I didn't really want to write about a plane ride. Honest, I didn't. Plane rides always suck, and spending the better part of 14 hours in either a plane or an airport sucks even harder. So when the flight from Seattle to Cincinnati had cable, I was pumped. Granted, they only had 8 channels, but one was ESPN, so I got to watch live Sportscenter on a plane. That was pretty cool. And it wasted a couple otherwise tedious and exhausting hours. By the time I got home, I was so tired I could barely form sentences, and when I did I could only croak them out with extreme struggle.
But then I slept. A lot. I slept better than I ever had in my life. Moving from sleeping on a bed like a woodpile in Soldotna to a bed that was slightly better than a woodpile in Anchorage to my comfortable sleeping cocoon might have been the best thing that happened to me since I left home. Seriously, I forgot what a nice warm bed was like. It's glorious.
So planes and sleep discomfort are done for me for a while. At least I hope so. Thursday was relaxing and filled with good beer and football, and more sleep. Wonderful wonderful sleep. Tonight, violence! State mandated legal violence, in the form of Friday Night Fights at a shitty casino in Rhode Island.
There were 7 fights, most of them bad. Young fighters without much professional experience slugging it out makes for either a hilariously brutal or brutally boring fight. Most were the latter. Each fight had some sort of local flavor to it, with one or both of the combatants hailing from Rhode Island or Massachusetts. So the crowd was amazing. Every single variety of Rhody trash was there, from the coked up Guidos, to the fat middle aged white women showing off their variety of dream catcher tattoos, to the Hispanic chicks drunk of Rum and Diet Coke, to the way too young to be wearing those clothes girls, to the dudes who think they know a thing about boxing but still yell "PUNCH HIM THE THE DICK" every 10 seconds. The best was this woman who, being a fan of one of the fighters, a man named Ray, screamed "Go for the bawdy, Ray. Go for the bawdy, Ray." The Rhode Island accent is abysmal, probably the worst thing that can happen to ears, but listening to it holler about boxing is pretty damn funny.
The main event was a ladies fight. For the UBF (whatever the fuck that is) Super Bantamweight Title of the World, New London's own Shelly Vincent fought someone from Long Island. I forgot her name already. It was the most entertaining, vicious, and energetic boxing match I have ever seen. Really, it was all the great thing about the sport, rolled into two tiny, mean women who just wanted to brain each other with their hands. Each round started with a flurry of brutality that left one or the other of them stunned and backing up. There was real hate between them. None of this touching gloves before each round bullshit during the male bouts. Just pummeling. It was amazing.
Shelly Vincent ended up winning the title, bringing it to New London, where winners...winners never come here. Her fans might have swayed the judges, the bout was pretty even. They were loud, super into the fight, and for some damn reason, wearing Guy Fawkes masks. Are they supposed to make us think they are in Anonymous? Are they trying to be subversive? I don't know. It was weird. And there were a lot of them.
Boxing is a lot of fun live, even if it is in a shitty Rhode Island casino filled with shitty Rhode Island trash.
SD
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