Monday, May 4, 2009

Would You Get Knocked Out for $12 million

by Tom Schreck, author of the Duffy Dombrowski Mysteries




Saturday night I spent fifty bucks to watch a fight that lasted less than six minutes.

Well worth it.

To the casual observer I'm sure it looked like two tough guys beating each other up.

To me it was ballet.

Hatton, the Brit, came right at Pacman, the Filipino.

Pacman stayed his ground and with a total economy of movement avoided getting hit and hit back hard.

Hatton went down three times and the last one scared the hell out of me. Slow motion showed he was unconscious the instant he was hit.

Hatton is probably in the 99.8 percentile of excellence in the boxing world. Unfortunately for him, Manny Pacquaio is two tenths of a single percentage point higher.

Hatton got paid 12 million dollars to get hit that hard.

Would you take that shot for that salary?

Before you answer think:

Would you being willing to have a headache the rest of your life?

Would you be willing to risk early dementia?

Would you be willing to roll the dice with things like sanity, pain and quality of life?

$12,000,000 is a lot of money for six minutes.

Forever is a long time to hurt.

And maybe this explains my rage when sports announcers claim that golf, tennis or even football are the most demanding sports.

Let's see Tiger hit a chip shot when his eye is closed from swelling, or Nadal approach the net if he was going to run into Pacquaio's left hand as he did or even let me see Ray Lewis try to hit someone who sees it coming, who can hit back and isn't wearing body armor.

Please...

2 comments:

Alan Orloff said...

Tom,

$12 mill for six minutes works out to about $33k per second. Can I sign up for five seconds? (I figure I it would take me about five seconds to climb through the ropes on my way out of the ring.)

The best fight I ever saw: I was in the Vegas Club (in Vegas, natch), watching an illegal HBO feed in the bar, of the Buster Douglas-Mike Tyson fight (from Japan). Unbelieveable. Plus I made like $150 bucks on my five buck wager on Douglas. Sweet!

Keith Raffel said...

I boxed intramurals in college for a year. I'm older now. The world is too violent. If boxing is going to continue to be legal, I'd like to see headgear and more to make it less dangerous. Wuss? Yeah, I guess so.