Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Star power at the Pacquiao fight

The final tally is in and here are the celebrities who turned out for last Saturday's big fight at Cowboys Stadium: Robert Duvall! Troy Aikman! Deion Sanders! And, uh, Miles Austin, Ken Hamlin, Drew Pearson and Marion Barber.

In fairness, stars weren't expected. I think the focus instead was on Jerry Jones. Didn't the storyline seem to be that, in taking what's usually a Las Vegas high-roller event and bringing it to Texas, Jones was single-handedly returning boxing to the masses? Here, look: "'Jerry Jones put on a show,' said Big Sugar Ray Phillips, a former pro fighter from Mineral Wells, Texas, who is now a trainer and actor. 'The good thing is that he didn't price out the fans. He made the prices reasonable for the working man to come to fights like this.'"

I mean, even Tim Smith expressed hope that if "Pacquiao and Clottey put on a good show and Jones is really committed to holding more boxing events at his stadium, it could jump-start a movement to push boxing back into the mainstream. But it is an uphill push."

By the way, here's my scorecard: Winners -- Jerry Jones, the city of Arlington, the Diamond Club, Grapevine's Gaylord Texan Resort. Losers -- Dallas city coffers.

2 comments:

Michael the G said...

Via MTLB by the way,
I like your blog. It's got just enough snark to be fun without turning into a perspective-less "Craplackhole"

You missed one important aspect on your Scorecard though.

Losers- Actual boxing fans (all 30 of us left in the States!) who know Clottey was a piss-poor stand-in for Floyd Mayweather.

Captchka "unness". As in, "It's not that Ban Ki Moon is bad, he just doesn't have unness of an U Thant or Kofi Annan"

Irene Done said...

Michael -- Thanks for reading. And as a casual boxing fan, I sympathize. I don't think we're ever going to see the Mayweather match-up though.