Well, I'm giving up on following boxing.
Not for humanitarian reasons; I was never one who intellectualised sport very much. I like boxing because I like watching grown men beat the living piss out of each other, preferably in easy-to-watch, three-minute chunks.
I'm also not giving up because of the depressing parade of ex-boxers I see on TV, although that's pretty off-putting. Evander Holyfield is so old, steroidal and mumbly that last time I saw him interviewed I thought Sly Stallone had started blacking up. Ricky Hatton, meanwhile, has ballooned so shockingly that I'm pretty sure he has Han Solo frozen in carbonite somewhere in his house.
It's not even the baffling and frustrating plethora of titles; the WBA, the WBC, WBO, IBO, IBA and IBF all have different champions and different ways of picking them. These range from the fairly sensible (the Klitschko brothers hold the WBO, WBC, IBO and IBF heavyweight titles between them, having beaten all challengers so far) to the slightly surreal (David Haye scored a points victory over that big bloke from Mordor to win the WBA belt, presumably then allowing his opponent to return to his thousand-year slumber) to the totally-ignored. (The IBA top five Welterweight contenders are currently Barry "Cillit BANG" Scott, Jesse Owens, Tinky-Winky, George Burns and a wheelie bin. The sixth place contender is me.) Still, I love the sport and pound-for-pound and aggregate rankings help sort through these things.
What finally put me off boxing, oddly, was social networking.
For the last few weeks, I've been noticing a disturbing trend of suggestions on my facebook page.
"Joe Calzaghe: Many people who like this also like The Chris Moyles Show."
...Really?!
The Chris Moyles Show is, for me, more unpleasant than having convicted sex offenders rape my ears with sandpaper condoms on. It's the aural equivalent of being kicked in the balls by the Chief Punt-Master of the International Ball-Kicking Federation, Steel Toe Division.
I'm not a fan, is what I'm saying.
But somehow, by being a boxing fan, it seems to be at least tacitly implied that I enjoy the radio broadcasts of a talentless cunt-monkey who seems genetically designed to curb the population explosion. Listening to the Chris Moyles show depresses me to the point of impotence and also inspires bile-spitting, homicidal rage every time his team of blithering, shit-gobbling sycophants applaud his mind-numbing, desperate attempts at humour. There are people out there hunting for bigfoot who get closer to their quarry than Moyles does when he's looking for a punchline, or even anything to say that doesn't shred my nerves like a heard of pigs being slaughtered outside a home for the proufoundly disabled while the residents hold a gurning contest and scrape their nails down a blackboard en masse.
Still, because I like Joe Calzaghe, someone out there assumed I was a fan.
Then there's the aforementioned Ricky Hatton, one of the more exciting fighters of his generation. A brutal swarmer with a knack for piling constant pressure onto an opponent before breaking through with devastating knock-down power.
Many who like him also like "YOU SHLAAAG."
I don't even know that that is.
Presumably, many people who like Ricky Hatton also like shouting things that aren't words in public. By implication, Ricky Hatton's biggest fans are not boxing fans, or native Mancunians, but tourettes sufferers with a slight lisp.
This, in short, is why I'm turning my back on boxing. It's not that I don't like it, it's just that, according to Facebook, I can't be a true fan unless I'm shouting mysoginist abuse in a Sean Connery accent whilst listening to shit radio.
And that all seems a bit much, frankly.
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