The Prizefighter

The Prizefighter(continued_3)

The trouble with sports is its all fixed. The football games, baseball games, none of its real. The whole realm of athletics has turned into one massive WWE wrestling match. It’s all staged to get the biggest crowds and the largest profits. Athletes don’t even have to be athletic anymore--they just have to look the part, don a costume and walk on stage to a round of cheers and applause. We’re actors, and the Olympics are the grandest stage, the Holy Grail of acting. Performers.

Have you ever heard of the Black Sock Scandal?

1919 World Series. They fixed the World Series. The team owner wanted to make money on the team losing the Series. Betting. It’s all about the money. The owner of the White Sox told his team to throw the series for money. Throw away the dreams of your youth, and boyish promises of fame and honor. For a handful of money, and a sack full of cash. Dollar bills with Jefferson’s face.

Thomas Jefferson had over two hundred slaves. It’s no wonder you never see a Bernard Jefferson, or a Sylvia Jefferson. There’s not a white Jefferson on the face of Earth anymore.

And the man who ruined sports, his name is Arnold Rothstein, the gangster who started it all. The New York gangster who destroyed sportsmanship for good, and the careers of “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, and the other seven players of the Black Socks. The 1919 World Series.

His name is Arnold Rothstein. Because of him, there’s no freedom in sports. There’s cages of men waiting to get out of the machine, the machine of gambling and no one can do it. It’s all a show. It’s all an act, and Boxing is the worst of them all.

When a boxer starts to become a contender, starts to become a somebody, a man whom the bosses can depend on, they come to you. In pinstriped suits and cigars flaunting from their mouths they come in drones to the hive of men who love sports and turn them into working machines. It’s such a busy hive.

The Prizefighter’s are the bums. The bums are the prizefighters. That’s how you know you’re living in the land of Cocytus. When nothing makes sense anymore. Deep in the rings of hell where no happy man can wallow.

They come and say, “Win this fight,”. “Lose that fight,” And just like that, the whole idea of boxing is washed away under a sea of meaningless acting. But the fans love it. They don’t care.

Sometimes, it seems like I’m the only person on Planet Earth who does. Who cares.

They came to me when I was a young bum with all my teeth and fists faster than a hummingbird, after I iced Punishing Joe Black. That’s when the newspapers started running stories, and my name was in ink all through the North East. The fans whispered my name in train stations like the steam of speeding locomotives and sooner rather than later my name got around to those that mattered. And suddenly, I was under their thumb.

I was the grime underneath their fingernails. I was nothing.

With a barrel of a gun in between your tongue and your cheek, there’s not much room to complain.

It all starts with Arnold Rothstein.

Wake-Up. Rewind.

Romano is coming at me like a rhinoceros. Bulking arms lurking through the air towards my body. He’s so slow. He couldn’t hit a punching bag. Those don’t even move, you know. I’m trying to keep my fists tied to my waist and just let him hit me, but he’s miles off my face every time he goes for the kill.

I feel like a mouse teasing an elephant.

He throws a hulking hook and I’m halfway down a highway before he realizes his punch didn’t connect with my face. I give him a one-two and he shudders back, and then I go back to teasing him.

I want him to hit me. Why doesn’t he hit me?

I can’t take being whipped again. He holds his big gorilla fists up and pushes his mighty legs forward.

David and Goliath.

I want to be covered in blood tonight.

I want to see Red.

And Romano is so slow he wont let me. I wonder how this bum ever became the world’s most prestigious prizefighter.

Romano grimaces and swallows some spit, and throws his fists in my direction, and I think I could move away from his fists if I was a blind man, or a century old Cybil.

He raises his hands in the air to say, “what gives”, and I can see every camera in the arena snapping photos of him looking strong. Like a prizefighter should look. I want to end him.

I want to fuck his girlfriend at his funeral for the sport of it. It’s a cleaner sport than this is. No betting in fucking. Only the lust of man.

Romano comes at me and misses again. I duck and I’m under his big swinging arms, and then I’m spoon feeding him an uppercut. Then a quick jab. He puts his hands up and figures out he can cover his face, and I’m welting the skin where packed abs jut out to meet brutality. Bloody bruises bend and break under my fists and he stumbles and drops his hands to his body. I reel back and place one in the jaw.

David and Goliath.

One. Two. Three.

The brief numerology.

Four. Five Six. My hands are catapulting in the air. I’m somebody now.

Seven. Eight. Nine.

I’m a prizefighter.

Ten.

I won the fight. I’m a dead man. I can’t take another whipping again. I don’t have it in me. I had to lose this fight. They told me I had too.

It all started with Arnold Rothstein.