Several weeks ago, faced with driving five hours to Cornwall, I decided to drink a can of Prime. It was clear from the start that this was a mistake. Everything about the product annoyed me: the gaudy tin, the moronic typography, the dumb name. The drink itself was a horrid, acrid nothing. It gave me instant indigestion, partly from the rank taste but mostly from the self-loathing I felt at having paid good money for something so awful.
My teenage daughter, to whom I started complaining, scoffed. “You’re an idiot,” she said. “What are you doing? You’re 42.” And she was right. I’m not against stimulating beverages per se. Give me a £5 Americano and a bottle of Barolo and I’m yours. But, clearly, I’m not a Prime drinker. “This stuff just… isn’t for you,” my daughter concluded. Then she jammed in her AirPods to tune out my whining.
I think of that conversation as I contemplate Saturday’s boxing match between KSI and Tommy Fury.
The fight is sponsored by Prime, because KSI is one of the creators of Prime, as well as a YouTube celebrity and the promoter of other groceries and liquors. Tommy Fury is a guy off the telly. Yes, he’s from a famous boxing family, but Tommy himself has just had nine minor pro bouts. So neither man is a boxer of note. Their fight is happening because they are famous and don’t mind punching each other.
Of course, there is a market for that. There has been since at least 1994, when Little Donny Osmond went three rounds with Danny from The Partridge Family. To boxing followers whose main interest is the circus — the six weeks of ballyhoo, the fractious press conferences, the trash talk, the stare-downs, the ring walks, the flashing lights, the pundits’ yak-yak, the hugs when it’s all over — celebrity bouts tick the boxes.
But to those who like watching great fighters pit their skills against one another, who are there for the actual sport, this is a meaningless aside. It is not even an asterisk in boxing history. If it took place at your local leisure centre it might be worth popping your head in on the way home from the pub. Nothing more. KSI and Tommy Fury might as well be playing tennis.
This sounds harsh. I do not mean it as a criticism of the fighters themselves. They’ve been to the gym. Evidently they have done a fine job of selling the sporting equivalent of Prime: all tin and no juice. They are good at what they do, which is not boxing as I know it, but making a fast buck. So fair play.
If dyspeptic dads like me who get a belly-ache from Prime and think TikTok marks the point at which Western society jumped off the bridge don’t like it, we don’t have to watch.
The Antiques Roadshow is available on catch-up. Yet one might ask how boxing has got to the point where this sort of bout is being hyped as though it is a real, world-class contest. That is a different matter. The promoters would call it evolving the sport. I call it style over substance.
The relativistic argument is that boxing is business, and what the public wants, the public gets. I understand that position, but I do not have a shred of sympathy for it, for one reason.
In almost all other regards, boxing has not the slightest interest in giving the public what it wants. If it did, to take one example, Tommy Fury’s elder brother Tyson would by now have fought Anthony Joshua, Joe Joyce, Daniel Dubois and Oleksandr Usyk.
What’s more, big fights would not be regularly abandoned for failed drug tests.
Ringside judging would not be a byword for laughable incompetence. And brilliant match-ups like this year’s Terence Crawford v Errol Spence Jr classic would come along every other month rather than two or three times a decade. What I mean to say is that boxing is generally denuded, and it mostly has itself to blame.
Boxing fans are masochists. We love the sport in spite of its epic dysfunction, its cast of appalling supporting characters, its shadiness, its sclerosis, its grift. KSI vs Tommy Fury is a symptom of how hopeless the sport has become, not a contributing cause in its demise. If there are so few great fights out there that this sort of novelty pap can be hawked to boxing fans as the real deal then boxing must ask itself why.
