<p><p class="MsoNormal">When fascination with a subject reaches a point equivalent to, well, equivalent to seeing nekkid people of the sex you are attracted to doing things you are attracted to doing, then you can use the term porn. Movie series like Saw and Hostel are so entranced with physical torment that someone coined the term ‘torture porn’ like it’s a bad thing. For me, it is gear porn.</p>
I love high quality training gear. I love wondering about gear, talking about gear, pulling gear into pieces to see what is inside, looking at gear catalogues, buying gear, organizing gear in lines. I love putting my hands into gear, or my leg, or my head, and yes, even my groin goes inside gear. I love training with gear; I hate training without good gear.
One day a couple of years back I walked into the gym and asked someone about a DVD. Could have been Marcello Garcia, I forget. A couple of the college kids overheard me, and started cracking up. I am forever cracking up youth – “You have an address book where you write things down with a pen??!? AHAHAHAHAHA.” This time the merriment was over someone actually buying a DVD series.
“DUDE” *gasp of laughter* “you BUY those??!? They are free!” Now freedom may the greatest word in the history of life itself, but in the context of something that you sell, “Free” it is not much what you hope to hear. I owned IslandMartialArts.com, a martial arts instructional DVD company, so I started to think hard about a plan B. The DVD business did not appear to have legs; the writing on the wall was rolling on the ground, laughing at me.
As I love gear, it was the first transition I thought of.
I have bought sparring gear alone from over 150 different companies, on at least three continents. I have some least favorites, but life is too short to tell much about the size L shin pads that didn’t fit me didn’t fit a 14 year old girl and finally didn’t fit an eight year old. Or about the gloves that appeared to be a novel Chinese experiment in substituting wood for foam in protective gear. Or about the gloves I ordered from overseas that looked more like soccer balls than gloves; actually, they sent me two soccer balls.
I would rather tell you about Twins Special, my favorite gear on the planet, ever, of all time. I love Winning, but hate the price. I love Reyes, but it is not designed for MMA training. I love Hayabusa, and Windy, and Grant, and Lonsdale, and Top Ten, and many more, but I love Twins Special the most. If Twins Special was a girl, I would become a bigamist, and marry both them twins. If Twins Special was a food, Manny Yarborough would be the world’s second largest professional athlete.
Love is boundless, but if I had to name the top reasons I love Twins Special they would be:
1. The feel after it conforms to your hands.
2. The function, working as it does so perfectly for defense and offense, clinching and on the outside.
3. The quality and durability.
Upon reading that, it sounds trite. I could more or less write the same thing about CVS Pharmacy standing as it does for Customer Value Store. I might as well have said “Good to the last drop.” But I really mean it - the comfort, function, and durability is second to none.
So when I decided to open a gear store, I determined to add a full line of Twins Special. It took a while, and that is another story; the Underground Store now has a complete line of Twins Special sparring gloves (12,14,16,and 18 oz), MMA training gloves, MMA headgear, and both Pro and Traditional style shins. You can have any color you want, as long as it is red. It is priced at or under comparable brands.
And all registered pro and amateur fighters get a further 10% off.
If you have a favorite brand that is not Twins Special, I meant no offense (although you will never be the man your mother is :-) Let me know what gear you love and why, and I might add it, sending you some for free as thanks. Ands if like me a shiny new pair of Twins Special 16 oz gloves feels an awful lot a bikini on a hot girl, then let me know, so I will know I am not alone ...
