The great wanker, he of churlish wit and girlish charm, the hairy coquette, Tyson Fury, the Tosser King defended his imaginary crown once again, this time against one Otto Wallin, who, as I’ve previously pointed out, has accumulated a record of 20-0 by fighting an assortment of corpses with a collective record of 271-259.

Otto made it semi-interesting in that he opened a cut on Fury’s noggin in round three that could have stopped the fight, but didn’t. (Maybe should have stopped the fight – one has to wonder about the legitimacy of the ref and ring doctor when Fury got rocked in round 12 and they let it go on without the doctor looking again at the eye.)

He won ten rounds to two.

What I want to see is the rematch with Wilder. This has been is set for February but now the big Tosser may have to put the kibosh on that, or at least delay it, since getting his melon sliced open by Wallin. If he misses that date with destiny, who knows where he’ll end up? A lot can happen in the next months.

Primarily the Ruiz / Joshua rematch, the fight for the real lineal championship. Pulev already has himself in position to be the mandatory challenger for the winner of that fight. What if Pulev wins that one? (I jest) How long will it take then for Fury to get himself a shot at the real title? First he has to beat Wilder, whenever that fight takes place, then he has to hope the boxing stars align to allow him a shot at Pulev, Joshua or Ruiz, as the case may be. That’s assuming that Kownacki or Joyce or Whyte or Povetkin aren’t next in line by that time.

Hell, what if Wilder loses to Ortiz? Will anyone care to watch Fury / Wilder 2 then?

At the very least, the myth of him being “the one true champion” has been exposed for what it is; a masturbatory fantasy. He should have been fighting real fighters instead of tomato cans, working his way to the place where the boxing fans and governing bodies alike would be demanding that he get a shot at the crown.

Now he’s lost a lot of momentum on that upward trek, and he’s got a rather severly damaged eye. As my mom used to say: “If you don’t stop it, you’ll go blind.”

The big Tosser.

Yes, that’s a landscape from the Teletubbies show.  And no, I’m not making a fat joke.  And yes, my artwork is pathetic. 

I put that picture there because it most adequately expresses my reaction to the news that Ruiz and Joshua are going to fight in Saudi Arabia.  I think it’s the first time there’s been a heavyweight title fight there. (Checks memory banks) Yep, the first time.

I’m giddy. I’m thrilled. I’m beside myself.

The exotic location makes it that much more intriguing, like an epic fight of old:

This is going to be historic, Like the Thrilla in Manilla, the Caracas Caper, the Rumble in the Jungle,  This will be legendary, epic.  All that remains is for Andy and Anthony to make a good fight of it.

 I’m so glad they didn’t muck it up by letting it go to Cardiff.

(Mostly I’m just happy to have a real fight to look forward to, after the announcement of the latest Tyson Fury wank-fest.)

So an epic battle of historical significance needs a good title, but they’ve given us “The Clash in the Dunes”?

Really?  Pee-yoo!

That’s the best we could do?  I mean these Saudi guys put up $100 million, we should do better. We owe it to them.  

So let’s put on our thinking caps.

The fight is taking place in Diriyah, a town on the outskirts of Riyadh, and which looks too much like “diarrhea” to be of any use.  So we could use Riyadh, the desert, the sand, or the sun as the location.

So, right off the top of my head, we could use “Struggle in the Sand”, or “Duel in the Desert”, or “Scuffle in the Sun” or “Ruckus in Riyadh”.  

Or, getting away from alliteration, it could be “Melee in the Desert” or “Fracas in the Sun” or, if they had all four belts on the line, the “Brawl for them All”.

Or, my favorite, (with apologies to Gabriel Iglesias) “the Fat and the Furious.”

And that took me all of three minutes. 

They say that styles make fights, and that explains why Frazier and Ali were so bad for each other, and why Foreman was KO’d by Ali and beat Frazier like drum. It’s not a linear equation. You can’t just look at the records and the tale of the tape and predict the outcome with any authority.

As my Dad would say, “That’s why they fight.”

If it were that logical and predictable I guess we wouldn’t watch it. And I’m glad I was watching last night.

I predicted a Kownacki victory (got that part right). But I also said he would win by knockout and within five rounds.

Oops.

I’ve seen Arreola fight before – several times, including all three of his title fights. I knew what he looked like, and how he fights and I thought Kownacki would get inside of his looping punches and pummel him with uppercuts and straight shots and take him out.

Surpise number one: Arreola didn’t look like Arreola. He weighed in at 244. That’s about as trim as I can ever remember seeing him.

Surprise number two: While he normally throws about 40 punches a round – right near the heavyweight average, last night he threw twice that many – like Kownacki. Kownacki is known for his high-volume assault, relentlessly punching, punching, punching, throwing at twice the rate of the typical heavyweight. In this way, he overwhelms his opponents, chipping away at their defense till he finds his way to their chin. But instead of just covering up and hoping Kownacki would slow down, Arreola decided to fight fire with fire. He amped up his own offense, matching him punch for punch. (He actually set a record for number of punches thrown.) (!)

Surprise number three: While he did get pummeled, he never went down. They say you can’t buy a chin, or get one in the gym, so he must have worked a deal with the Devil to put that steel in his chin. It was never weak before, but last night it looked ready to take a sledge hammer. Remarkable.

Surprise number four: He wasn’t an ass. In the past I always thought of him as a bully. A cantakerous biker-looking beer-drinking bully. I’ll never forget him beating the slobber out of one Joey Abell. When it was clear that Abell was unconscious yet still standing, Arreola stopped throwing and went in for a smirking kiss instead. The Chris Arreola that we saw this week was a gentleman. For the first time I thought I could enjoy having a beer with him.

Surprise number five: The old boy ain’t done yet. I thought he was done three years ago, when he fought Wilder. He looked tired. I never saw anything like the confidence he would need to win. It even looked to me that Wilder carried him for few rounds. If I remember right, Wilder said something about giving the old man one last big payday as a send-off, a farewell. I believed it, thought that was his swan-song. When I read that he was going to fight Kownacki I bitched about it being a mis-match along the lines of Fury / Schwartz. Indeed the betting odds were severe, with Kownacki a -3,500 and Arreola +1,100. But the old guy made it a real fight, with smarts and guts and the hell with the odds.

But right the oddsmakers ultimately were, Kownacki won convincingly. After the fight that lady interviewer gushed “You said you would retire if you lost tonight, but surely after that performance you can’t be thinking of retirement now?” It was a vacuous question, but I think that she was just expressing the admiration and appreciation we all felt. He gave us a hell of a show, and we would like to see more.

But his point is well taken, and better it would be if more boxers were to adopt his point of view: He said “I’m too old to start over, and that’s where I’ll be if I lose, back to square one.” Too many, addicted to the adrenaline, can’t seem to find the brakes.

And by the way, what the hell was up with Kownacki playing the Polish national anthem? The man’s been living in Brooklyn since he was seven years old. I mean Arreola makes a big deal about his Mexican heritage, but he at least he knew what country he’s from. Props for that too.

So, I hope he does retire. And I hope he makes it stick, that he doesn’t attempt a ‘comeback’ in a couple years, saying “age is just a number” (I think George Foreman may someday regret saying that inasmuch as it has added fuel to the fire that still burns in old fighter’s bellies) and doing harm to himself. This was so much better a farewell than the Wilder fight.

Adios valiente guerrero. Via con Dios, Pesadilla.

Did the internet exist in 1990? I don’t recall. I know that I didn’t have access to it, and if I did it would have been slow as hell and would have had what Dave Barry called “a duck playing a kazoo”. But I didn’t have it, so I turned on the TV.

It seemed like years since it started. Understand that I live in Columbus, and while I’ve never met the man, I did meet his father once, and John Johnson too. There had been hype aplenty, or at least more than usual, because Buster was from Columbus, was one of ours.

During his ‘comeback’ (after the loss to Tucker) there would be an article in the paper every couple weeks and invariably they would mention the tantalizing possibility that Buster would get to fight Tyson.

When he did get the fight, it was announced months in advance. And of course (you know) no one gave him a chance. I remember one local sportswriter opined that Buster did have a chance, and that because Buster was a talented fighter with a stiff jab and a huge reach advantage. I filed that information away in my mind, cherished it, pulled it out every so often to look at it and say, “I believe in you!” And I did this in private. I didn’t want to hear the raspberries of derision that showing faith in Buster would prompt.

Plus, I just didn’t like Tyson. I mean I enjoyed watching him work, who didn’t? The man was an amazing talent. But at that time I was convinced that he was evil, and was bad for boxing. I’m struggling to remember now the things that I knew about or thought I knew about him that lead me to think that way. Had he been accused of the sexual assault yet? I don’t recall. I think maybe there had been a story about him getting rough with Robin Givens. Some hard quotes, I don’t know. But in my mind he had taken heavyweight boxing to the Dark Side. I wanted to see him unseated in the worst way.

It must have been a wedding that kept me from seeing it. I don’t remember that either. So when I got home, I turned on the TV to catch the 11:00 news, to see how Buster had done.

The newscast started with the usual teasers and such, but within the first couple minutes the anchor said “We can’t show you footage from the Douglas / Tyson fight, so we sent Jim to a bar where they are showing the fight. Let’s go to Jim now and see how Buster is doing.”

And they switched to a shot of a reporter standing in front of a blank wall; you could see some people to his right, all looking to his right.

“Well Buster is doing surprisingly well. The fifth round just ended, and the commentators are saying that he has likely won all five rounds so far”

They chatted back a forth for a couple moments then went back to the studio. The news cast went on for several minutes, local news, national news, before they switched back over to Jim at the bar.

“It doesn’t look good for Buster. He was knocked down at the end of the eighth round. He was saved by the bell, but he looked pretty wobbly. He gave it good try, and did remarkably well, but it looks like Mike Tyson is now going to close the show.”

And some more banter: “Aw darn” and “too bad”.

Then after sports they went back to the bar and Jim “one last time” and: Chaos! – People shouting! Jumping! Jostling! Spraying beer! “Unbelievable! Buster Douglas has won the fight, and by a knockout!” (More jostling and spraying) “What?”

“He knocked out Mike Tyson in the tenth round, and is the new heavyweight champ!”

And that’s the way I experienced it. A week later I located a VHS tape of the fight a friend had recorded.

Of course Buster put on some weight and lost to Holyfield in three rounds in his first defense, and the raspberries of derision started anew. Of course you can blame much of that on Don “the Weasel-Heart” King. I think Buster only got out of court with him like two weeks left before the fight.

And I was briefly saddened that he lost the title so quickly. I was hoping for a long reign, to be able to brag about our local boy for a few years. But in the end it didn’t matter. His place in history is fixed. He was the undisputed champ, if only for a few months. Everybody knows it.

Klitschko said winning the belt was easy compared to hanging on to it. And he kept it for a long time. It is difficult, he said, to convince yourself to train hard year after year, for your fourth, fifth, or tenth title defense. He did 14 in a row. Dr. Steelhammer had an iron will to stay at the top.

Buster? Maybe not so much. He climbed the mountain, why climb it again? It doesn’t take away from his achievement.

So sure, when we get around to arguing who is the best of all time (you know we eventually will) I probably won’t put Buster in my top ten, but if we’re talking favorites, yeah, he’s right near the top for me.