skip hall, baddest liar/fraud on the planet......
The baddest Grandfather on the Planet
Skip Hall to retire from mixed martial arts competition at age 63
By Mike Chiappetta
NBCSports.com
updated 1:55 a.m. ET March 19, 2008
Just like millions of Americans his age, Skip Hall is preparing to retire.
Unlike the millions of Americans his age, what he's leaving behind isn't an executive role or a factory job, or any kind of 9-to-5. What he's leaving behind is a sport so physically demanding that most men half his age are already mulling retirement from active competition. Having graced the earth for 63 years, this soft-spoken grandfather is believed to be the world's oldest professional mixed martial artist.
Hall has fought over a dozen pro matches, and on March 22, in Irondale, Alabama at an event called Dixie Throwdown V, he'll tape up his fists, strap on his gloves and walk out to the arena to fight one last time. And then, win or lose, he'll take one final bow, hug his wife Sally, and quietly close the book on a career spent in the trenches, for the love of competition.
Hall can't be blamed for getting a late start in MMA, which didn't really exist in its current incarnation until 1993. By then, he was already training in jiu-jitsu after a lifetime of boxing and other martial arts. But the move to full-contact MMA came almost as an afterthought.
His son was training in tae kwon do, and suggested to Hall's wife that Skip should take up the sport. Sally off-handedly agreed, not believing that anyone would actually want to sign him to a fight.
"At the time, we had a school and were teaching cross-training," he says. "And is there a better way to find out if the stuff you teach works than by doing it yourself? A lot of martial arts disciplines are in a very clinical environment, and you never get to use them."
The former IBM executive never really set about to re-invent himself as a mixed martial artist. In truth, it was simply about the challenge.
Athleticism was the easy part. When he was nine years old, he would have to walk through the worst part of Birmingham, and quickly realized he needed to be able to defend himself. He started training and turned himself into a golden gloves boxer.
He was a Special Forces soldier who served tours in Vietnam, Korea and the Philippines. Along the way, he learned tae kwon do and hapkido. He got into kickboxing, then won awards in powerlifting.
http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/23652320/
We could get a serious pool going!
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