Saturday night: The fight of the century. The millennium. So big that spokesmen for the next millennium have already admitted they won’t be able to top it.
It’s not just a boxing match — it’s a boxing event. It’s not just a boxing event, it’s an event-event.
It’s like Mike Tyson taking on Muhammad Ali, the Yankees battling the Celtics and the Spanish Armada crashing into the starship Enterprise — all on the same night The Beatles reunite as the opening act for the reanimation of the cryogenically frozen corpse of Walt Disney.
The Pacquiao-Mayweather fight. It’s like nothing was ever exciting before. I’ll tell you what: This bout’s gonna make World War Z look like afternoon tea at Miss Porter’s School.
It’s going to redefine us as a nation, a world, a solar system. In 30 years, Robert Redford is going to make a movie about how everything that came after was a sad sign of our lost innocence.
Me? I have a lot of questions. Here are some from a man who doesn’t get the hype.
♦ Doesn’t the “sport” of “boxing” consist of men trying to inflict brain damage upon each other? With the ultimate goal being trauma-inflicted loss of consciousness?
♦ Do they at least play “Eye of the Tiger” a lot?
♦ Is there more than one page to the “Big Book of Boxing Strategy,” or does it kinda fizzle out after “Hit other guy. Try to avoid getting hit”?
♦ If I call myself Vic and chomp on a huge cigar while wearing polyester slacks, will I enjoy it more?
♦ If the fight goes the distance, then we don’t even know who won until we hear from an entirely subjective panel of judges scoring the fight based on mysterious secret criteria, right?
♦ No way anything could be corrupt about that, right?
♦ Cockfighting illegal. Dogfighting illegal. Manfighting legal?
♦ Does it make me less of a hetero man if I’d rather be watching an Anna Kendrick movie than two half-naked gladiators getting sweaty and repeatedly “going in the clinch” with each other?
♦ Since football players wear helmets and hockey players wear helmets and even baseball players wear helmets, though none of those sports are primarily about hitting each other in the head, would it kind of make sense for the guys to wear some sort of skull protection?
♦ Or would that diminish the possibility of seeing delicious trauma-inflicted loss of consciousness?