Will I Miss Ring Theory? “Prolly”
I keep thinking I should craft some fancy essay the Ring Theory boxing podcast, which hosts Eric Raskin and William Dettloff are putting out to pasture after one more episode, but that’s not what I want to do here. All I really feel like saying is thank you to Raskin and Dettloff for giving me four years (I started listening in fall 2012) of the only truly irreplaceable podcast in my rotation. Pretty much everything else I listen to is just sports news or current events, jacked up to double speed so I can absorb it fast. For years, Ring Theory has been the only podcast that I listen to on 1x speed.
When I started listening to Ring Theory, it took a few episodes for me to understand what I was hearing. Not that I didn’t know enough about boxing to keep up, but Ring Theory was just so different from the other sports podcasts I was familiar with. Just about every talk/analysis/interview podcast I can think of exists in large part to amplify the host’s reputation as a writer/creative/jerkoff or to brown nose the host’s interview subjects in hopes of someday getting a more fun job. Ring Theory, protected behind a paywall, was about setting fire to all the bullshit and pretension and fraudulence of boxing and media and laughing your balls off while watching it burn. Episodes, clocking in at around two hours per, were longer than any professionally produced podcast would be permitted to run.
In terms of production quality and subject matter, Ring Theory was never clean, and that was the point. It was only at the end of some exasperated rant that Dettloff could stumble into a line as funny as the time he accused Raskin of stealing the Ring Theory subscription riches and forcing Dettloff’s daughters into lives of giving blowjobs on the street for catfood. It was some July afternoon two years ago, driving home from work, that the catfood episode forced me to pull off the road and pound my steering wheel in fits of wheezing, red-faced laughter.
I’ll resist giving more examples out of respect for Ring Theory’s dishonorable honor code — basically, that the podcast was a safe space for all the degenerate humor that boxing’s degenerate fans could appreciate, but which doesn’t belong in polite conversation.
The hosts also brought a keen eye and a strong sense of empathy for the human details that boxing tends to unearth. A different moment probably stands out in each listener’s mind, but for me it came during an episode after Austin Trout’s December 2012 win over Miguel Cotto. Raskin and Dettloff spent what felt like 15 minutes discussing Cotto’s one-word response to a post-fight interview question. Cotto, who felt he deserved the decision (FOH, Miguel), left the ring without granting an interview, so Showtime’s Jim Gray chased him down the aisle in Madison Square Garden and managed to squeeze in one question: Miguel, Will you fight again?
I didn’t think twice about it in the moment, but Raskin and Dettloff turned Cotto’s muffled, sad-sack response into something profound about the sport. It was Cotto’s fourth loss. He likely had enough money to retire, having drawn million-plus pay-per-view audiences in fights against Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. At the time, most reasonable fans would have said Cotto had nothing left to prove. So would he box again?
Prolly.
Of course he would. He’s a prize fighter, and why leave money on the table when he could clearly earn more. Raskin and Dettloff seized on Cotto’s ambivalence — maybe right after the Trout loss, Cotto wasn’t certain he wanted to continue his career, but he understood that fighting is what he knew and all he’d ever done, and that eventually it would make sense to get back in the ring. Raskin and Dettloff broke this down with compassion and humor, and then promptly turned Cotto’s “Prolly” into an inside joke that would last until the end of the Ring Theory’s run.
Raskin and Dettloff have plenty of reasons to be proud of Ring Theory, but I bet they take as much pride in the show’s web of in-jokes and catchphrases as anything else. It takes about 15 minutes of one episode to glean that the hosts are big fans of Seinfeld and The Simpsons, so perhaps the most welcome praise I can give them is to point out how Ring Theory spawned the same kind of comedic second language among its fans as those great TV shows did. The same way I still speak in a personalized patois of Seinfeld and Simpsons references with my friends from high school and college, when I talk to other members of the Ring Theory tribe, we speak a boxing pidgin that only makes sense to us, full of Prollys and Cupajoes and Jim Gray “no no no”s; gunts and Triple Gelatos and the opposites of kudos; Bernard Hopkins saying “Bill, you’re an asshole,” Mike Tyson saying “Nonito Doh-nair-oh,” and the Osaka announce team losing its shit over Hisashi Amagasa’s knockdowns of Guillermo Rag-an-done.
Thanks, Eric and Bill, for giving us hours of entertainment, even though we paid for it. Whatever you do in the years to come, I hope you stay busy.
How busy?
Busy.
