Ripped Off -- and Getting Ripped

I'm racing to write this before I forget Saturday night entirely.

And this isn't Jonathan Nolan-crafted fiction. At the fights in Brooklyn's Barclays Center hours ago -- which was the first big boxing event of 2017 and broadcast live on Showtime -- a fellow journalist kept coughing in my face.

He meant no harm; he had merely deplaned not long before from a 20-hour, multi-stop trip through the skies that had left him with an throat-irritating postnasal drip.

As men pummeled each other yards away, I wished badly I were in an Asian mall in which everyone wears a surgical mask (believe me -- it doesn't seem germaphobic with the specter of sinusoidal misery looming).

Also, beyond the coughs, I inadvertently used one of the man's pens. So I'm likely doomed to the sorts of headaches and congestion that makes all TV equally entertaining and unbearable (like the ABC Family show "Greek") and makes recollection, let alone reportage, impossible.

So here I go, as fast as I can before I fade into a juicy ball of sweatshirts and tissues.

The greater headlines are that super-middleweight champs Badou Jack "The Ripper" and James "Chunky" DeGale fought to what the judges saw a draw -- one guy had DeGale winning, the other two had it even.

Ironically, before the fight, I used the restroom while former 168-lb. titleholder and current Sky Sports commentator Carl Froch did, and we spoke upon leaving with me expressing more faith in his countryman than he -- I said Chunky could win all 12 rounds. He said, But doesn't Chunky fade late? I said, Not if he can harness his incredible athleticism.

Not that I realized I was contradicting a former champ in this exact weight class, mind you. Froch cleans up so well -- wore a grey suit with light blue windowpanes, spoke in an accent that seemed too refined to be Nottingham-bred, not that I know a damn thing about UK accents -- I wasn't sure it was Froch until another journalist confirmed it.

I want to apologize to him here and also to his government and queen, which bestowed upon him the title "Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire," or MBE, which is the smallest ascendance on the path to knighthood (and the greatest one on the path to quintessential English polite verbosity).

After the fight, same restroom, same exit: ShoBox announcer Barry Thompkins told me he thought DeGale had won, though t'was so close he couldn't quibble with a draw. And this time, I recognized the fellow immediately, without hesitation regarding where in Nottingham Forest his more provincial sounds may have been erased on behalf of Rupert Murdoch by commie hypnotists involved in that Manchurian snafu.

Read the rest HERE.