in boxing history" and resulted in Willard sustaining a broken nose, cheekbone, ribs, jaw (in seven places), and losing four teeth and part of the hearing in one ear. One look at this footage will show you why the "neutral corner" rule was later brought into effect and is still in use today. I was very pleased to see that part two included footage from George Foreman's 1976 bout with Ron Lyle, a war of attrition that remains my favourite boxing match of all time (boxing analyst Wally Matthews would later refer to it as "one of greatest exhibitions of pure violence in the history of boxing"). In fact, it's so good that I'm gonna urge you to click HERE to watch the entire fight start-to-finish in all of its brutal magnificence. There's also Renato "Babalu" Sobral's renowned field-goal kick KO of Brad Kohler, Gilbert "Hurricane" Yvel's double-kneestrike knockout of Carlos Barretto (with a straight-right chaser) and a lot more.

Enjoy!