Well, it’s official; I can’t have nice things, even when the nice things aren’t very nice.
Pictured above: the only punch Mike Tyson actually threw in that entire Goddamned fight. I’m a writer, y’all, even if I’ve more or less given up on books, and I could have written ten thousand different versions of that fight and not one of them would involve both corners begging their fighters to get more aggressive with the other person, and not one of them would have involved a fight where Mike Tyson barely threw a fucking punch the entire time. I swear he went entire rounds without throwing any punches.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I’m not going to genuinely suggest that that fight was fixed, but I will say that it sure looked like neither guy was super interested in actually winning it. I thought Paul looked genuinely scared in the first round, when Tyson actually did come out aggressively and hit him a couple of times, but after the second … nothing. Tyson turtled up and chewed on his gloves, and what the hell was the deal with that, and Paul danced around and occasionally threw a few punches. As shaky as Tyson’s legs looked, I can’t believe there wasn’t at least one knockdown at some point. Neither of them looked like they were fighting to win, and the crowd was noticeably pissed at the end of the fight.
I’m back to my “never ever care about sports for any reason” viewpoint, in case anyone was wondering. It’s just never worth it. Thank God I only spent time and not money on this.
(Not true. I could have made that money back. I’ll never get the time back. I will always have to remember staying up way too late for this terrible, boring, anticlimactic fight.)
I don’t like Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson is a rapist. I don’t like rapists.
Like a whole lot of people who generally don’t care about sports in general or boxing in particular, I’m planning on at least attempting to watch the Tyson/Paul fight tonight. Why attempting? Because who the fuck knows when the thing is going to start, and Tyson in his prime kind of specialized in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-sorry-that-guy’s-dead-now fights that you could miss by going to the bathroom at the wrong time. I don’t really want to watch the entire undercard, which could be a couple of hours, so I’ll mostly be relying on the Internet to give me an idea when the actual main event itself is going to start.
I am, I admit, more than a little conflicted about it, and I’m mostly writing this post as a way of thinking out loud rather than making a unified and coherent argument. Generally when I find out someone I was previously a fan of has turned out to be any of many different varieties of sex pest, that guy is removed from my consciousness as thoroughly as I can. Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and Bill Cosby, to pick two fairly recent examples and one not so recent, are all dead to me. To hell with all three of them. I don’t vote for politicians who are sex pests and in fact default whenever possible to voting for women precisely so that I don’t do it accidentally.
It is entirely possible that this entire post, and a lot of the “thinking” that I’ve been doing about it over the last few months, is about me searching for a way to justify watching this fight. To find a way that oh, this one doesn’t count. And maybe that’s all that’s going on. I’m not sure that that has to be a problem, to be honest! We already had a Netflix account; any tiny percentage of however much my wife spends a month on Netflix has already been earmarked to Tyson without my approval or consultation. I think I might be having a different conversation were this a pay-per-view type of event or something that Netflix was demanding a surcharge for. I am not a fan of Tyson’s; recognizing that he is either the best boxer or the second-best boxer who ever lived depending on how you feel about Muhammad Ali (Tyson has said multiple times that Ali would win if they were both in their prime) is merely stating a fact and not a fan’s opinion. Other than playing hours upon hours of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! as a kid I’ve never engaged in any particular “fan” activities toward the guy. I don’t think he’s a good guy, and I don’t want to be like him, and I don’t want my kid to look up to him or want to be like him or think he’s a good guy.
What I want is to watch him beat the piss out of Jake Paul, a loathsome human being, and someone who is a loathsome human being now, as opposed to a rapist who went to jail for his crime, served his time, and for the most part has kept his nose clean since then, and who has definitely not been accused of any further sexual misconduct since leaving jail.
Just because I want to see him punch Jake Paul’s nose around to the back of his head doesn’t mean that I want to take part in literally anything else that he does. And, you must admit, Mike Tyson is kind of uniquely qualified to be the guy who punches Jake Paul’s jaw clean off of his fucking smarmy face. There is no one else who it would be more satisfying to watch do that. It is possibly true that this is because I can’t name any other boxers!(*) But still.
But Tyson also hasn’t done the kinds of things that we want perpetrators of sexual violence to do in order to obtain “redemption,” whatever exactly that thing is. There’s been no attempt, to my knowledge, of any attempt at restitution, or an apology, or even admission of guilt. And there may have been more than one victim, which wouldn’t be surprising at all. There’s also his whole relationship with Robin Givens, which (I don’t think?) involved sexual violence but certainly was abusive.
But again: did his time, has stayed out of trouble since then, and I’m not directly supporting him by watching this fight, and I think he sucks as a person, and and and and and I’m not sure any of it really matters because I so badly want to see Jake Paul beaten until he’s two-dimensional so maybe I’m just letting my standards slip this one time because these are kind of unique circumstances, I’m not perfect either, goddammit, and my wife’s watching it with me and she’s even a whole-ass woman! So there!
I’m gonna be so pissed if Paul wins.
(And, not that I’m the first person to say this, but I feel like it’s worth repeating: while he’s definitely going to make an asston of money with this fight, it’s not the best career move for Jake Paul, if we’re willing to call his boxing a “career.” If it’s a fair fight, he’s going to get the shit beaten out of him, and if he wins, half the audience (including me) will be screaming that the fight’s fixed and the other half will not be impressed because Tyson is nearly fucking 60 and the young strong guy is supposed to win a fight with a guy who is nearly sixty years old.)
(*) Okay, I can, and some of them might even still be alive, but none of them are as mean as Tyson. Watching George Foreman turn this guy into hamburger and then grill him up would simply not be as much fun, I’m sorry. Foreman is nice. Relatively speaking.
Anyway. Are you watching? Are you also morally conflicted about it, or at least pretending to be on the Internet so you can go do what you wanted to do in the first place?
I have spent most of the weekend watching college basketball, somehow, and my brother’s family was in town today, and I swear if you had asked me what time it was before I looked outside and realized it was dark I probably would have been off by at least three hours.
Lots to do tomorrow, on my last day of Spring Break. Hopefully I can get through Sunday without losing my shit too hard.
Tonight is one of those nights where I can pretty much get away with saying anything I want, because the whole world is distracted, in this case by the Taylor Bowl. I am, in accordance with my ancient traditions, not watching, but if you are I hope you’re enjoying it. I don’t much care who wins, although a Chiefs win will make me a tiny bit happier if only because it will make certain very bad people angry, and I like it when those people don’t get what they want. If you want the 49ers to win because you are a 49ers fan, or because you hate the Chiefs for some pre-Taylor-Swift reason, I have no beef with you.
Frankly, the fact that I can name both the teams playing makes this the Super Bowl that I’ve paid the most attention to in a long, long time. The unfortunate part is that on this Day of No One Paying Attention, I don’t have anything tremendously compelling, much less controversial, that I want to talk about.
Anyway, I’ve got a heavy teaching load tomorrow, as both my Algebra kids and my regular 8th graders are starting a new unit, so I expect to be half-dead when I get home from school tomorrow. The good news is that, compared to systems of equations, slope, and graphing linear equations, which is what we’ve been occupying most of our time with since November, Pythagoras and basic factoring are absolute cake, which means that my job ought to get a little less stressful and their grades ought to come up. I’ve got about an inch of papers to go through sitting next to me and I suspect I’m not going to touch it tonight. This wasn’t much of a weekend– it wasn’t bad, by any means, but I really didn’t do much with it– but if I make it through the next four days, I get a four-day weekend. I don’t want to miss any more days in February so hopefully everything will go nice and smoothly. We’ll see.
I have been in an absolute boiled-shit bad mood all day, and I am tired of virtually everything. In particular, I have never been more tired of the NFL in my life than I am right now; I have generally been content to ignore professional football and the legion of drunken cosplaying dweebs that follow it, but for some reason their fucking opinions keep making their way into my sight recently, and everything they think about everything is dumb.
I absolutely hate the fact that I have to have an opinion about Taylor Swift’s boyfriends again, and I’m especially peeved that this time I’m on her side. Fuck all of this; I’m exhausted.
And while I’m irritated at groups of people I’m generally content to ignore, everyone in their twenties and thirties needs to shut the fuck up about, like, everything. All of your opinions are wrong and most of them are wrong and dumb and you believe in your wrong and dumb things with your entire chests and I’m fucking exhausted over here. Off my fucking lawn, all of you, and by “my fucking lawn” I mean “planet Earth.” Even when your opinions are right you are invariably wrong about what to do about those right opinions and I just can’t any more. I’m losing my shit over here.
I swear to Christ that if I have a rage-stroke and die before the shitgibbon does I will find a way to haunt everyone, forever. Don’t test me, Goddammit.
Many years ago I had this young man in my classes, we’ll call him Johnny, which isn’t his name. Johnny was in an all-boys’ class, the only one I’ve ever taught, and a group that, in general, drove me insane, because temperamentally I am not very well suited to teaching large groups of boys. I had him in 6th grade. He was a pretty good kid, as it went, but he was prone to getting dragged into shit if shit was nearby to get dragged into. I have described this type of student to parents before as a “kindling kid”– he’s not going to do anything on his own, but if there’s fire, he’ll burn.
Anyway, I was describing his behavior to his mother at parent teacher conferences once, and she was reacting quite a bit more strongly than I really felt like she ought to have, and at one point she looked at him and hissed something at him that I actually had to have her repeat to make sure I’d heard it correctly.
“Quarterbacks don’t act like this,” she’d said. And I was immediately of two minds; the first being of course they do, and the second being why are you laying that on your twelve-year-old right now? And let me get to the moral of the story before I tell the rest of it: parents, can we not set our kids up to peak in high school, please, and can we absolutely definitely not set them up so that if they aren’t the star QB they don’t feel like their lives are over before they’ve had a chance to start?
This is the part where I start making stuff up, by the way, because I really don’t have any evidence for any of what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s on my mind.
Anyway, this kid randomly popped into my head this weekend– I found a random little gift that he’d given me in the course of cleaning up, and it had his name on it, and this story came to mind. And I did a little bit of research. Johnny did play football in high school, but didn’t play quarterback, and frankly while he was on the team he doesn’t appear to have played much at all– I was able to look through the box scores of his senior year, because America’s obsession with high school football is genuinely creepy, and I couldn’t find any evidence that he’d contributed to the team in any meaningful way. I didn’t look at every game or anything like that, but it was pretty clear that, at the least, this kid wasn’t the star player.
And then I found a picture of him, from what would have been his sophomore year of college if he’d gone, posted by a local Painters and Allied Trades union. The tone of the caption is celebratory; they’re honoring their newest member. And I honestly can’t believe that they chose this picture to post, because the kid looks like his life is literally crumbling down around his eyes. Johnny grew up getting his head pumped full of stories about how he was going to be the star quarterback, and then he was going to go on to college and then probably the NFL and be a famous football player, and instead he’s 20 with no degree, no sports career, and joining the painter’s union.
This isn’t to say that I look down on these people; I don’t, and as a union member myself I consider the trades unions members to be brothers and sisters. I don’t look down on anybody who works for a living. But Johnny very clearly got raised to believe that there was one way his life was going to go, and it didn’t, and I know I’m reading a lot into it and I haven’t seen the kid in years but the look on his face in this picture is just fucking heartbreaking.
And maybe Labor Day isn’t the best day to post this, either. But fuck it, I’ve been thinking about him all weekend, and I hate it how quickly young kids are willing to cling to sports as what’s going to make them rich and famous when the truest thing I can say to any of them is no, it’s not. You’re not going to be in the NBA or the NFL or really anything else. You might play in high school, but I can count the number of college athletes I’ve taught over the years on one hand. This isn’t any more realistic as a life goal than “I’m going to win the lottery” is.
