#these are very different versions of the characters and the surrounding events so these championship matches serve different purposes!

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AWWWWWWWWW

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Skating prodigy Andrei Kutovoi dreams of the Olympics

You might have noticed him during the Junior Grand Prix event in Courchevel, this August.

We sure did.

The posture, the qualities of his skating, the musicality. You just couldn’t take your eyes off Russia’s Andrei Kutovoi.

He finished the event – his single JGP assignment this season and his first ever international competition – with a bronze medal, and left skating fans in wonder, in amazement: who is this incredibly gifted teenager, debuting on the World stage? Andrei was still 13 this summer.

Well, he’ll tell you that himself, in an interview done in St. Petersburg, his home town, by our very own Natasha Ponarina. Based in St. Petersburg as well, and working as a figure skating photographer, Natasha knew Andrei already – she had been following him for a couple of seasons, eyes glued, lens glued to the talent that he was, practicing at Yubileyny Sports Palace and, since 2017, at Tamara Moskvina’s figure skating sport club.

Cousin of Elizaveta Nugumanova, another skating wunderkind (Elizaveta is three years older), Andrei tried skating as well, when he was 5. And, as everyone expected, he liked it that much that he literally started running on the ice – he’d tell you with a smile.

…and you’ll notice the smile, but also the seriousness, in the numerous photos accompanying this interview.

Work of Ms. Ponarina, the tens of pictures recompose Andrei’s journey and career so far – and we gladly share them with you. Adding, you’ll see, some heartwarming pictures from the family’s archive.

Ladies and gentlemen, there you have him: 14-year-old Andrei Kutovoi, Olympic hopeful.

Natasha Ponarina: Andrei, let’s start from the very beginning – when did you start skating? How old were you?

Andrei Kutovoi: I was almost 5 when I put the skates on for the first time.

And how did that happen? Were you watching skating on TV, were you following your cousin, Elizaveta Nugumanova? What made you decide that you wanted to skate?

By that time, Liza was already training, and they decided to bring me to the rink as well, just to try it, maybe I would like it. I wasn’t following skating then, so it wasn’t my decision.

Who brought you to the rink, remember?

It was my grandmother who brought me to the rink for the first time.

What do you remember from your first day on skates? Did you like it right from the very start?

I think the first day at the rink was exciting and interesting, because it was something new for me. My mom says my first steps on the ice weren’t really steps, but it was running. I was running on ice, so to speak [smiling].

And judging by the fact that we kept going to the rink, I think I really liked it.

Where did you learn to skate and who was your coach back then?

My first coach was Irma Georgievna Bukhartseva, we trained on a small rink of Yubileyny Sports Palace.

And on the practice rink of Yubileyny Palace, Alexei Mishin’s group trained, which I joined later – and it was where I met my current coach, Veronika Anatolyevna Daineko.

When you first started skating was there a skater you wanted to be like? What about now – do you have a skater you admire?

When I first started skating I didn’t know any skaters and I didn’t watch figure skating.

It changed over time, and now I’m watching closely what’s going on in the skating world. I try not to miss any event of junior and senior level.

I admire the Japanese skater Yuzuru Hanyu, his skating skills, musicality, the way he feels every single movement. The ice and Yuzuru are like a single entity, that’s his element. Nathan Chen is also very strong technically, he can do all the quads – it’s the highest level.

“MY FAVORITE JUMP IS THE LUTZ”

Tell us, what do you like to do in your free time? You tried drawing, maybe something else?

There isn’t that much free time, but if there is some outside my studying, then I like recreational activities. Recently, my mother and I have been to the Norwegian ropes course park “Orekh”, that was a lot of fun, all that climbing, I really liked it, and I’ll definitely come back there.

I like to draw, as you mentioned, and I also like dancing and photography.

How does your weekly schedule look like? One has to train a lot to get the result that you have. Do you have time for school?

I train six days a week and I have one day off. Each training day includes two ice practices, two warm-ups, cool-down, stretching, and, on different days, I have specialized physical training, acting classes, choreography, jazz classes.

Unfortunately, I don’t have much time for school, I get to go there infrequently, but I’m being home-schooled, with the help of my mom and online lessons.

You’re 14 now – tell us, which medal/result/competition you are most proud of so far? [Andrei turned 14 on October 4, 2019]

Some of the most important ones are the first places in Championships of Russia (Younger Age) in 2016 and 2017.

Which is your most vivid memory from your career so far? Looking back, what comes to your mind first?

The strongest memory so far is the first Junior Grand Prix in Courchevel [August 2019]. It was my first international competition.

I was also really impressed by a show in Germany I took part a while ago [Media Markt Eisgala – Concert on Ice 2016]. We were touring different cities on a bus, I was surrounded by, and performed with, amazing famous skaters, aerial and ice acrobats, and there were also famous singers and music bands in the show. It was such a memorable experience.

Was it hard to learn the triple Axel? Which jump do you like the most – and the least?

Yeah, triple Axel is an ultra-C jump, like quads, so you can’t equate it to the triples. My favorite jump is the Lutz, and I don’t have jumps that I don’t like.

Can you tell us about your programs this season, how would you describe them? Judging by your inspired performances, you really like them, you are so in character, one-on-one with the music…

Thank you, I’m really glad to hear it.

Most of my SP is to “Fly Me to the Moon”, it’s a love theme. At first, I’m waiting for my beloved, counting the hours, then I see her and I hold out my hand, inviting here to fly with me to the moon, to immerse into the music of the stars. And, in the end, I confess my love to her.

At the end of the program there is a part for the step sequence, and I just dance to the music “I Won’t Dance”, the modern version of it.

My FS is to the music from “Les Misérables”. I represent the character from the times of French Revolution, Jean Valjean, but many people see me as Gavroche, which you can say is also right, since both these characters represent the best ideas of “Les Misérables”: independence, devotion, purity, compassion.

I really like these programs and I’m very grateful for them to Nikita Mikhailov.

You started you first season on junior Grand Prix level with a bronze medal in France. What are you plans and goals for this season, what do you want to achieve?

My plans include two triple Axels and a quad in a program and, of course, to skate clean. My team and I are working towards that.

What is your biggest dream as an athlete, a dream that you can share with the readers? What do you wish for as a skater?

[smiling] My biggest dream? The Olympic Games.

Please check out the rest of Inside Skating’s photo story featuring Andrei! His family has provided many photos from him starting out skating at five and his skating journey 💕

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Bitterness in the Age of Fighting

I was excited when the first episode of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness appeared in my youtube feed last Monday, I’m willing to watch anything Jon Bois puts his name on right now. Most of his content is centered around American football and basketball and baseball, which is great, those are all sports I have watched at least semi-regularly at some point in my life, but for the past few years I’ve followed Mixed Martial Arts more closely than any of them. Felix Biederman, the writer and narrator of the show, was a new name to me: I know Chapo Trap House by reputation but the most I have ever heard of it is a few clips out of context.

That first episode did some strong establishing work to set the tone and context for the series, and then got to work telling the fascinating story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Gracie family. It’s a story I know decently well, I think Felix did a good job of picking out the interesting characters and especially the moments of class struggle, and of course his words are backed up by the datawave audiovisual stylings of Jon Bois that we have come to know and love. The political ideas were more familiar and less interesting to me than the bits about fighting but I was curious to see how the show was going to try to draw connections and parallels between the rise of MMA as a spectator sport and the socio-political environment in which that rise took place.

I was engaged and I watched each episode as it came out through the week and by the end of episode four on Thursday I was starting to turn a little on the series. In this era of Youtubers with healthy Patreon support and good microphones I’ve gotten used to clear, smoothly edited, well recorded voice work and for me Felix’s narration falls short there, especially for a project with a major media company behind it. More than that, though, I was no longer on board with where the show seemed to be going, and I was worried that it would end on a sour note. I found myself agreeing with Felix’s political commentary but disagreeing more and more with his thoughts on MMA and the way he was choosing to frame the history of the sport.

The final installment disappointed me more than I had feared it might, enough to motivate me to make some kind of response to or critical reading of the whole series. Re-watching it with that in mind I (unsurprisingly) found more things I disliked. Fighting in the Age of Loneliness does an excellent job of telling the story of the ancestry, birth, rise, fall, second rise and anticipated second fall of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, but along the way it makes some pretty big missteps and takes some positions that I strongly disagree with. I’m not going to break down each episode individually but I do want to lay out the issues I have with the series and in particular dig in to the problems with the last episode. Towards the end I think I might even call Felix Biederman a fascist.

First, I want to provide some context for my own thoughts about MMA, and make some inferences and assumptions about Felix’s history with the sport that I think go some way to explaining why we see it quite so differently.

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I am absolutely not a long-time hardcore Mixed Martial Arts fan, until relatively recently I didn’t have any interest in combat sports at all. Growing up in the UK around the turn of the millenium I was aware of boxing but only from a distance, it was already well on its way to fading from the forefront of the popular sporting consciousness, and my pacifist socialist middle-class parents certainly weren’t watching Mike Tyson fights. The first contact I had with what I would later know as MMA was a grainy video I remember watching on some pre-YouTube video sharing site as a teenager: a highlight montage of a man wearing black, red and white shorts kicking various different people in the head in various different boxing rings, with the same concussive effect each time.

I became more aware of the modern sport of MMA when I started noticing the UFC in mainstream sports media headlines around 2014. Three names kept appearing in those headlines: Jon Jones, for running into things with cars, Conor McGregor, for running his mouth, but most of all Ronda Rousey, for running through every challenger the UFC put in front of her. I suspect that there are a lot of newer MMA fans who, like me, were swept up in the hype surrounding Rousey and McGregor during that time, and stuck with the sport after they finally broke their respective winning streaks and came back down to earth.

Three years later even though I watch MMA most weekends and even though I have become almost as fascinated as Felix Biederman seems to be with the history of the UFC, the people who have fought in it, and the things that they have done to each other, I still consider myself a ‘casual’ fan. This is at least partly because when I think of ‘real’ or ‘hardcore’ MMA fans, I think of people like Felix, who have been around the sport for a lot longer and are, at best, skeptical about the results of its most recent jump in popularity.

Felix doesn’t explicitly talk about the genesis of his interest in the sport but there are hints in the text. The general tone of the piece goes from being detached and historical in the first episode to personal and emotional in the last, which I think is both a deliberate choice on Felix’s part and a reflection of his own experience. The third episode, when his narrative reaches the mid-2000s, is when I think it transitions from learned history to memory, and it’s around here that Felix starts making frequent references to goings on in MMA fan culture. If I’m correct then Felix Biederman has been following MMA for at least a decade longer than I have really known what it was. He has had the time to become emotionally invested in fighters and even the UFC as an organisation in ways that I am not, and of course his initial views on the sport were formed a relatively long time ago. MMA fights in 2018 don’t look all that different than they did in 2005 but the UFC has certainly changed a lot in that time, as have public awareness of and attitudes towards a new generation of combat sports stars.

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That decade and a half of change in the UFC is the real focus of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness, but it presents itself as something much broader. The first episode is titled ‘The Invention of Fighting for Money’ and in it Felix makes a lot of sweeping statements about the past that don’t hold water. He very much tells the winner’s version of history, the narrative favoured by the UFC and the Gracie family, who would have you believe that they invented not only the modern sport of MMA but somehow the very idea of fighting itself. Felix remarks on the marketing and promotional skills of Rorion Gracie in the second episode without seeming to realise quite the degree to which he has himself fallen prey to them, and he also comes across as having the slightly fetishistic attitude towards East Asian martial arts that has become common in the USA over the past half century or so.

As he transitions out of the prologue, Felix says “the true catalyst for MMA as a sport, business and spectacle go back to Japan”, and when he goes on to describe the spread of Jujutsu from Japan to Brazil he says “after hundreds of years, Martial Arts had finally broken containment.” At the end of the series he proclaims that the “fourth era of fighting itself” is currently beginning and that the previous two ‘eras’ only lasted a handful of years each.

These generalisations don’t stand up to even the lightest scrutiny. The history of Martial Arts or combat sports or fighting or whatever term you care to use goes back much farther than feudal Japan, and some of the other things Felix says imply that he is at least partially aware of this. As he is giving his starry-eyed take on the life of Judo’s inventor he says “As long as there are people, they will at some point want the ability to keep someone from kicking their ass, no matter how unlikely it is that they will ever get into a fight.” It strikes me as particularly American that his argument in favor of combat sports being inherent to human society is based on the concept of self-defence. I prefer a line of reasoning that is similar but based on competition: As long as there are people, they will at some point want to test their wits and skill and strength against each other.

Indeed, the story as we know it of unarmed combat sports is as old as recorded history: there are images of wrestling in four thousand year old Egyptian tombs, and the classical Greek Olympics included an event called Pankration, which could be roughly translated as ‘fighting with all of your power’, that had an almost identical ruleset to early Ultimate Fighting Championship events.

Felix oversimplifies the history of fighting as a whole, but even if we just look at what he says about Mixed Martial Arts he gets it wrong. In episode one he says “The entire sport of Mixed Martial Arts owes its existence to Mitsuyo Maeda” and then in episode two he alleges that “A world where proto-MMA existed outside of gymnasiums in Brazil seemed pretty unlikely in 1976.” A corollary of my earlier statement might be that as long as there are people testing their wits and skill and strength against each other, there will be other people who think they can do it better. People have been pitting different schools of fighting against each other and amalgamating them long before the Gracie clan existed.

A decade before the date when Felix claims that mixed martial arts were confined to Brazil, Bruce Lee was blending Wing Chun with other styles to formulate Jeet Kune Do. A decade before that a Japanese Karateka was devising a ruleset which would eventually become Kickboxing to facilitate competitions between karate and Muay Thai. In the 40s the Kajukenbo school was founded in Hawaii with the goal of rigorously testing multiple fighting styles against each other to determine which elements of each were the most effective. In the 30s a Czechoslovakian Jew was refining the boxing and wrestling he had been taught in gyms into Krav Maga in brawls against anti-semitic thugs.

In Victorian London the Bartitsu school taught gentlemen a blend of five different fighting styles from around the world, while in the music halls exhibition matches pitted boxing against Savate. Savate was itself developed over the preceding century by efforts to find a middle ground between the heavy-booted street fighting style spreading from French ports and the Queensbury rules boxing that was popular in England.

Even the legend of the birth of Muay Thai, a fighting style which has had arguably as much influence on the modern sport of MMA as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, is a story about mixed martial arts: when the Konbaung Dynasty of Burma captured a famous fighter during their battles with Siam in 1767, they offered him the chance to win his freedom if he could demonstrate the superiority of his Siamese boxing style against the Burmese school, which he promptly did by knocking out ten Burmese opponents.

Felix contradicts himself on this topic in the first episode when he describes Jigoro Kano studying western wrestling and sumo to augment his Jujutsu training and develop Judo. In the second episode when he says “In 1993 no one knew anything, and most people still thought that if you did karate the right way you could blow up somebody’s heart” he is obviously being facetious but he is also projecting his own ignorance outwards. There has always been fighting, all over the world, and there have always been evolving schools of thought about the best ways to fight and the best rules for fighting as a sport. The story of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and the Ultimate Fighting Championship is captivating but it is not, as Felix presents it, the only story about fighting. In this regard, as with others, he seems to have internalized the some of mystique that the UFC has cultivated around itself and its history.

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Once the history lesson is over I think Fighting in the Age of Loneliness hits its stride and Felix’s passion for the Pride FC and UFC fights and fighters that drew him into the sport shines through in the writing and the narration. His criticisms of the ways that the UFC continues to underpay and otherwise mistreat its fighters are spot on and if anything he could have gone into its anti-union policies in more depth. Before I get to the final episode, there are a few smaller criticisms I want to get out of the way.

Firstly, I would like to have seen more about modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts in the show. I largely chalk this up to the difference in perspective on the sport between Felix and myself: a female fighter was what drew me to watch the UFC in the first place so my image of the sport is one that has always included women, whereas Felix got his start watching Pride, which had no female fighters, and an all-male era of the UFC. There were women competing in MMA at that time and a few exclusively female promotions but if Felix ever watched any of them he doesn’t mention it. In the end, Ronda Rousey gets a minute and a half, Joanna Jędrzejczyk gets about 30 seconds and Cristiane Justino gets a name check.

Rousey is the only female fighter to be mentioned outside of the quarantined WMMA portion of the show, and she comes up during a rather odd accusation of nepotism that Felix levels at Dana White, one which I have heard from other longer-standing UFC fans. I am no supporter of Dana’s and I’m not seeking to defend his character, but it seems far more likely to me that the reason the UFC put so many promotional resources behind Ronda Rousey and Conor McGregor is not, as Felix supposes, simply because Dana White personally liked those two fighters, but rather because he saw the opportunity to make a lot of money off of them, which he did. Dana is a fight promoter, he is notoriously fickle in his affections and the warmness he displays towards any given fighter is directly correlated to their ability to drive pay-per-view buys for his promotion.

I also think that there are some more straightforward explanations for the UFC’s success than the poetic ones that Felix understandably focuses on. The ideas of the UFC as a refuge for outcasts and the alienated, both as fighters and as fans, and the honesty of single combat in an age of uncertainty are clearly very thematically important to Fighting in the Age of Loneliness as a project. For me the series places too much importance on the role those things played in the current popularity of the sport and doesn’t put enough emphasis on, or even mention at all, some more mundane but more significant contributing factors.

The vacuum at the top of combat sports that was created when boxing all but collapsed under the accumulated weight of decades of corruption and promotional malpractice, and the brief but significant success that the WWE had with a grittier presentation of professional wrestling in the late 90s both set the stage for the rise of modern MMA in the USA. That rise was helped along by things like the value of the walk-off head kick knockout and the fourteen second armbar victory in the age of the highlight clip and the animated GIF, and the mix of astuteness and good fortune that led the UFC to put out a reality TV show featuring actual physical conflict at a time when programming was being dominated by reality shows based on exaggerating and continually re-hashing interpersonal squabbles.

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At the end of episode four, titled “As the world fell apart, the only magic was in the cage”, Felix’s rhetoric about the things that happen during UFC fights reaches its most florid, mythological heights. Against a montage of post-fight embrace photographs he says “The magic that we wish we saw everywhere else was in the cage [...] At least there was one place where unthinkable things actually happened, at least if you put two weird people with incredible abilities in front of each other their combined experiences and opposing martial abilities would create a beautiful, maddening story.” I am not criticising Felix for being more captivated by the emotion and passion of fighting than I am but the praise and reverence which he lavishes upon his favourite period of the sport’s recent history at the end of the fourth episode clashes brutally with the way he starts the fifth.

“No-one is ever content to just like something, especially not nowadays”, he says. “We’re not just fans of things any more. We declare our media consumption habits to determine the types of people we are [...] now if someone doesn’t like something we like they hate us” These lines and the visuals that accompany them are presented as a barb aimed at the legions of TV personality and pop star fans bitterly defending their territory on social media. Although there is a hint of self-deprecation about this segment I don’t read much self-awareness here, mostly just old fashioned middle-class punching down at the popular culture of the working class.

In the way he frames what he views as the best period of the UFC’s history, Felix is himself engaging in, as he puts it, “battles that our millionaire entertainers will probably never give a shit about or even find out about”. He has taken to the field of the culture war to defend his memory of a past version of a massive, sinister entertainment company against the changes that he perceives to be ruining it.

Here is where the bitterness begins to creep in, and build. Felix starts talking about the insecurity of modern MMA fans and the sport’s image problem, but then he abruptly dispenses with those concerns and starts arguing that MMA should remain insular and niche. A this point he also waves a huge screaming red flag by describing Jon Jones as a “weird person” who is “actually pretty fascinating once you get to know him” and who has “more depth than most would know”, but we’ll get to that later.

“Who gives a shit if we don’t have hundreds of millions of people watching with us every time, and why do we care if people think we’re fucked up or weird for watching it. We know what our sport is, and we know who we are [...] It’s our stupid violent insane spectacle sport for freaks and assholes that’s as legitimate or illegitimate as any other sport in the world. Well, at least it was ours at some point.”

I recognised this argument the moment I heard it. It sounds almost word for word like an insecure gamer defending video games as an art form and as a hobby that is just for real nerds and not the masses. I know that argument very well because I have been that insecure gamer in the past. In complaining that MMA is not “ours” anymore he has jumped from “if someone doesn’t likes something we like they hate us” to “if someone likes something we like for the wrong reasons they hate us”.

This is the tone that Felix adopts for the entire final episode, and he proceeds to decry three recent changes he thinks the UFC has made in an effort to bring the sport into the mainstream, changes that he declares as already being “to the detriment of the viewers, the fighters, and ultimately, [the UFC] themselves”.

The first is the Fox TV deal, of which his criticism is that it has led to too many fights and therefore too many fighters, but he doesn’t present any reasons why more fights has been a bad thing. He talks about how poorly the UFC compensates its rank-and-file fighters, which is a great argument for better fighter pay, but is not an argument for fewer paid fighters or fewer fight cards.

The second is the UFC’s apparel deal with Reebok, which he accurately assesses as a disaster for their fighters.

The third is drug testing, and for me this is where Fighting in the Age of Loneliness goes completely off the rails. The first thing he says in this segment is probably the only part of it I agree with: “the vast majority of your favourite athletes use steroids.”

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Felix is right that the UFC asked the US Anti-Doping Agency to start testing its fighters more to provide an image of legitimacy than because they actually care about fair competition, but his main problem with the policy is that performance enhancing drugs are in fact cool and good. Earlier in the series he celebrates the way that Pride FC’s “loose medical oversight” and “pro-steroid policy” allowed its fighters to “consistently break laws of god and man,” now he gleefully exclaims that “Steroids are actually kind of amazing.”

“The human body is absolutely not designed to fight for 15 to 25 minutes, but steroids help make it work”. Felix provides no justification whatsoever for this claim, and it’s a ridiculous one that springs from the same myopic view of the history of combat sports that he expresses in the early episodes. To present just one counterexample, fighters in classical Greece did not have the benefit of modern nutritional science and training methods, let alone anabolic steroids, but the only time limit on Pankration bouts was sunset. Fights that last more than 25 minutes might not be the most fun to watch but they’ve certainly been happening since long before the steroid era.

Felix doubles down on this position. While he acknowledges that steroids “have their side effects” he asserts that “it is impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without some chemical help.” This is another absurd claim, he does try to back this one up but in doing so he immediately undermines it: “Talk to any retired fighter, and they’ll give a number anywhere from 75 to 90 percent of their former training partners juicing.” Rather than proving his point, this statement suggests that it is not at all impossible to compete at the highest levels of fighting without chemical help because at the very least ten percent of fighters are doing it. This scaled-back version of his original pronouncement does make the prospects of success seem pretty bleak for clean fighters, but Felix doesn’t care. He is happy to accept that if most fighters are doping then fighters need to dope to compete and therefore it is OK for fighters to dope.

USADA testing in the UFC has, in Felix’s opinion, fucked things up. There are a lot of very valid criticisms that he could make about the inconsistent way that the policy has been applied to different fighters or the odd ways it has conflicted and overlapped with state athletic commission testing policies or the lack of fighter engagement in the process of rolling out the program leading to confusion and uncertainty about the rules, but he doesn’t. Instead of talking about the massive unregulated supplement industry in the USA and the habit that some supplement brands have of ‘accidentally’ slipping a bit of the good stuff in their products to make sure that their customers get the gains they crave, he complains that fighters are being punished for “by-products of over the counter substances”. By-products and contaminants are not the same thing, I’m not sure if Felix just misspoke here or if he genuinely doesn’t understand the problem he is talking about.

He goes on to moan that the punishments for breaking the rules of the sport are longer under this new program. He doesn’t say why the longer bans are bad, just that the UFC has been ‘capricious’, and it seems obvious to me that the reason he disagrees with the longer bans is that he thinks PED usage is a good thing. Let’s address that idea.

There are two main reasons why I think performance enhancing drugs should be banned in almost all sports. The first is that PED use is bad for the long term health of athletes. We know that there are permanent negative effects associated with the use of anabolic steroids, and there are scores of other widely used PEDs that simply haven’t been around for long enough for the consequences of their use to be properly understood. It is possible to argue from this position for the regulation and standardisation of PED use in sports, and although I disagree with that line of reasoning I do think it has some merit, but there is no hint of this argument in Fighting in the Age of Loneliness.

I think the most practical way to prevent athletes from being incentivised to gamble with their future health for short-term gain, especially in a sport like MMA which already carries so much physical risk, is to ban the use of PEDs and enforce that ban with testing. Felix talks about steroids helping fighters to recover quickly from serious injuries, but I don’t think that is a worthwhile tradeoff to ask them to make, and I don’t think it would be a bad thing for the health of fighters if less prevalent PED usage meant that fewer of them had to endure the accumulated physical toll of fighting four or five times a year.

The second reason is a purely sporting one. The rules of all sports are arbitrary, but they usually constitute an attempt to delineate a competition that tests one particular set of skills and abilities in its competitors and excludes others. Chess is not designed to be a test of split-second reflexive reactions, 100 meter sprinting is not supposed to challenge your ability to predict the strategy your opponent is going to employ and prepare a counter-strategy, and as far as I am aware there is no sport that seeks to test its competitors ability to improve their bodies through medical intervention. I want the sports I watch to be fair competitions that are about what they are about, and Felix does too: he repeatedly praises the “truth” and “honesty” and “earnestness” of “what goes on in the cage,” but he fails to see how this contradicts with the idea of allowing the outcomes of fights to be heavily influenced months ahead of time by means of one fighter having access to less scrupulous, less restrained doctors than the other.

There is some nuance here around where you draw the lines between sports nutrition, necessary medical assistance and doping, but again Felix does not adopt a position so sophisticated. It’s been demonstrated in almost every popular sport that athletes with the help of an organised and scientific doping program have a significant advantage over clean rivals with similar levels of experience and training, and that’s not a contest I was ever interested in watching. Fighters shouldn’t use steroids any more than match sailors should use outboard motors, it is contrary to the very concept of the sport.

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Felix isn’t just mad about USADA testing because he thinks steroids are nifty, though. He’s also mad that they took away one of his favourites. “At the absolute highest level of the sport, no-one was derailed by this as much as Jon Jones” This is another part of Fighting in the Age of Loneliness that emphasises the gulf between Felix Biederman’s perspective on the UFC and my own. He watched Jon Jones’ rise through the ranks and his multi-year reign as the consensus best fighter in the world, and was apparently completely captivated by it. In describing him Felix returns to the hagiographic tone of the third and fourth episodes, describing him as “a giant, freak athlete who did moves that he learned off of youtube to humiliate fighters we grew up with”, comparing him to Napoleon, calling him “a genius who can destroy world champions with stuff he saw in a movie, the equivalent to those savant kids who can hear a song once and instantly play it on a piano perfectly”

By the time I was starting to watch the UFC, Jon Jones had already sabotaged his career fairly comprehensively. I don’t know Jon Jones as a legend or a genius or the greatest fighter in the world because I’ve never seen the fights that earned him that reputation. Here are the things that I do know about Jon Jones, things that have happened or that I have learned about since I started following the sport:

Jon Jones is a homophobe. In 2012 Jon Jones crashed his car, plead guilty to driving under the influence, and received a slap on the wrist. In January 2015 Jon Jones tested positive for cocaine in an out-of-competition test and was issued a token fine. In April 2015 Jon Jones ran a red light and caused an accident involving two other cars that left a pregnant woman with a fractured arm, then ran away only to turn himself in after an arrest warrant was issued and eventually plead guilty to fleeing the scene of an accident, receiving 18 months of probation. In 2017 Jon Jones was given a one year suspension after testing positive for banned hormone and metabolic modulators, which turned out to be contaminants in an erectile dysfunction pill he had been given by a training partner. In 2018 Jon Jones tested positive for an anabolic steroid and was suspended again for 15 months.

On the front steps of courthouses Jon Jones is humble and apologetic, and in the immediate aftermath of being caught doing something he shouldn’t have he often talks about how hard the experience has been for him and how much he has learned from it and grown as a person. At all other times he acts as though the bad things that happen to him or around him are never his fault, that he has no responsibility to ever change or even reflect upon his own behaviour, as though in all these struggles he has been the victim of cruel circumstance and conspiracy.

The Jon Jones that Felix describes is not someone I recognise, and the way he describes him is concerning. “As we got to know Jon more, we saw his personal foibles, like his DUI arrest and rivalry with Rashad Evans” I don’t think that having a heated rivalry with a competitor is comparable with drunk driving at all, and in framing the incident this way Felix trivializes it. He does this again with Jones’ hit-and-run conviction, mentioning it in passing but quickly moving on to quip about how awesome Jones got at powerlifting in his year off. He calls Jones “a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, got pissed off and said incredibly cutting things to his opponents”, reinforcing the impression that Jones’ main character flaw is simply being too fierce a competitor, instead of calling him, say, a person with failings who sometimes acted like an asshole, took drugs he shouldn’t and crashed cars.

Felix is constantly making excuses for Jon Jones in this part of the episode. When he gets to the second failed drug test, he says Jones “got popped by USADA”, a turn of phrase that subtly reinforces Jones’ own narrative of victimhood, especially since Felix has already established USADA as the bad guys who are fucking up the UFC. He wraps up the Jones segment with a ‘boys will be boys’ defence couched in another appeal to the glory of days gone by: “It used to matter less if you acted like an idiot. Everyone was a bit of an idiot in one manner or the other in life, but god forbid you now embarrass the sport”.

*

From here, Fighting in the Age of Loneliness whines to a messy conclusion. The segments get more disjointed, it’s at this stage that modern women’s Mixed Martial Arts gets all of two minutes of consideration, and then there is a rather reluctant summary of the UFC career of Conor McGregor, who Felix seems not to like. He certainly doesn’t describe him with close to the same kind of exaltation that he deploys earlier for fighters who had similar trajectories like Mauricio Rua, Anderson Silva and Jon Jones.

After that, Felix goes back to behaving like a fan of an indie band that has started making top 40 hits. He doesn’t like that the one of the UFC’s new part-owners is an asset stripping firm, even though in his golden age one of the UFC’s part-owners was an Emirati war criminal. Back in the first segment of the first episode he references “this modern era of fighting, where all of the things that used to make the sport unusual are mostly gone,” and now he returns to that idea and calls the supposed new “fourth era” of fighting “sanitized and oversaturated,” contrasting it with the “honesty of a fist-fight” and the “cultural haven for strange people” that the UFC offered ten years ago. He complains that there aren’t enough knockouts any more. When he brings up the recent long-anticipated fight between Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov he says “sometimes the dam of normalcy breaks and we get momentary bursts of how things once were,” which strikes me as a rather ‘what have you done for me lately’ attitude to take about something that happened the month before this video series came out.

Things drag closer to an end and Felix keeps returning to his golden age. “What was once a weird refuge for those who needed it is now eroding into just another thing that’s as formless and indistinct as everything else. Fighting has rid itself of so much of its magic. It does not transcend the world any more.” The way that he constantly makes references to a bygone era when everything was simple and pure and good and as it ought to be, and wishes dearly that we could return to that era instead of continuing to face the injustices of this current moment in time, reminds me a lot of an ideology that has has a big resurgence in the USA recently.

The episode wraps up with one final spasm of bitterness. “This will happen to everything that you love. Nothing you like will remain untouched, and it will get further and further monetized into meaninglessness. This isn’t just our problem in our idiotic bloodsport. You’re fucked too.” He’s not wrong about the commoditization of entertainment and sports-as-entertainment but he sounds once again like a whiny gamer stereotype or a disillusioned popstar fanboy of the kind he mocks at the start of the episode.

And then the episode doesn’t actually end. The sort-of epilogue about Donald Cerrone fighting Nate Diaz seven years ago is a good little segment, but it doesn’t do anything here. It doesn’t serve to illustrate or emphasise any of the things Felix has been talking about in the minutes leading up to it, it doesn’t follow from them in any kind of narrative. It feels like a piece that some combination of Felix Biederman and Jon Bois just liked too much to cut, even though they couldn’t find a place to put it, so they stuck it here at the end. Maybe it is intended to provide some sense of denouement after Felix’s angry ranting. Regardless, it comes at the end of such an unpleasant half hour that its attempt at poignance failed utterly on me.

*

Felix Biederman likes different fighters than I do, he has a perspective on the sport of Mixed Martial Arts that often seems parochial and outdated to me, and I am puzzled by his obsession with the idea that combat sports athletes are all strange, broken people, but none of these things would bother me if Fighting in the Age of Loneliness did not present itself as an authoritative, comprehensive history of fighting, instead of what it is, which is the story of Felix Biederman falling into and out of love with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Together with Jon Bois he certainly tells that story well, their collage of tales of societal fracture and political indifference with images of single combat is a powerful one, but in pursuing its thematic goals the series fails over and over to justify or interrogate the positions it puts forward.

If the UFC disappeared tomorrow, or if it had never been created in the first place, fighting would still exist, Mixed Martial Arts would still exist, the “one two path of a punch to a guy snoring on the ground” that Felix claims to adore will still exist. Fighting is exactly as magical and exactly as mundane today as it it always has been and always will be, even if Felix Biederman doesn’t enjoy watching it as much as he used to.

[superchartisland]

Game Set & Match (Ocean, Spectrum, 1987)

Gallup Spectrum chart, Your Sinclair Issue 26, February 1988

We’ve previously covered one compilation, in the charity fundraiser Soft Aid. Game Set & Match is another chance to bring together a bunch of old games and is purely for profit, taking as its unifying theme the sports game. If there’s one thing that AAA’s journey so far from 1984 to the end of 1987 has taught us, it’s that the game-playing British public loved sports games. Almost any sports games. So taking a whole bunch of different minor sports games and bundling them into one was a savvy move from longtime savvy movers Ocean. Most of the games come from British former rival turned subsidiary Imagine, and most of those from a deal to remake the games of Japanese developer Konami.

One of the Konami originals is Hyper Sports, which alongside Daley Thompson’s Super Test means that this is the first time (but not the only time) that AAA will review a release containing game(s) already previously covered on AAA. Which is weird. Even more so because the biggest reason for their presence on Game Set & Match appears to be to bump up the numbers on its box. 10 games and over 20 events, it trumpets, on the basis of all of the different events contained in those two games. Although you would have to do better than me at Hyper Sports to even get to all of them.

They remain similar but distinct takes on the multi-sports challenge. Daley Thompson’s Super Test (Ocean, 1985)  is the more generous to the player and places the higher value on variety. Hyper Sports (Imagine, 1985) shows its arcade origins through both difficulty and visual flair. They’re not my favourites but they do enjoyable things with small challenges, the better for not attempting the task of tackling a sport as a whole.

Taking the one game at the time in brief approach to reviewing the rest of the contents:

Pool (CDS, 1983)

An early, functional but very simplified version of pool. Only three balls of each colour?

World Series Baseball (Imagine, 1985)

An early, functional but very simplified version of baseball. Decent music for a Spectrum game.

Konami’s Tennis (Imagine, 1986)

An early, functional but very simplified version of tennis, where it’s easy enough to return the ball but working out how to actually score a point is a very different matter, with a slight feel of playing against a pre-injury Andy Murray.

Konami’s Ping Pong (Imagine, 1986)

An early, barely functional version of table tennis. Its most distinguishing feature is the demonic laughter of the crowd in response to each rally.

Basketball (Gamestar, 1987)

An early, garish and confusing version of basketball. A two-on-two match where all the four players wear different colours from each other.

Jonah Barrington’s Squash (New Generation, 1985)

An early version of squash, where to be honest I don’t understand the sport well enough to make any judgements about functionality or otherwise. A bit like Konami’s Tennis except with half of my shots being ruled out for reasons I don’t understand, plus the audio has synthesised speech which you can just about make out reading out the score, as long as you already know what the score is.

Super Soccer (Imagine, 1986)

An early, not even functional version of football in which you have accelerate/brake/turn left/turn right controls for your players for some reason. On the other hand it includes a degree of customisation of how it looks which allows you to play on a magenta pitch, which is not to be sniffed at.

Barry McGuigan’s World Championship Boxing (Gamestar, 1985)

This game stands out a mile in these surrounds, due to such factors as better-than-minimal graphics and a career mode, even if the punches its boxers throw feel a bit weedy and weightless. When you define your character at the beginning you are asked to choose between them being Black or White, which is an age ahead of its time.

Overall these are some of the games which have aged least well, or rather aged the least to my liking under the approach I’m taking to playing them, which is a very different statement. For a start, the barrier of complexity, and that of the difficulty of making AI advanced enough to play realistically badly, would be significantly lessened if I was playing them with someone else two player. That would be a more natural fit for what they’re representing, and there can be something fantastic and joyful in trying to work out how to play a game alongside someone else while competing with them. More relevantly, childhood experience would suggest that while such a process of competitive co-operation works best with the best games, it works better with bad games than mediocre ones.

[livehealthynewsusa]

Watch An Exclusive Clip of The New CrossFit Film Out Today

If you’ve watched any of the documentaries about the CrossFit Games events of the past decade, or a handful of videos about the CrossFit Ball on YouTube, chances are you’ve consumed a visual feast from the Marston Sawyer and Heber Cannon.

Collectively known as Buttery Bros., they weathered the storm of CrossFit’s restructuring and firing, witnessed their implosion around Greg Glassman’s racist tweet, and documented their recovery under new CEO Eric Rosa.

Her new film, Resurgence, today is the story of the CrossFit Games 2020, which, due to the unprecedented restrictions to control the pandemic, saw a greatly reduced field of five men and five women.

Check out this exclusive clip of the film and read our interview with Marston and Heber below.

Men’s health: Give us the condensed version of the Buttery Bros. genesis.

MARSTON SAWYER: In the fall of 2018, we were fired from CrossFit HQ. We left California, moved to Utah and started Buttery Bros. It’s been two years and this is the second documentary we’ve made independently but them [CrossFit] also easily attach to this.

MH: If you could, what would you say to the two guys who are about to be fired from their jobs?

MRS: I would say that you will have a lot more options and that you are about to start something really exciting and fulfilling and fun. So don’t get too preoccupied with what you’ve done in the past and just know that the future is bright for both of you

MH: What was it like to start on your own?

LIFT CANNON: I think the first phase was figuring out that we wanted to stay in the CrossFit space and in the community. When I started CrossFit, I wanted to go to LA and direct movies. But I felt there was so much room to grow with this company in 2008-09. I felt like I was missing out on something if I didn’t jump on it.

Flash forward to 2018 and there’s so much chaos in the CrossFit space, but we have all these friends and connections – it just felt like such an opportunity. I wanted to take the chance and play CrossFit again. But do it yourself and see what we can do with it.

From then on it was about what we produce, how it should look and how we finance it. How would we shape it as a company? When we worked for CrossFit HQ we never had to think about it. So the first six months of Buttery Bros were like law, business school, and fatherhood in one insane package.

MH: Obviously you studied law and economics …

HZ: Yes totally!

MH: How did the chaos surrounding Greg Glassman’s tweet and the subsequent sale of the company affect you?

MRS: When that tweet came out everyone started saying they were boycotting the games and we were right in the middle of it trying to document this. The story tells how the athletes felt, but also the general community and how they felt. We are part of the CrossFit community and felt like we were stabbed in the back. We had helped grow this company from its inception into a truly professional, eye-catching sport that we were proud to make films about.

Then they let us go and took the company in a different direction that didn’t really align with what we created. When that happened, we felt like it was an opportunity to create the content that CrossFit didn’t want. As time went on, the company got more and more negative press and then this tweet, it was like wow – it seemed like this thing was going to collapse.

It was sad. Because we had seen how positively and wonderfully it had affected so many people’s lives, only to put it in such a negative light. It was a full 180. We got upset and just tried to tell people’s stories as best we could.

MH: A big part of your YouTube channel is spending real time with athletes and other members of the CrossFit community. Who is your new favorite person on the scene?

MRS: I would say our favorite newbie is Justin Medeiros. He’s just an aspiring kid who’s just plain positive. We followed him through the Mid-Atlantic CrossFit Championship and he has a great support team, his parents and everyone in his corner are great. He has a bright future for CrossFit and everything that moves forward. We just teamed up with him at our new nutritional supplement company Podium. It’s a great new relationship with this kid.

MH: How long have you been working on Podium?

HZ: Various companies had spoken to us for a while, but they wanted us to be one of their ambassadors or they were a brand we didn’t really like. So we were just trying to figure out what we wanted to do. Two of my favorite brands were Cellucor for the product and Ghost Life for the pictures. Well, this guy who had worked for these two companies turned to me and said he wanted to start a new line and company with us and what was I thinking?

I said, ‘Dude! Brilliant!’ And now that I was “in business and law school,” I can do this. In November 2020 we finally met him personally and discussed with him what it would look like and feel like. Our friend, a Mat Fraser, had just become a free agent, so we spoke to Mat and are thrilled to have him on board.

Another no-brainer was Craig Richie who is just a phenomenal YouTuber from the UK and we look forward to getting started. Every week there is something new and cool that happens.

MH: How much of your time do you spend on the business side now?

HZ: For a long time, 50% of our time was occupied by the economy. I remember going to Miami with Mat Fraser for an open workout announcement. We traveled all day and I emailed brands to see if they would sponsor the video, called between flights and layovers, tried to rent a car while talking to another brand but we could Don’t use their product because we didn’t have it with us and so on. Then edit photos that night until 3 a.m. and talk to other brands about the video we’re going to start the next morning.

Then we had to be professional and energetic on both sides of the camera to film all day before staying up all night to edit so we could upload it.

Now we’ve got to the point where we’ve streamlined the business side of things and hired a manager to take care of a lot. So when we have an initial conversation we can hand it over to him and he will do a lot of the grunt work and present us with things to make a decision about.

MH: To be fair, when you look at your early videos compared to now, you look a lot less tired …

MRS: In the beginning we stayed up all hours to do the editing. Partly because everything was time sensitive, but also because we tried to prove the concept to people, sponsors and brands. In the early days we went to an event, shot for three days, got very little sleep, and it was just me and Heber trying to grind and produce to prove ourselves. The event ended and we stayed up until completion and spent 12 hours editing it, so it was ready and fresh when we uploaded it the next day.

Now we’ve got to a point where we’ve brought in other editors so we can send out clips while we’re filming that they’ll insert and organize into a rough story that we can add our finishing touches to.

It means we can juggle things better when we need to. For example, we finished the movie while shooting new Buttery Bros content every week.

With the new film and working with CrossFit again, we were able to choose our dream team of people to work with and we could knock them out of the park. We want to work with new, young people who are really passionate. We have an editor on site and she looks forward to being taught and learning from us.

It’s amazing to go from those early days of the grind to something that is streamlined and that we can nurture.

MH: With the reduced field of 10 athletes in 2020, did you like the extra access and focus you could have on each of them for Resurgence?

HZ: Oh, as opposed to 180 in 2019!

MRS: It was definitely more intimate. In some films in the past, at the end of the weekend you stood on the podium with someone you didn’t see coming and you didn’t shoot with them all week!

HZ: I have never seen that as a disadvantage. You choose your characters and some of them don’t make the party. For me it’s a dramatic story. It should never be the story of the six people on the podium. You know, that’s six out of 80 athletes.

For this year it was great to have that reduced for us. We did this huge road trip and managed to be one on one with eight out of 10 athletes. It shows in the film when you have intimate conversations with most of your competitors.

MRS: Perhaps the craziest part about 2020 is that there were no fans and no music. Right there you could hear the breathing. One of the funniest parts is during the CrossFit Total, you could hear the announcers in the cabin say whether they looked good in the elevator or not. The athletes said, “I’m here! I can hear you guys! “

You could hear every coach yelling at them with tips and they almost tried to out each other from the sidelines. It was pretty fun.

MH: What was the moment of the 2020 Games for you?

MRS: In addition to Mat and Tia, who came across the line holding hands, it was the trail run for me where everyone had to turn around and run all the way back. They had tested it on the demo team the day before, so we got to experience it on a different scale. It was exciting to be part of this reveal and see these guys sell the soul to get done just to turn around.

You could never have done that with a large field and fans. It was a completely unique situation and it was really cool.

MH: Who would you like to see at the CrossFit Games 2021?

MRS: I would love to see Mallory O’Brien do really well as far as women go.

Herzog Loren Photography

HZ: I would like to see Emma Cary be fine. But Tia is always fascinating to look at. We watch a dynasty and the others fight for second place. It’s wide open on the men’s side. Glad to see Justin Medeiros well and I found Jayson Hopper’s performance in the semifinals really impressive. I would love to see Pat Vellner in the field again. He is unbelievable.

And then your boy Noah Ohlsen. He set up a really good training environment in Atlanta, so I’m curious to see if that pays off at the Games.

Resurgence by The Buttery Bros is available now on iTunes / Apple TV worldwide for £ 12.99. Find it here

David Morton David Morton is Associate Editor at Men’s Health, where he wrote, worked, edited and sweated for 12 years.

source https://livehealthynews.com/watch-an-exclusive-clip-of-the-new-crossfit-film-out-today/

[truesportsfan]

Chris Jericho’s beautiful view atop the wrestling world

Being the top guy has a specific meaning to Chris Jericho.

The pro wrestling legend is back at the summit of the business at age 49 as the first and only world champion in All Elite Wrestling history. Being the headliner and face of a major company for a significant period of time is a role Jericho has rarely had in his three-decade career. He never won the world title in WCW and only had a combined five WWE or World Heavyweight championship reigns in his nearly 20 years with Vince McMahon’s company.

Being a promotion’s standard-bearer, who carries the weight of helping it and the talent around him succeed, is a job he’s never been more ready for.

“Could I have done more in WCW in a headlining position? Would I have been good? I don’t know. In my mind I’d be great,” Jericho told The Post. “The first time I was put in a headlining position in WWF, I wasn’t ready, and in WCW, it was a couple years earlier. So maybe I wasn’t ready.

“And as the career goes forward, I can tell you the exact moment when I knew I had become a legit, headlining, main-event guy and the exact moment where I became the top guy, which was in New Japan Jan. 4, 2018 [versus Kenny Omega at Wrestle Kingdom], which led to [me] being the top guy here in AEW.”

Now that he’s been “given the baton,” Jericho’s goal is to help elevate others in the company to legitimate main event players, giving them their piece of the spotlight.

In the more than 13 months since AEW launched, Jericho has had singles matches with Scorpio Sky, Jungle Boy, “Hangman” Adam Page, Darby Allin, Cody Rhodes and others. He cut a memorable promo with Maxwell Jacob Friedman (MJF), and has surrounded himself with Jake Hager, Sammy Guevara and Santana and Ortiz in his Inner Circle faction. He has been a big backstage supporter of Allin. Jericho described giving the hot upstarts the chance to beat the grizzled veteran heel as the “magic” that wrestling is about.

“We had a match a couple weeks ago where Isiah [Kassidy] from Private Party had such a great false finish, people thought Isiah was going to beat the champ,” said Jericho, the son of former New York Rangers winger Ted Irvine.

Most of the company’s younger talent had very little, if any, cable-TV time before appearing on “AEW Dynamite.” Now they get to share the ring live on TNT or on pay-per-view with one of wrestling’s most recognizable faces. Jericho said he wants to have a match with Orange Cassidy, a slow-moving comedy wrestler with a cult following, at some point, too.

“When you’re the top guy, you don’t hide and stop others from getting in there because then it just becomes stale and it dies,” said Jericho, who was at the New York Toy Fair, where AEW showed off its new action figures and ring sets from Wicked Cool Toys and Jazwares. The first series will be available this August.

“Your job as the top guy is to help everyone else up on top of the mountain so that there are 15 top guys and everybody is making money and everyone’s having a great time, people are enjoying the show and the product.”

AEW’s first series of action figuresAll Elite Wrestling

Wrestling legends are among those taking notice.

“Hulk Hogan called me a few months ago and said, ‘What you guys are doing is putting guys no one had ever heard of in a main-event spot and having them believe that they can beat you,’” Jericho recounted.

Jericho’s current rival is Jon Moxley, formerly known as Dean Ambrose in WWE. The two have a match for Jericho’s title set for AEW’s Revolution pay-per-view on Saturday. Jericho recruited Moxley to AEW knowing his talent level and understanding he was unhappy as he was transitioned into a comedy character in WWE. What Jericho didn’t expect was exactly what person and character would emerge in AEW. When Moxley debuted and attacked him and Omega at the “Double or Nothing” pay-per-view last May, Jericho saw someone who had “completely” changed.

“This is not the guy formally known as Dean Ambrose, this is a completely different person, a new character, performer,” Jericho said. “He’s totally different, not even the same guy. And that to me is another feather in our cap because it shows the creative freedom that you have in AEW that allows you to live and breathe and be what you know you can be.”

Moxley, also the name he used prior to joining WWE, is a violent, unpredictable badass babyface whose tendencies AEW announcer Jim Ross has compared to Stone Cold Steve Austin’s.

“I knew he’d be good,” Jericho said. “I didn’t expect him to just become this amazing. I say that with the utmost of respect. I don’t think anybody, including Mox, would have been able to predict that.”

Both Jericho and Moxley also recently wrestled for New Japan Pro-Wrestling, where Moxley is the promotion’s United States champion. When Jericho was in Japan for Wrestle Kingdom in January, he beat legendary wrestler Hiroshi Tanahashi in a match that would have given his opponent an AEW title shot with a win.

It led to Jericho being outspoken about wanting the two companies to work together in the future given the financial opportunities that would come, especially given the history he, Rhodes, Omega, The Young Bucks and other AEW talent have with New Japan.

He is willing to help make that happen, but Jericho noted that “in other people’s opinion, we shouldn’t” work together before floating the idea of an AEW/New Japan invasion a year down the line.

“I think it would be beneficial relationship,” Jericho said. “Do I think we need New Japan? No. Do they need us? Well, if they want to work in the States, they may want to think about it.”

During that appearance in Japan for Wrestle Kingdom, the hashtag #fatjericho made its way onto social media along with pictures from the match that showed a heavier version of the Canadian star.

Jericho said the added weight was by design. He wanted to look more like the character portrayed by legendary wrestler Bruiser Brody, a pain-causing killer whom everyone feared. In Jericho’s experience, bigger-looking wrestlers are more respected in Japan. He likened it to Robert De Niro gaining weight to play the role of Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.” He has dropped some of that weight since coming back to AEW, posting workout videos to social media.

“When you see the online criticism, I love the idea of the fat Jericho because I can take my shirt off right now and I’ve got six f–king abs,” he said.

It’s all part of Jericho’s constant attempts to reinvent himself, creating new wrestling moments and catchphrases. Recently, the crowd at the episode of “Dynamite” taped aboard Jericho’s rock and wrestling cruise loudly serenaded him with his entrance song “Judas” by his band Fozzy — continuing to belt it out long after he first appeared. It’s continued at each show since.

“The next week, I went to the producer of the show, Keith Mitchell, and said, ‘Let’s pull the music down a little earlier,’ and I went to the announcers, Jim Ross, and said, ‘Don’t say anything,’” Jericho said. “When the music stops, let’s see what happens and let’s see if they continue to sing. We made it a thing.”

When it does, Jericho lets it happen, saying even as a heel, trying to tell the audience to shut up and don’t sing would spoil the vibe and organic nature of the moment.

“If they want to sing the lyrics to ‘Judas’ for an extra 30 seconds, that’s something that everyone’s talking about,” Jericho said. “People are going to go, ‘Wow, are you seeing this?’ It transcends good guy, bad guy. That [leads to] iconic moments in wrestling, which is what we strive for so much and when it happens organically, that’s a gift from the wrestling gods, so don’t mess with it.”

Chris JerichoAll Elite Wrestling

Jericho said the AEW talent is having fun backstage as well. In his opinion, there is no “snaky-snaky bulls–t” going on. The company continues to grow. “Dynamite” was renewed on TNT for three more years. A separate hour-long TV show is in the works, and AEW will run its first “Dynamite” in the Tri-State area on March 25 at Prudential Center in Newark.

“Dynamite” has consistently beaten WWE’s NXT show in the ratings each Wednesday and has had a headlock on the 18-49 demo. While not specifically correlating it with ratings, Jericho believes that AEW highlighting young stars such as MJF, Guevara, Jungle Boy and Marko Stunt is helping to attract a younger audience because “we don’t send them to the developmental league or whatever for five years.”

It’s helping the company expand into action figures and potentially video games down the road. Jericho said he has had around 200 different action figures over his career. The AEW line, which will debut with Jericho, Cody, Brandi Rhodes, Omega and The Young Bucks, stands out to him not only because of the figures’ detailed looks, but the story around them. As the company’s top guy, he’s been one of the biggest driving forces behind all of it.

“We’ve only been on TV since October and these will be coming out in August, so it’s a quick turnaround and the reason why the turnaround is so quick is because the product is hot,” Jericho said. “That’s of great pride to me because obviously when I came to AEW, there was a lot riding on my shoulders to make sure it was a success.”

He’s never been more ready to ensure it.

source https://truesportsfan.com/sport-today/chris-jerichos-beautiful-view-atop-the-wrestling-world/

[allofbeercom]

Donald Trump Is The Florida Man Candidate

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — There are a lot of reasons why Donald Trump is expected to triumph in Tuesday’s Florida primary, where the GOP presidential front-runner enjoys a commanding lead of more than 20 points in the polls.

But there’s a very crucial one that shouldn’t be overlooked: Trump is Florida Man … well, the candidate for that type of voter, at least.  

Florida Man, if you weren’t already aware, is a descriptor and an avatar of the Sunshine State’s most outlandish residents. These include the Florida Man who insisted the ghost of WWE legend Macho Man Randy Savage haunted a local wrestling match; the one who subdued and then vowed to eat the shark that bit him; the guy who showed up hammered to a Mothers Against Drunk Driving banquet in his honor and the thief who stashed a chainsaw in his pants  — all chronicled in the @_FloridaMan Twitter account. This resonates, in part, because it exemplifies a very specific and weirdcare-free ethos that is unique to Florida. The state is home to an often bizarre mishmash of nouveau riche ostentation, sunburnt Southern swagger and a kind of meth-addled YOLO philosophy.

“Florida’s a weird state, it’s very split,” said Sebastian Sultzer a student originally from Deerfield Beach in Palm Beach County. “Miami is very different from North Florida.”

Put another way, Florida Man is the Joe Six Pack of people who drives Cadillacs at 110 mph while naked.  

Trump, so far as we know, has never done any of these things, but consider his career in this context and you can begin to hear echoes of this character. Just switch his name for Florida Man and you’ll see what we mean:  

Florida Man purchases a private jet and enjoys watching Jean Claude Van Damme’s “Bloodsport” while airborne.  

Florida Man attempts to sell meat in a high-end electronics store.

Florida Man appears on “WWE Raw,” and showers the audience with $100 bills.

Florida Man makes inappropriate comments about the attractiveness of his daughter.

Florida Man runs for president, refuses to take off his baseball hat, boasts about his penis and encourages violence and defends punching protesters.

“This is my second home,” Trump bellowed during a rally on Sunday in Boca Raton, Palm Beach County, in reference to his numerous properties in the state. Like so many New Yorkers before him, the businessman spends increasing amounts of his time in Florida, reveling in the sun and favorable tax laws.

“I love Florida!” he roared, his Queens accent bending the state’s name into “FLORI-DUH,” somewhat appropriately.  “Speaking of Florida, we love Doral,” he added, referring to the Trump National Golf Resort in outer Miami. “Hundreds of acres owned by Donald Trump.” 

New York Daily News Archive via Getty Images

An aerial view of Mar-a-Lago, the sprawling estate of Donald Trump, in Palm Beach, Florida.

Despite Trump’s Queens accent, his decades in New York real estate and an endorsement from former Yankees star Paul O’Neil, Florida remains his spiritual home. The Sunshine State’s schlock-per-capita is truly a thing to behold and its monuments to American excess and outsized ambition are utterly Trumpian. This state is not only home to Disney World, SeaWorld and the Panhandle’s so-called “Redneck Riviera,” but also Versailles, a 90,000-square-foot McMansion in Orange County that is America’s largest private residence.

It’s a kind of “Florida independence,” said Amy Janiero, a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) from Jupiter, Palm Beach County. “We joked that Florida takes pride in screwing up elections.” She added that if her state helps split the vote Tuesday,  “Florida would love it, we caused a brokered convention!”

This is also a state where the housing crisis hit hard, and it’s still America’s risky mortgage capital. Abandoned McMansions are no less part of the state’s lore as Splash Mountain and hanging chads. The state is now the setting of “The Vanilla Ice Project,” a show on the DIY Network in which the “Ice Ice Baby” rapper, whose real name is Robert Van Winkle, buys foreclosed McMansions, applies a fresh coat of paint to great rooms, makes some kind of “stop, collaborate and listen” joke, flips the house and buzzes off.

The real estate mogul himself had to foreclose on the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Fort Lauderdale. And though he has never had to foreclose on a prefabricated mansion in a far-flung exurb, he did file a Chapter 11 on something called “Trump Castle Associates.”  

However, Trump doesn’t resonate everywhere in Florida, especially in the southeast, with its large Latino population, less conservative New York transplants and generally more urban voting habits. Polling has shown the reality TV star to be underperforming in the area, and his team hasn’t opened any campaign offices here, opting instead to locate them in and around northern and western locales like Daytona Beach and Sarasota.

Indeed, one of the ironies of Trump’s relationship to the state is that most of his properties are situated along the southeast coast where his support is weakest. The Trump National Doral Miami golf resort he mentioned in his Boca Raton speech is actually surrounded by the state’s highest concentration of Venezuelan immigrants, not exactly a key constituency for the real estate mogul.

David Cannon via Getty Images

TheTrump National Doral Miamiattracts star golfers like Northern Ireland’s RoryMcIlroy to events like theWorld Golf Championship Cadillac Championship.

During a rally for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in West Palm Beach, Jonathan Vine of Delray Beach remarked upon the state’s quirky demographics.  “Down here, in south Florida, there’s more Rubio supporters,” he said.  “I’m from New York, my wife is from New Jersey, everyone in this row is from New York. Northern Florida is the real south. It’s the same thing that you would get in Georgia or elsewhere.”    

But Trump knows how to play to his Florida Man base, even if he is mostly removed from it. In 2006, he had a 40-foot-wide American flag raised atop an 80-foot-pole at his Mar-A-Lago club in West Palm Beach, where he will hold his now-customary election night press conference. He was fined for violating the upscale town’s rigorous zoning regulations and used the penalties to denounce the town’s anti-patriotic on national television.  

It was a brilliant move, simultaneously impressing Florida Man with the magnificence of his property and the breadth of his patriotism, while utterly angering Palm Beach’s “hoity-toity” society types, further ingratiating himself to Florida Man, with his populist outlook. One imagines Florida Man scrunched in a kiddie pool, sipping a beer, his bent knees and protruding belly forming a kind of fleshy archipelago, nodding in approval.

“People look at his money and see how much money he has and are impressed,” said Sari Vine, who also attended Rubio’s rally in West Palm Beach.

He make all these promises that are impossible to fulfill.

 “He’s not going to fulfill one promise,” her husband, Jonathan Vine, added. “He make all these promises that are impossible to fulfill.”

It’s this mix of ostentation and bravado that may help explain Trump’s polling success here over home state senator Rubio. Compare that to Ohio, while Trump is fighting to eek out a win against the Buckeye State’s Gov. John Kasich (R). Whereas Ohio’s populist wing is animated by the economic disruption of a decades-long offering of reliable working class jobs with good benefits and robust pensions, Florida’s is motivated by a less modest desire for a steroidal version of the American Dream, something Trump can, and has, offered up to the state’s residents time and again.

And Trump’s bottomless confidence in himself and his way of life is something that no doubt appeals to people like the Florida Man who vowed to eat the shark who bit him. Truly, Trump might be the only person in history who is his own spirit animal; his ID, ego and superego are all one single, solipsistic Freudian nightmare. 

This attitude was on full display when Trump left his Sunday night rally. Not only did his helicopter buzz the crowd to thunderous applause, but it did so as speakers piped in the theme from “Air Force One,” a movie about a president who battles terrorists at 30,000 feet as they try to hijack his plane. It’s the quintessential movie for a Florida Man presidential candidate who used to watch “Bloodsport” aboard his own plane.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/donald-trump-is-the-florida-man-candidate/