Forgive Me Sports Gods, For I Have Sinned
You ever get that look from someone? You know, the one where you offer a seemingly innocuous opinion on something and the reaction is as if you’d said, “You know, I don’t agree with everything Jeffery Dahmer did, but you can’t argue with the man’s culinary inclinations!” Or, as Bill Burr once spit out, “O.J. Simpson isn’t just a murderer. The man won a Heisman Trophy!” Context matters.
There’s a gastropub somewhere in the flyover states — Missouri, maybe, or a Costco parking lot — where the beer menu lists 15 IPAs with descriptions like “honeysuckle with a grapefruit finish” and “Colombian mocha with spicy ginger undertones.” And right at the bottom: Bud Light, $30. Why? Because if you read through the whole novella and still want “Saint Louis water with a hint of beer flavoring,” they’ll happily gouge you for it.
On empirical stuff, I’ll follow the science. On subjective stuff? I’ll die on most hills, including this one: 97% of IPAs taste like garage-aged turpentine with the finish of a sumo wrestler’s armpit.
Same energy when you say, “Taylor Swift? Not bad.” Suddenly you’re being waterboarded in Monster Energy by some dude whose idea of lyrical genius is Nickelback explaining a photograph. I live with two daughters and an armada of Squishmallows. My HVAC system runs on Stockholm Syndrome. Taylor Swift isn’t my hill to die on, but I’ll give her credit — she sneaks in words like crestfallen and synchronicity without sounding like an SAT prep course. That’s not nothing.
Crimes Against Sports Humanity, Exhibit A
I want Jake Paul to succeed. There. I said it. I want the world’s most insufferable YouTube-born douchecanoe to actually achieve his cartoon villain dream of becoming a boxing champion. I want him to torch every virtue-signaling combat sports fan on Twitter like a hibachi chef juggling knives and shrimp tails.
Why? Because cheering for the underdog is American as hell. Apple pie, muscle cars, privatized prison systems, and adults who read at a fourth-grade level.
Would you have gone to see Rudy if the plot twist was him blowing out his knee on Day 2 of tryouts, developing a crippling meth addiction, and getting arrested in a motel sting? Would you have watched The Rookie if Dennis Quaid just ripped his UCL, got Tommy John, and spent the rest of the film filling out expense reports at Home Depot?
Of course not. You wanted Rudy to sack that Georgia Tech QB (never mind it was a teammate’s stat). You pumped your fist when Jimmy Morris struck out Royce Clayton with a fastball that smelled faintly of Disney magic and HGH.
In the uber-realistic cinematic masterpiece Here Comes the Boom, Kevin James plays a high school teacher who gets into mixed martial arts for reasons I don’t remember — probably to pay the electric bill or save the school orchestra, whatever. Point is, you didn’t cheer for Ken “The Executioner” Dietrich to detach his spine. You jumped out of your goddamn seat when James slammed him to the mat and scored a miracle KO.
What Paul is trying to do is the same brand of Disney-scripted, suspension-of-disbelief fantasy — only if the protagonist had all the sympathetic appeal of jock itch and the bedside manner of a parking ticket. He is chasing the same absurd miracle. Not a miracle of faith or redemption. A miracle of sheer audacity. A regular guy — if social media sociopaths with Lambos count as regular — trying to morph into a legitimate world champion in combat sports.
And yet… if he pulls it off, you’re not just watching a fight. You’re watching the sporting universe prank itself.
That’s lunacy. That’s beautiful. That’s sports.
Forgive Me, Sports Gods, I’ll See Myself Out
Look, I don’t like Jake Paul. You don’t like Jake Paul. His own reflection probably doesn’t like Jake Paul. But I want him to keep winning, if only because nothing is funnier than the boxing establishment choking on its own hypocrisy. Nothing is better than every “serious” fan watching their sport get hijacked by a cartoon villain with a mullet fade and a camera crew.
So forgive me, Sports Gods, for I have sinned. I want Jake Paul to hoist a belt. I want him to become boxing’s Bud Light on a gastropub menu. Come hell or high water - hell being a virtual certainty at this point, I NEED this Bud Light on a gastropub menu.
Torsten / 120 Proof Ball
Proof that the internet was a mistake.
