HAJIME NO IPPO - Chapter 1511

Have you all ever questioned whether boxing is real? I mean is it possible that it was all setup before hand and its just sports gambling. The fact is why are they even wearing the gloves for. If you really want to have a knock out, a pure knuckle is way better than a glove. Sure these gloves are heavy as hell and can be thought of as like a hammer, but that is only true if you can use that to your advantage by throwing a “down smash.” Actually, that what Sendo is doing, he is doing a smash here. But, the net-effect is still no where close to the damage he could have inflicting with pure knuckle. I tried this in high school with a Karate fanatic friend. About the only thing these gloves are good for are for transmitting momentum and generating momentum through large movement of the arms and body as this manga demonstrates. And by having such a large surface area, it can really generate a bang when it hits.

Anyway, I think the gloves are to protect the fighters to some extent as well. But, they really need to keep the head gears on because a brain can easily be damaged with all that hitting. I think boxing manga is one thing but we probably should consider banning all violent sports going forward. It’s fun to just “merely imagine it,” we don’t really people hurting each other for entertainment. It is not fun. Boxing manga is though to some extent, like this one.

Hajime no Ippo, like so many great sports manga really should have ended with his first victory followed by immediate retirement or ending just like Slam Dunk or the original Captain Tsubasa with them winning the world and him moving to Brazil realizing the childhood dream of becoming a pro. Sports manga’s appeal is the training arc as the main character learn more and more about the sport while teaching us about the sport along with it. In this sense sports manga are like training manuals for various sports.

However, that is not their only appeals and this is where “imaginary sports manga” far surpasses the “real sports manga” like this one. The original Prince of Tennis was the one that broke the standard and complete forsake the training arc and jump quickly into the realm of “extreme tennis” where characters each have their own ridiculous unique technique(s) that just makes zero physical sense, but at the same time you wonder if that is true. For example, the captain of the main character’s team has this technique that he can just stand there and every returning ball will come back to him just like that. And the explanation is that he can force his opponent to return a certain way by placing the ball in the right spot with the right spin on it. It was such a cheat, the captain was the final boss the MC had to beat. And he beat him by another cheat, “copying/”

You see, one of the strongest cheats in any activities you do is not any super power, but the ability to “copy” that super power. If you can do that, you are pretty much guaranteed to beat your opponent. This was why Kakashi Sensei would be the strongest in Naruto … if he could copy the blood-line techs too. Of course, Kishimoto Sensei understood this OP power early on and thus set a restriction against it from the very beginning. Assuming a creator exists in our world too, do you guys think someone like Kakashi Sensei could exist?