So, it finally happened. The high-price-tag, cheap-content spectacle game of professional boxing cranked out its biggest dancing bear circus act to date. Mike Tyson lumbered out of retirement to patronize a rich boy bankrolling his own make-believe sports career. And why not? The same combat sports enthusiasts who used whine about Mayweather contemptuously putting up points, or a bored Brock Lesner putting outclassed opponents on the ground and mashing their faces into pudding, are the same dickheads watching deluded junkies give each other brain damage on Power Slap. ‘Fake’ or ‘dishonorable’ are irrelevant adjectives when the subject is less professional than someone turning tricks at a truck stop for booze.
The Youtube Kid fits the industry perfectly. No notes. Unironic congratulations to him, Mike Tyson, and all their fat stacks of Netflix cash. He’s not just what the sport deserves, but what it seeks. If you don’t like him, then what even attracts you about boxing in 2024?
The problem here is that all sports are starting to ape this shitshow. Football, for instance, is much harder to fix and remains largely skill-based, but we all knew the erosion would start the very moment the gambling gold rush started. It’s a very European road we turned on.
That stacks with the (illusory) streaming gold rush, and now Netflix snagged the rights to two NFL games next year. The days where we could turn on the TV and watch football are long gone, and now we live in the end of streaming packages’ first stage.
Next is football’s boxing era. They used to sell games to the stations, and make more money off ads. Now they’ll make money off ads, selling the games to streamers, and take a cut off our dumb asses when they inevitably sell us individual games. The prices for sports packages will become unfeasible, and we’ll be lured back to bars and restaurants to watch regular games and pay obscene prices for important games to watch at home. Hope you’ll enjoy paying through the nose to watch the Super Bowl.
There are reassuring precedents, of course. If I gave a damn about pro wrestling, for instance, I could pay 9.99 per month for access to all Pay Per View Events. But that’s niche. The NFL and NBA are much worse, right now. If I want to watch football through Amazon on any day other than Thursday, I need to pay for Prime, Hulu, then another Hulu upgrade just to access the option to pay more money for fucking football. If I pay to watch NBA games, I have to pay more to watch the WNBA– what a deal. The future here is bleak. Stupid gimmick shit on a stupid line-item pay plan that cannot be seen as lucrative unless it’s deliberately unethical. And what is America gonna do, stop watching sports?
The NFL was scared– terrified— that its viewers would boycott if they saw black players peacefully protesting on the field. They’re not worried at all about viewers boycotting after a nonconsensual assfucking. Boy, they got our number all right. Now they’re taking notes from more successful hustlers.
Can’t wait for 2030!
Outer Freakwave 