Even though Friday’s showdown between Mitt Romney and Evander Holyfield raised a reported $1m for CharityVision, the friendly exhibition was underpinned with a pathos that was impossible to ignore. No one submits themselves to celebrity boxing because their professional lives are going well. The hardest part was figuring out who to feel more sorry for.
The black-tie, 20s-themed benefit in Salt Lake City wasn’t the first high-profile fight between public figures – these sideshows are a tradition as old as PT Barnum and John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. But you might not have known it from the crossover interest and widespread curiosity it generated.
Professional fighters require at minimum a rare courage to enter, near-naked, the ring – the squared circle where a man can be killed by his opponent but cannot be murdered, in a legal sense – for a public accounting of his masculinity where all will be exposed.
Maybe people watched on Friday to see Romney, the buttoned-down Mormon who was stage-managed within an inch of his life during the 2012 presidential campaign, submit himself to that crucible. Or a simulation thereof.
Maybe they were intrigued by the bizarre juxtaposition of two men both undone by uncertainties over tax returns who otherwise share little common ground.
Or maybe they just wanted to see Holyfield cave in a 68-year-old’s face with the same weapons-grade left hook that more than once stopped Mike Tyson in his tracks.
Yet as the vaguely sad footage of the non-televised event was disseminated piecemeal via social media on Friday night, the reality of two men trading on their dignity – even in the name of a worthy cause – became manifest. To call it a sparring session would be charitable. This was an exercise in prancing and pawing that made Mayweather v Pacquiao look like Hagler v Hearns.
The sadness redoubled midway through the second round, when a ponderous overhand right from Romney sent Holyfield – a warrior who stood toe to toe with Riddick Bowe, Lennox Lewis, George Foreman and Larry Holmes – meekly spilling to the canvas.
The proud Olympian who fought his way out of poverty to a $350m fortune since squandered and stared down the most feared bully in American public life in a pair of epochal victories over Tyson had been reduced to sideshow B-side: Anthony Quinn as Big Chief Mountain Rivera in the heart-rending final scene of Requiem for a Heavyweight. All that was missing was the headdress.
Equally if less obviously tragic was the spectacle of Romney’s belated attempt at relatability. It could have counted for so much more three years ago.
Thus Holyfield v Romney took its place alongside Vanilla Ice v Todd Bridges, Olga Korbut v Darva Conger, Ron Palillo v Dustin Diamond, Joey Buttafuoco v Joanie “Chyna” Laurer, Danny Bonaduce v Barry Williams and Tonya Harding v Paula Jones.
The much-fancied but never-staged grudge match between DMX and George Zimmerman might have offered more redeeming value, to say nothing of two-way action.
The record will show that CharityVision won, while Romney and Holyfield lost. What Friday’s event says of us, a public captivated by bloodlust and fantasies of destruction defying all reason, is less certain.
