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Ali pulling his punches的意思

Again, he pulled his punches to soften the blow.

Now, definitions. “Pulling punches” is a term borrowed from the game of boxing. Boxers throw punches to hit and hurt. Pulling your punches (before your hands reach the opponent’s head) means you are holding back – in other words, you do not hit as hard as you can.

At least once, Muhammad Ali pulled his punches against an opponent and that time, “The Greatest” did not do it to soften the blow, but to prolong his opponent’s pain. The opponent’s name is Ernie Terrel, who had angered Ali by refusing to call him by his new name, insisting on calling him Cassius Clay (Ali’s old name before converting to Islam). Anyways, during the fight, segments of which I’ve watched many times on DVD, Ali toyed with Terrel, landing punches to the latter’s head and body at will, all the while asking out loud: “What’s my name, Uncle Tom, what’s my name?”

Thus and so Ali administered 15 rounds of brutal punishment but did not knock Terrel out, which would’ve ended the fight, and in Ali’s view, prematurely.

Anyways, that’s Ali deliberately pulling his punches and here are media examples of other people pulling their punches or pulling none at all:

1. Are the top chess-playing computers pulling their punches against one another and saving their real strengths for matches with humans? It certainly looks that way.

In the seventh Computer World Championship in Maastricht, the Netherlands, July 5 to 11, the play seemed to be strangely ragged, the machines beating each other in games that often looked up for grabs. Crude mistakes were rife, games looking as though they were conducted by park bench players of the old school.