Every human is either left-handed or right-handed. Some have developed hand agility with the off hand to the degree where they can claim to be ambidextrous. In most of these cases though, they are left-handers who have been encouraged or coerced to use their right hands to do tasks such as writing. Some forms of writing are very difficult for a left-hander by design. Naturally, it is forgivable to make a reversed checkmark with the short side on the right and the long sweeping side on the left. Chinese characters, however, have the sweeping strokes on the right putting the lefthander in the position to choose between trying to draw those characters with the left hand or accepting to learn to write with the off hand.

In many cases, the child learning doesn't have the choice. Either the left handed child is forced to fit in a "normal" society or in worst cases must face religious zealots who believe that left handed people are going to hell. I suppose they also believe that the planet Venus was created by Satan because it is the only one that rotates clockwise [the sun rises in the west and sets in the east]. It is more likely though that such people haven't given that much critical thought to their dogma. I've heard of one nun screeching in terror when a girl crossed herself with her left hand after prayer. The discrimination of left-handed people is not new. The word sinister comes from Latin meaning left. Today it means evil. The word for left in many languages is a synonym for awkward or evil. The word dexterity comes from Latin meaning right and today means agility. Those who use both hands to perform tasks are called ambidextrous, not ambisinister. 

We still don't know what causes left-handedness today. There have been efforts to compile the number of lefties in a left-handed person's family, but nothing is conclusive. The existence of mirror twins raises more questions. They are identical twins where one sibling is right-handed and the other is left-handed. Because we know they exist, we can neither wholly support a DNA-linked theory nor rule one out. It could be that due to their genetic code both twins were susceptible to the outside factors that would lead to left-handedness, but only one took the trait. It could also be that the outside factors had no bond whatsoever to the genetic code. This would put left-handedness in the same class of traits as fingerprints. 

Sports have nearly always embraced left-handed athletes. In hockey, teams want their forwards shooting at the net, so the left and right wingers tend to shoot in opposite directions. In baseball, we see batters and pitchers testing each other. Boxing however, appears to discriminate. Southpaws have trouble getting fights. Climbing up the ladder is a door-slamming experience. Fighters don't want to prepare for a southpaw and fans don't want to watch a southpaw. There have been championship bouts featuring a southpaw against an orthodox and some have been good. The ratio however, doesn't match the lefty to righty ratio in the general population. In the heavyweight division, there has been only one southpaw champion, Michael Moore. 

The sport of kickboxing loves southpaws. Unlike boxing, the jab can be followed by kicks, knees or even spinning punches. In the 12 years of the K-1 promotional company's Grand Prix, four southpaws have made it to the championship match: Jerome LeBanner, Andy Hug, Mirko Filipovic and Akio Mori. Of the 24 places available, these four men have occupied 8, or a full third. Compared to the general population ratio, southpaws do quite well in kickboxing. Compared to a sport that one would expect to be similar (ie. boxing), southpaws do extremely well. 

In the CKO rankings, we can find more southpaws at both the elite level and the journeyman level. On January 1^st 2004, four of the top ten fighters were southpaws. The #4 and #11 ranked fighters at that time were left-handed fighters who fought orthodox. Of the 8 fighters who have held the #1 rank in the world, 3 were left-handed. 

In a kickboxing ring, it is not uncommon to see two southpaws square off. Jerome LeBanner has fought Andy Hug, Mirko Filipovic, Rick Roufus, Jan Nortje, Akio Mori and Vitali Ahramenko. Each of those fighters has his own list of fellow southpaws he has met in the ring. Given the discrimination southpaws face in boxing, the success of left-handed fighters in kickboxing is a giant billboard to fighters to learn to kick or at least to learn to block kicks. There hasn't been an exodus yet, but the future could bring one. 

One of the interesting trends in the sport today is that some southpaws are actually right handed and some orthodox fighters are left handed. Southpaw Jerome LeBanner is a right-handed southpaw. Bob Sapp, on the other hand, is left handed and fights orthodox (albeit in a most unorthodox manner). Akio Mori is right handed and fights ambidextrous with a 60/40 ratio in favor of the southpaw stance. Carter Williams is left handed and fights ambidextrous with a 70/30 ratio in favor of the orthodox stance. 

There are two schools of thought on which stance a fighter should take.

1.      A fighter should lead with his dominant hand and follow up with the off hand. The premise is to fire off the dominant hand more times than the off hand.

2.      A fighter should lead with the off hand and follow up with the dominant hand. The premise is to use the dominant hand to score a clean shot on reacting target. 

One thing that is often over looked is that people are not simply left or right handed. They are left or right sided. When a person has to lean to one side to read the tags in a filing cabinet, the choice is not random. Right handed people prefer to lean to the right and left handed people to the left.  

Besides the hands, sidedness is most apparent in the eyes. A right handed person will use his right eye to peek through a hole in a fence or peer through a telescope. A lefty taking a picture will used his left eye to aim with the camera and use his right hand [no choice] to push the button. 

A simple test you can do right now is to form a ring with your thumb and index finger on each hand. Line up both rings and look through them [both eyes open] at an object on your desk or nearby. Close your left eye. Close your right eye. When you close the dominant eye, the rings will shift position. 

Both eyes work together to give us vision, but each eye works differently. The dominant eye targets the object and the off eye adds depth. Although a visit to the eye doctor may suggest that peripheral vision is equal in both eyes, the can-you-see-my-finger test doesn't take into account that the off eye is by nature preoccupied with what the dominant eye has targeted. To illustrate, think of the roles each windshield wiper plays. The driver's side of the windshield is clear while the top corner of the passenger side is untouched. 

Now let's return to the two choices of stance. A fighter who opts to put his dominant hand forward is also putting his dominant eye forward. In terms of offense, it is a sound strategy. In terms of defense, however, some questions begin to surface. The strike you don't see is the one that does the most damage. If a fighter is going to get blindsided, he will certainly want to roll with the strike. Depending on the stance, the blindsided fighter will either roll into the arc [belly side] or roll out of the arc [back side]. Structurally, the fighter can bend further forward than backward. 

Two examples of fighters getting blindsided inside the arc are Jerome LeBanner and Carter Williams. Jerome is a right-handed southpaw. In 2001, he got blindsided by Mark Hunt on the left side. Stunned by the blow, he then absorbed 15 more punches before getting knocked out. Carter Williams is a left-handed ambidextrous fighter. In 2004, he got blindsided by a high kick from Brecht Wallis on the right side and was immediately knocked out. 

The choices made by a fighter before he enters the ring is an exercise in risk management. To take advantage of a dominant hand jab, the fighter and his team will have to invest time to reduce the risk of getting blindsided inside the arc where the only give is the neck. Those who want to take advantage of offensive advantages of ambidexterity will also have to invest as much time to ensure that both stances are defensively sound. In kickboxing, any corners a team cuts in defense is a corner presented on a silver platter to the opposing team in offense. 

In brief, left-handed fighters add variety to a to an already interesting sport. They are neither gauche nor sinister. Their number in the sport of kickboxing means that they are still a minority but far from an anomaly.