‘It’s like someone found the cheat code’: The agonizing history of the body shot knockout

You go back and watch the moment the kick landed and it’s like you can feel the full-body wince. Late in the third round of the UFC 309 main event, after chipping away with repeated kicks to the body, Jon Jones let fly with the spinning heel kick that caught Stipe Miocic in the midsection, landing with a sickening crack.

Miocic dropped to his knees right away. A couple follow-up punches from Jones finished him off. As the champ celebrated, the challenger remained down on the mat, trying to summon the strength to stand.

It was all pretty familiar to “Chainsaw” Charles McCarthy. Nearly 20 years ago, he was on the business end of the UFC’s first spinning heel kick finish against David Loiseau at UFC 53. The one he suffered was arguably even worse than what put Miocic down, since Loiseau’s heel shot like a piston to the right side of McCarthy’s body, smashing his liver more than his ribs.

“I’d never been hit like that before,” McCarthy said. “It was like somebody had just turned off the electricity to my body. It was so crazy.”

McCarthy went into that fight feeling confident in his ability to take a hard shot. He’d never been knocked out in a fight. He hadn’t even really been hurt, even by bad body shots in the gym. While preparing to fight Loiseau, he even told his kickboxing coach not to bother throwing this spinning kick, since he didn’t expect to see it in the fight.

“That’s the irony,” McCarthy said. “I remember telling him, ‘No, I’ve watched a bunch of his fights and he doesn’t throw that kick.’ Then that’s the exact kick that ended up putting me out. So I would say my arrogance at that young age ended up costing me big time in that fight.”

For those who have never experienced it, the body shot knockout can seem mystifying. They assume maybe it’s just the pain that stops fighters. Maybe they just quit. But a well-timed body shot — especially one that finds the liver region — is more like a full-body shutdown.

In MMA, the pioneer of the liver shot is unquestionably Bas Rutten. In the early and mid 1990s, he came up through Japan’s Pancrase organization, where closed-fist punches to the head were banned. This gave a greater edge to the catch wrestlers and submission artists on the scene, but Rutten found a way to make the rules work for him by focusing on body shots. With knees, kicks, and even open-handed palm strikes, he could target an opponent’s liver for precision destruction.

Rutten always said he first learned the power of the liver shot when he went from training in karate to sparring with Thai boxers. His first day in the gym, he said, a Thai boxer dropped him with a liver shot. Once he recovered, he demanded to know how this magic worked. Then he set himself to learning how to wield it, which ended up being very useful during his time in Pancrase.

“Some guys, they can really take a punch or a kick to the head,” Rutten told me once. “But I don’t care how tough you are. For the liver shot, it does not matter.”

One of the earliest known purveyors of the body shot was former boxing champion Bob Fitzsimmons. “Ruby Rob,” as he was sometimes called (a somewhat ironic reference to the red hair he began losing at a very young age), became boxing’s first three-division champion. He started out as middleweight champ in 1891, then jumped all the way to heavyweight while only weighing around 165 pounds, and finally finished by winning the light heavyweight title at the age of 40.

Fitzsimmons was nearly always at a weight disadvantage in his fights. He was born in Cornwall, England, but grew up in New Zealand as the son of a blacksmith. He gained a local reputation for beating up drunk or simply obnoxious patrons around his father’s forge, to the point where it was said that some gathered at the blacksmith shop just to see him fight. When boxing great Jem Mace visited New Zealand and put on a boxing tournament of amateur heavyweights, Fitzsimmons demanded to be included, despite weighing only about 140 pounds. He won the tournament, which amused and delighted Mace, who recommended Fitzsimmons seek out a boxing career in America.

As he rose through the ranks at heavyweight, Fitzsimmons sometimes found himself giving up 40 or 50 pounds to his opponents. He developed his body punches as a way of mitigating that size difference, since he found that larger opponents could more easily withstand his power when it was directed only at their heads. The body shot, Fitzsimmons learned, worked on everyone. It’s why he’s sometimes credited with coining the phrase, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

Fitzsimmons’ body shots even got him disqualified once in a fight with noted heavyweight “Sailor” Tom Sharkey in 1896. The fight was refereed by famed lawman Wyatt Earp, who did everything possible to draw attention to himself, including wearing his Colt revolver into the ring. When Fitzsimmons floored Sharkey with one of his body shots, Earp ruled it a low blow, despite protests from many in the crowd who insisted that it was a legal punch to the body. Earp declared Sharkey the winner, which infuriated Fitzsimmons. For the rest of his life, he regarded Earp as a showboating nemesis who he never forgave.

But his greatest moment as body shot artist came in his heavyweight title fight against “Gentleman” Jim Corbett the following year. Theirs was the first heavyweight title fight to be filmed as a moving picture (when it was shown to audiences, it was the longest movie ever released to that point), and also the first to take place in an arena built solely for the purposes of that bout.

Corbett entered nearly 20 pounds heavier, and for the first dozen or so rounds he easily handled the smaller Fitzsimmons. But in Round 14, a short blow to the body crumpled the champion Corbett, who then crawled across the canvas on his hands and knees, desperately trying to haul himself up with help from the ropes. Corbett couldn’t beat the count. Fitzsimmons became the new heavyweight champion.

Instead of being dismayed by this, Corbett was initially enraged, flying at Fitzsimmons and trying to resume the fight as soon as he’d recovered from the body blow. After being restrained and eventually forced out of the ring, his anger gave way to confusion. He simply couldn’t understand how one punch to the body had rendered him so totally and yet temporarily unable to fight. Those around him said that after the fight he kept repeating the same thing over and over: “It was a lucky punch.”

Talk to those who’ve been put away by the body shot and you’ll learn that this confusion is a normal part of the experience. The paralyzing effects are very real, but also relatively short-lived, as McCarthy found out that night in 2005 against Loiseau.

“I remember that as soon as it hit, I just couldn’t move,” McCarthy said. “It was like I was stuck in the position I was in for the next 30 seconds. But once that 30 seconds passed, I was fine. Like a few seconds after the fight was stopped, I felt like I could have kept fighting. But in the moment it just freezes you. It’s a very frustrating feeling. It’s like someone found the cheat code for your body.”

As for Fitzsimmons, his body shot knockout of Corbett had another lasting legacy. As fight fans struggled to understand what happened in the fight, one San Francisco newspaper writer quoted a doctor he’d spoken to, who said it was a punch to the “solar plexus.” It’s said to be the first time this term entered popular usage.

Fitzsimmons was so overjoyed that his signature punch had won him the highest honor in fight sports that he initially insisted he’d never fight again.

“I am now prepared to enter some other occupation,” Fitzsimmons told reporters, according to John Durant’s excellent boxing history, “The Heavyweight Champions.”

Seasoned fight fans can probably guess how that plan aged. Fitzsimmons fought three months later. He lost the heavyweight title to James J. Jeffries in 1899, then fought at least 20 more pro bouts after that before finally retiring at the age of 52.

Corbett, whenever he was asked about his loss to Fitzsimmons, maintained that it was a single lucky punch. He could have gone on fighting, he said, and would have. If only they’d given him time to get over it.