From a dodgy big toe to fighting big Joe
You’ll have heard of the plan. He had actors wired up to fake fuse boxes and buzzers like they were condemned to walk the Green Mile.
Then, in filed the unsuspecting subjects of the experiment. The volunteers were told the more they twisted the switch in front of them in the doctor’s lab, the more powerful the electric shock those strapped into the mechanisms would experience.
It soon became clear that the further away people were — behind a screen, in another room, absent apart from muffled screams — the further to the right the level was pulled. Ouch.
It’s the same with commentators in internet chatrooms, forums, some websites. Ask any inter-county GAA player. You wouldn’t say a lot of that stuff to someone’s face if you met them out and about on the street.
Sometimes, the hive mind of the net, however, gets it just right.
On Saturday night the world was appalled — and secretly excited, I’d wager — by the ridiculous scenes in Munich.
For those who, luckily, slept or socialised their way through the evening and managed to avoid the circus, here’s the digested read.
Derek Chisora put the tin hat on a week of shameful behaviour in the run-up to his heavyweight title bout against Vitali Klitschko by spitting at the Ukrainian’s brother Wladimir. He had earlier slapped his opponent at a tense weigh-in.
The action on the canvas — two men beating each other up for our weekend entertainment, let’s remember — was the most edifying spectacle of the whole affair.
Then, as D’Unbelievables say, it’s worse it improved.
David Haye — a man who bookmarked a space for himself in the almanac of the world’s worst excuses when he cried off with a sore toe not so long ago — showed up at the post-fight press conference swigging from a warm bottle of Desperado mixed lager (nominative determinism is when your name reflects your job: like Mr Stout, the barman. I don’t know what it’s called when your drink of choice of a Saturday night gives some hint to your mood).
Then it all kicked off, as I’m sure you know. Haye’s manager was cut badly with a flying camera tripod when the two boxers brawled as if they were on a bloody disco dance floor. Boxing again plumbed the depths.
A few nights later, the nation settled down to watch Ian Palmer’s documentary film on the culture of bare-knuckle fighting amongst sections of the Travelling community.
The film was a decade in the making, with the director first coming into contact with the Quinn-McDonaghs at a family wedding in the 90s. From there he attended dozens, it seemed, of these fights, featuring mostly James Quinn McDonagh, staged in lonely country lanes, farm yards, wherever.
The film was far from an effort at glamorising this activity but rather, I thought, an honest, authentic, warts-and-all account of this tradition. Though some of the punches were sickening and fights at times unremitting, the time allowed to the wives and mothers of the fighters away from the action hit home most. It’s clear it’s one part of their lives on which they’d gladly turn their backs.
Cable TV company HBO forced their way into US homes in the 80s and 90s using professional boxing as the thin end of the wedge, not unlike Sky Sports some seasons later with Premier League football.
They then made their name with series like The Sopranos and The Wire. Now, they want to turn the grimly-real account of life fighting your kin down country roads into a mini-series, if reports in the US are to be believed this week.
Within hours, a photoshopped poster promoting a fight between, ‘Big Joe Joyce’ — one of Knuckle’s peripheral, if memorable, figures — and a smiling David ‘The Haymaker’ Haye was pinging around the internet.
“It’s on!” the tag line read. As I said, sometimes those in front of warm computer screens get it right — I’d watch that fight, and I know who my money would be on.
* adrian@thescore.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
