Al Bernstein On Boxing: Sorry To Disagree, But...

[CFH]

Teddy Atlas is a comlpete bloody half wit, I mean he really is a cretinous moron. I'm absolutely fed up of his ridiculous analogies about rooms in his house. FFS, "he goes downstairs", "he's up in the utility room", "he doesn't want to spend too much time in the garage with the engine running", "If he doesn't put on the extractor fan whilst cooking curry in the kitchen, the observatory might be a little smelly bit later on".

He does it with other things too. He seems to come up with the most inapplicable, ludicrous metaphor for what he's seeing, then sticks to it resolutely and over-extends it, despite it being dubious to begin with.

There was an example in the Cloud-Woods fight on the weekend about cars, but they usually follow this sort of pattern, "Woods is like an old Mk V Jaguar, that's been down lots of roads and had years of racing. It didn't win every race, but it's reliable, durable and hard working. However, whenever it's raced in the USA, where it has to drive on the other side of the road, it's came up second best. Will Woods be able to fine tune his performance like the engine of this jaguar, and put the final application of turtle wax on it tonight, or will it be shipped back to the UK in deafeat? Or some stuff like that.

He also has a habit of making one or two rudimentary and bleeding obvious points like, "the guy that's got a 6 inch reach advantage wants to fight from the outside". He will then proceed to repeat this over and over and over again, ad nauseam, for the rest of the fight. He'll mention it every time the tall guy fights from the outside. He'll refer to it every time the tall guy gets dragged into a toe to toe brawl. He'll fill the breaks between rounds talking about whether or not the tall guy is or isn't doing what he reckons he should, accompanied by replays showing so much more, He'll sum up by either saying 1. The tall guy did what I said and won, or 2.The tall guy didn't do what I said and lost. The guy bloody repeats himself so much that I usually end up shouting at the TV screen or just turning down the volume.

[amat]

A few years ago in one of the FNF threads everyone was making their own Teddy analogies, it was a great thread. Awesome stuff and yeah Al Bernstein is 100% right and an awesome writer.

[Gandalf]

That was a really enjoyable article. Bernstein is right in most of what he says. The Internet is important for boxing as coverage beyond that in the printed press is marginalised or else not covered at all. There might be a lot of dross, especially within message boards, but outside of that credible analysis does exist. The Internet is actually my only source of information for boxing, I have no alternatives...but all in all I think it serves me well and gets the job done.

[Kirkland Laing]

I think it's a fair bet the Teddy Atlas doesn't spend a lot of his life on his computer, if indeed he has one. If he has read any message board postings about himself then it's likely that this won't have made him see the boxing part of the internet in a positive light. He sounds like an old grandad getting upset about how things aren't the same as they used to be. And come on, we all know he's always wrong about fights so why is it a surprise that he's wrong about boxing and the internet?

The internet is the best thing to happen to boxing as far as creating and maintaining a fan base since Ali. In Britain I'd get exactly zero regular media coverage of any fight that wasn't British apart from megafights like Oscar Floyd. I'd only ever see what Sky can make money out of, there'd be no streams or Youtube or downloads of everything else to watch. But to be fair to Teddy he's involved in the business and isn't able to appreciate this and as far as the net goes I'd be amazed if he even has an email address. Probably in a few years if he's still punditing he'll come out and say, yeah, actually I'm looking at boxing stuff on the internet now and maybe some of it isn't so bad. Or maybe he gets the boot from ESPN and in a few years he's doing a column for Bloody Nose Boxing.