Wake me up when boxing doesn’t suck

Ryne Hancock
Aug 27, 2017 · 1 min read

On a cold February night in Memphis 14 years ago, I lost faith in the sport of boxing.

Less than a year after losing to Lennox Lewis at the Pyramid, a rather humbled Mike Tyson returned to the Bluff City to face a rising star in the boxing world in Clifford Etienne.

Given the fact that I needed some money to buy my girlfriend a Valentine’s gift, I decided to shoehorn people into the tiny Whitehaven apartment I lived in for a fight party, charging $5 a head.

As we all sat around the television with abated anticipation for the fight, many of us felt that Tyson would win in 8 by knockout of Etienne.

Or so we thought.

39 seconds into the fight, Tyson found redemption in the Bluff City by beating Clifford Etienne. And while Etienne was a respectable boxer in his own right, matching him up against Tyson was the equivalent of a 1-seed going against a 16-seed in the NCAA Tournament.

I thought about that this morning in the wake of Floyd Mayweather’s triumph over Connor McGregor.

While you can applaud McGregor for putting up a valiant effort in the ring against Mayweather, it doesn’t change the fact that the state of boxing in 2017 is watered down.

And the multitude of people who spent money on the fight got played like a fiddle.

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Ryne Hancock

Written by

Proud New Orleans resident and millennial. Writes about sports, life, and New Orleans.

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