I’m getting excited about Oscar vs. Floyd! As with most sporting events of this magnitude that I end up looking forward to for a long time, I’ve made a point to ignore all press/hype/predictions/etc…with boxing especially, the whole ‘there’s bad blood between the two camps’ narrative doesn’t interest me anymore. I fully understand the business necessity of doing it like that, to get the hoopleheads interested, hopefully a bunch of them that don’t even like boxing. The epitome of this, as far as my lifetime is concerned, was Holmes-Cooney, when the Rappaport brothers did and said everything they could to draw out every possible wallet owned by a racist they could. It worked. Though reality took over shortly after the bell rung, with Holmes at the top of his game, doing his thing…years later he remarked on the whole thing in depth, though my all time favorite quote wasn’t about how his one fight with a white challenger yada yada, but this: “Once that bell rings, all that bullshit goes out the window. It’s just you and me, you can’t call the cops.”
I’m getting carried away here, as this was supposed to be a quick hit in the midst of a school break and my brain definitely preferred writing about boxing as opposed to the software testing paper I’ve got to get back to work on…the real reason I wanted to set-up by mentioning Oscar and Floyd, was because it’s on HBO. Here are some of my other favorite fights from that channel. Let me know which one you think is the best one. I’m partial to this first one, but my namesake’s role in all of it probably has something to do with it: