So, who’s forking out £17 to watch Saturday night’s fight between David Haye and Tony Bellew? What a match-up that will be, between two blown-up cruiser weights, the latter of whom is the WBC Champion in a division for blokes who aren’t big enough to fight as heavyweights. And what’s at stake this weekend? A couple of million quid and nothing else. I’ll give that a miss then.
To be honest, I never buy any of Sky’s pay per view events because Mr Murdoch trousers enough of my money as it is. In this instance, what the hell is the point?
Haye and Bellew purportedly hate each other and the former has said, in the usual good taste you have come to expect from professional boxing, that the latter will not get out of the ring alive. That will look especially good if something very serious happened in a “sport” where the object is to render the opponent unconscious and many of its participants end up with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. As there is money to be made, neither boxer, nor smug promoter Eddie Hearn, will be objecting just yet.
I concede that, if I am doing nothing else, I might find myself listening to the fight for all the wrong reasons people are forking out a large wedge to watch it. It brings out the worst in folk and I am no exception. I used to watch all the big fights on ITV, including the one where Michael Watson was seriously and permanently injured when fighting Chris Eubank and when Gerald McClellan was put into a coma, blinded and almost deafened during a contest against Nigel Benn. I vowed never to watch another fight, but I did. These days, I don’t go out of my way to watch boxing at all.
Who will win? I don’t know and I don’t care. Since both have spent their careers tucked away on pay TV, their fights have been shown to tens of thousands rather than millions. Whilst Haye is well known to the public, Bellew is a near unknown. Come Saturday night, nothing much will change.
Sky wouldn’t show this fight if no one wanted to pay through the nose to see it, so it’s our fault really. We want to see two grown men smack the shit out of each other because it’s a pantomime. I get that, of course, and maybe if it was on the BBC even I might succumb. But for £17? Sod that.
