In an alarming trend, milestones are now increasingly marked by people's passing.
Of course, Rickey is so fast, he was already banging on the pearly gates like, Henderson here! before Saint Peter could get to the front.
Rest easy, Rickey.
Y'all know what court we was supposed to meet up on. See you on the other side.
So, Bokolis corralled someone's account and hung in long enough to watch Mike Tyson be carried by Jake Paul for eight abridged rounds of what they claim was boxing. This came somewhat close to retroactively ruining my childhood- some punk-ass white boy from the Cleveland suburbs besting a muthafucka from the streets.
Bokolis hopes Tyson got paid well for this. According to the broadcast, Paul claims the idea for this circus was hatched when he asked a friend, do you think I can beat Mike Tyson? Of course, I was able to rationalize that this wasn't the same Mike Tyson that I had built up in my head.
Already in a dark state of mind, this was a guy who showed up to the ring looking like it was past his bedtime. Aside from sharing the belief that a legacy ain't nothing but a muthafuckin' Subaru, Bokolis can relate because I had fallen asleep during the undercard. Twenty years ago, it might have been a disco nap. But, these days, it is decidedly an old-man nap.
Aside- also conducive to sleep was that this broadcast was brutal. Is this what programming has become?
That was enough for Bokolis to think, uh-oh. Other than seeing a random clip of Tyson training here and there, I know nothing about the build-up to this. I've had friends telling me he looked good and in decent shape.
But, what Bokolis saw was a guy likely both neutered and bloated from painkillers. Paul looked like he was on whatever the current version of Adderall is. Tyson offered a modicum of energy in the first round, faded in the second- at least, that's what we saw after restarting the feed due to the buffering- and that's when I noticed that Tyson was working with a bum wheel.
If memory serves, this was the issue in his final proper fight. His knee was gone, so he tried to get himself DQ-ed and, when that didn't work, begged off.
He didn't need to beg off against this opponent, as Paul is not an elite-level pugilist and Tyson was still able to mostly dodge what he threw. That got Tyson to the finish line, well behind on the scorecards.
Rounds 3-8 were sad to watch, as Bokolis knew that Tyson had no chance. The crowd was muted by its realization that 1986 Mike Tyson was not in the building. Further humbling surely came with the realization that they had suckered themselves, and would have to wait for someone else to knock the GH out of Jake Paul.
The only saving grace was that his reflexes were such that he didn't stand in front of Paul's right hand long enough to get KTFO. This would've really fucked my shit up.
It was an eerie parallel to June 8, 2002. Bokolis was watching Lewis-Tyson in, of all places, Cleveland, Ohio. From the second round, it became clear that Tyson didn't have it and was going to get knocked out. Unlike the nostalgic saps in jerry's place last night, the crowd in the bar in Cleveland was decidedly anti-Tyson. While Tyson was champion in the hood, these middle-America white folk were full-on cancel culture.
It might have also been that it was a generation later, people who only knew Tyson as an ex-con rapist who wanted to eat his children and as the guy who, at the pre-fight hype fest that ultimately got the fight pushed back, told the punk-ass white boy who yelled out to put Tyson in a straightjacket that he would fuck you 'til you love me, faggot (after Tyson walked up and- a work, just like Tyson's slap on Paul was- threw a hook toward Lennox Lewis).
Disclosure- on three occasions, Bokolis has worked this into the act when shagging a bird, minus the part after the comma. Needless to say, there was no second trade on any of them. One was too thick- figurately thick- to get that it was coital shit-talk, the second was repulsed and couldn't wait to get away from me, the third liked it, and I couldn't wait to get away from her.
Just like that night in Cleveland, it ended with Round 8 and with Bokolis closing off another chapter.
So, Berlusconi faded away, and Bokolis had a few things go through my mind. For a bit, I wasn't sure what to think.
This man bankrolled AC Milan's surge to dominance, both of Serie A, the strongest league in Europe at the time, and through European football itself. Officially, his reign over the club ran from 1986-2017, but the time Bokolis will most fondly remember is the the run of ass whuppin from 87-95. There were Scudetti, there were European cups, and there was a barren period for the dreaded Juventus, which shut up everyone around me.
Somewhere in there, Berlusconi managed to become prime minister of Italy. When Bokolis had to explain Berlusconi to Americans, I would use the comp of Donald Trump for the bombast but, as Trump was a comparative piker, I would throw Ted Turner in there, mix the two and say that it was like Trump being president. Then we would snicker, Donald Trump president, yeah right.
With Trump fulfilling the prophesy, it turns out that Italy were early adopters, you might say, of (right-)wingnuts. Bokolis ribbed my Italian buddy about this, goading him (into invoking Benny Bianco from Bologna and) to state the obvious- just as they were in 1921, except, this time, it's the US increasingly looking like heading down the Via D'Annunzio.
In those heady days, it was kind of a cute novelty to have the owner run the whole country. His time in charge lasted about as long as novelty does.
That said, once Berlusconi came back from being prime minister, Milan, while still a top club, no longer would dominate as they did. During his second run as Prime Minister, his stench of both his politics and appetites started to define him, even in the eyes of Milanisti.
By the time he came back from his third turn, the world had been introduced to the terms bunga bunga and culona inchiavabile, Barbara was fucking the striker, Pirlo was off to Juventus. Berlusconi, in addition to hurtling towards senility (as American football fans have seen with Al Davis and are now seeing with Jerry Jones), was in the process of having his comeuppance finances dwindle and empire unravel. 2011-2017 was a period of regression for AC Milan while we waited for Bunga Bunga to divest, and even that was a shitshow.
Berlusconi shitting all over Italy was possible to overlook while Milan were delivering trophies, but ultimately became impossible to reconcile.
Suave homes, the hedge funds have got it from here.
With any luck, he has come up on his daughter's murderer, put him in the camel clutch, and humbled him for all times.
Suave homes, namber vun, there'll never be another.
So, it seems the bloodsuckers at UEFA/FIFA have met their match in this soulless cunt, who is looking to blow up football as we know it by bringing to existence the long-threatened European superleague to finally run the European Cup competition, currently doing business as the misnomered Champions League*, out of business once and for all.
Feudalism by any other name...despite the stated nationality of the bloke at the head of the table, Bokolis' inner circle of friends considers him a middleman/facilitator, and puts the blame for this squarely on the shoulders of the American ownership regimes of EPL teams.
As it is, with the proposed league saying that the squad can't play domestically and its players could be precluded from playing int'l, this has the potential to bite them in their ass.
Most of the relevant players would have no problem choosing riches of the superleague over country, but what happens when they are no longer good enough to play for the new G-20 and the lord kicks them off the land? Like a deposed nobleman, they'll be thrown in with riff raff, and still(?) banned from playing int'l.
The fans might be the bigger issue. We've hung in with the CL through all perversions because we still manage to hold some silly romantic connection to the European Cup. This new league would be like rewriting the Constitution, to which we have no allegiance, and not (self-)required to support. For Bokolis' part, I have been slowly extracting myself from football these past few years. My head is still lodged up its ass, but the rest of me is out.
The P in EPL has always, to some degree, stood for Plastic. The chief purpose of rebranding was to capture the national/int'l TV market- the so-called 'plastic fans' who who don't live near the grounds and don't go to the matches. Of course, television now makes up the bulk of the big clubs' revenue; spectators are just there to help with the TV ambience.
Similarly, the TV revenue in play here renders those local fans to being a bunch of local peasants, like someone living in a bungalow next to a high-rise who won't sell to the developers.
Surely, the new bloodsuckers would buy off UEFA/FIFA for its blessing. The EPL and the FAs are not Bokolis' hero- just a more tolerable lot of bastards. They are all cut from the same cloth.
The fans' only recourse is to disavow the clubs. Only the English fans are capable of this. Bokolis would count Gary Neville among them. While G.Neville the filthy manc cunt is to be reviled, I very much like the way G.Neville the analyst shakes. He is just about as quick to slam his own club for its misdeeds as he is any other, and praise a club he dreads just as quickly as he would his own, which are about the best things you can say about an analyst. He rightfully shreds MUFC and LFC in the same breath.
Have you ever noticed the difference between who gets the championship trophy in football (the captain) and who gets it in American sports (the owner)? As part of the greater culture, as Bokolis pointed out to his circle, you see a big difference right there between Britain, hardly as left-leaning as much of western Europe, and America. In America, where corporations seemingly have more rights than humans, and the free speech granted to a corporation and its money extends to the right to tell you to STFU- with the threat, implicit or explicit, to throw you off its land- when your view clashes with its own, a man with an opinion like this wouldn't even get three minutes to voice it on corporate media, let alone an uninterrupted three minutes.
Bokolis remembers reading- maybe 10-15 years ago, an article about the growing American ownership of clubs in the EPL and how they were already lobbying to scrap relegation. Someone was cited as saying it will never happen because they need 2/3 of the votes, and then the league has to also agree, which it would never do. I thought, just you wait, pal.
It's this kind of nonsense that America is seeking to bring to old world Europe, only it has stormed the beaches of England this time.
