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According to the DVD audio commentary by Cleese, Palin, and Idle, the sequence originated in a story told to Cleese when he was attending an English class during his school days.

Two Roman wrestlers were engaged in a particularly intense match and had been fighting for such a substantial length of time that the match had degraded to the two combatants doing little more than leaning into one another with their body weight.

When one wrestler finally tapped-out and pulled away from his opponent, it was only then that he and the crowd realised the other man was, in fact, dead and had effectively won the match posthumously.

The moral of the tale, according to Cleese's teacher, was " if you never give up, you can't possibly lose " – a statement that, Cleese reflected, always struck him as being " philosophically unsound ".