If you look at the comments, there are no lack of hostile / negative comments. If you understand the commentator, you may be shaking your head. If you read the newspaper from back then, what was described vs what actually happened is a whole different thing.
I don’t agree with people trying to say how great the fight was (because it wasn’t), that it was charity and therefore not real (they actually signed the death waiver) or that it is because it was bare knuckles and therefore totally different (yeah right!?!). If you just try to find excuses for it, you won’t learn and improve from there. I do hate the fight but I respect them for going through with it because back then, aside from individual challenges within closed doors, there simply isn’t any publicized fights like that back during the period of time (1950s).
Accepting failures are not just about accepting your own failures, it is also how you treat others that have failed. It should also be reflected on how you teach and your willingness to experiment. Most importantly, it is about whether you can learn from the incident regardless of the actual “win or lose”. For some, a “win” is just by luck or just that you can endure more hardship than others, there are still the potential of learning from each and every event.
Without people who are willing to put their neck out, there will be no progress. You may laugh at how people think that the world is flat or how human try to fly like a bird. Yes, looking back, all those were bad ideas but it is important to understand that without those forerunners that took the risk to try and experiment, and a few individuals that came up with an alternate hypothesis, we may be still in the dark ages.
Exercise
Find some notable failures that still earn your respect and became the basis for a new trend. (Doesn’t have to be fights)