High life
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Ed (Too Tall) Jones is a six fciot nine inch, 270 pound negro who used to make 60,000 pounds per year knocking people down. Jones did this legally as he played in defence for the Dallas Cowboys, an American football team. In American football, a defending player is usually black, very large, extremely tough, unusually mean and encouraged by the rules to use his hands, elbows, shoulders, even his head in order to remove immovable objects preventing him from reaching his objective, the quarterback, who is usually white, unusually smart and much better paid than the defender.
This year, at 29 years of age, Jones suddenly announced his retirement and declared that he was turning in his shoulder pads and helmet for a 'pair of eight ounce gloves. He also announced that he was going to be the next heavyweight champion of the world. The Dallas fans screamed 'Say it ain't so Ed', the sportswriters laughed, and the Cowboys' front office executives just shook their heads and said it was another ploy by Jones's agent to extract more money from them. As it turned out everybody was wrong. Well, almost wrong. Too Tall did quit for more money but lint Cowboy money. It seems that someone bY the name of David Wolf, whose greatest achievement up to date has been to write a book about a basketball player, connive.d with the Columbia Broadcasting System Irl order to hoodwink the great America°, public into believing that Too Tall cold° fight. CBS, as if one didn't know, is Paley's £1000 million conglomerate, a company which has contributed uniquely t° the turning of Americans into robot-hkc humanoids that emit commercial-hke noises every three minutes. (A well resPeco ted man I know, a captain of industry 11... less, frequently goes off at a tangent: :?L'e you suffer from painful haemorroids? says, 'then try new, improved PrepanMon H.' The man, like every other Amellca,; watches a lot of TV, and has replaced Tr, talking and thinking process by com01 ,1,,,e cials. CBS has a programme called .,50 Sports Spectacular, an event unequalleo9IP"... date in bad taste and false expectan Things like wrestling cheer leaders, undeift. water weightlifting by midgets, andderffohd ion derbys by paraplegics are not b, e):, the realm of the producer's imagmatw.,"0. tte fact it is the ultimate in pornography, 1100 subscribes to the belief that having, the everything as far as sex is conccrn _cc. only thing left that still excites is violn eieot The plebeian Paley is considered a. fanCY American aristocrat. He buys a lot ot, objects and owns great houses. He 11 t the been selling cheap programmes American consumer for the better Pa' ' 30 years. Last week Paley's little conglomerate brought Too Tall's fight into our living rooms in living colour. Jones's opponent was a man called Yacqui Meneses who had skin which in boxing parlance is described as being of the caucasian persuasion. Meneses, it turned out, was part white, part Indian, part Chinese which ensured the ethnic audience, and in turn made CBS a fortune from sponsors like Budweiser Beer and Preparation H.
There was only one problem. For the future that is. Too Tall knew as much about boxing as Pol Pot and Khomeini know about compassion. The white, red, yellow man ran away for five rounds but in the sixth, Meneses got inside a runaway right lead and left-hooked Too Tall by jumping up while holding his trousers with one hand for leverage. Jones collapsed and was being counted out when, for some inexplicable reason, Meneses pushed the counting ref aside and punched down the prostrated and dreaming Too Tall. That, of course, disqualified the white, yellow, red kid and now Too Tall can continue his schedule of 42 bouts over the next 30 months.
There is nothing surprising about this. Managers like Wolf have wolf-like appetites and do not mind spilling blood, as long as it's not theirs but that of their boys. What is surprising is that CBS will televise his next fight. I wonder if they can get the next boxer to disqualify himself if by an accident he happens to make contact with Too Tall's chin? Whatever the case, the only man Too Tall should be allowed to fight is Bill Paley. It would be advertised as the battle of the tallest against the greediest. And it would be a sellout.
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