After an arduous evening in Birmingham last night, watching what might well have been the local team winning the Champions League final, this morning I sleepily reached for my mobile phone to read all about Anthony Joshua’s first round knock out of the roly poly (fat) challenger Andy Ruiz Jr. It would have been a formality since Ruiz had been called up at the last minute to replace the original opponent who, it turned out, had been a drugs cheat. Wobbling in to the ring, the man looked like he had been overdosing not on drugs, but pies. Imagine my amusement when I discovered Joshua had in fact lost.
I watch very little boxing on TV these days for too main reasons. One is that I am always uncomfortable watching a sport where the aim is to render the opponent unconscious, with all the irreversible brain damage that ensues. And secondly because most of the big fights are shown on a pay per view basis. I pay Sky quite enough to watch their sport thank you very much so I am not forking out another £20/£25 to watch two blokes fighting at 5.00 am on a Sunday morning.
I have seen snippets of Joshua’s fights over the years and he always struck me as an amiable, muscle-bound giant of a man. He looks more like a body builder than boxer. For some reason, he always reminded me of Frank Bruno, another amiable, muscle-bound giant of a man. The difference was Bruno had a glass jaw. And then Joshua got hit on the chin. Whoops.
We all know what happens next. A rematch between Joshua and Ruiz sometime later this year and, hopes promoter Eddie Hearn, revenge as Joshua takes out his opponent and marches on to greater glory. The rematch will be plugged to death on Sky and thousands will pay a substantial wedge for the privilege. Good luck to them.
Obviously, boxing is not like wrestling in the sense that one is for real and one is entirely staged. I’ll leave you to work out which is which! Either way, the entire business is constructed to ensure the participants, managers, promoters and so on make vast sums of money and not for the benefit of fight fans who are rarely treated to fights between the very best boxers as the likes of Joshua are spoon-fed easy fights like Ruiz. And it’s when the con trick goes all wrong that makes it especially funny.
PS Yes, I really did come up with ‘Ant hits the deck’ all on my own.
