Morning:
6°c
So, here's a question for you. Who is the current British heavyweight boxing champion? Time was when the answer would have tripped as readily from your lips as those of the Arsenal manager and the captain of the England cricket team.
Not any more. A proud division of the fight game has disappeared into oblivion in recent years to the point where you might as well ask who is the fourth-top ranked British male tennis player.
Well, to put you out of your misery early on, here's the answer: it's Danny Williams. Yes, you thought he'd retired long ago, but no. He retained his title with a victory at the Crowtree Leisure Centre in Sunderland in May in a contest described by Boxing News as one of the worst fights seen in a long while.
Suddenly the eras of Joe Bugner and Richard Dunn are reinvented as the golden days. Oh 'Enery - how did it come to the point where your world is as far from the halcyon days of live peak-time televised showdowns at the Royal Albert Hall as Portsmouth are from Premier League survival?
So here's another question. In such circumstances, what on earth do you do to try to resurrect the heavyweight corpse? If you're Barry Hearn, you morph into Simon Cowell and you create an event at the Excel Arena tonight, that has to be the must-see boxing event of the year.
In case you've missed this - which is highly possible - Hearn stages his latest Prizefighter bill tonight, as boxing becomes a punching and jabbing version of X-Factor.
Strictly no lightweights. This is eight heavyweights, some still running up the hill of ambition and others hurtling down the other side, who will contest seven fights on a knockout basis, resulting in a final at the end of the evening and an outright winner. You probably won't have heard of some of the guys who are taking part, but you will know Williams.
And you will certainly know Audley Harrison. Yep. That Audley. Nine years on from that Sydney gold medal and now aged 37. Who knows what he's been up to of late but here he is tonight, viewing the evening's action as a precursor to an assault on the world heavyweight title.
Whatever he's been doing, it clearly hasn't relieved him of those forays into fantasy that were his trademark all those years ago.
It's a novelty night, a pantomime in a way. However, it's also brilliant and Hearn must be delighted that tickets sold at such a rate that the bill had to be moved from it's original venue in Bethnal Green. It's a pity, though, because the down and dirty soul of the York Hall would have created a fantastic atmosphere, rather than a barn on the way to Canary Wharf.
Don't be fooled into thinking it's the real thing. Enjoy the evening and then refocus on David Haye and Carl Froch. Haye fights the giant Nikolay Valuev for the WBA heavyweight title next month while Froch is now a star performer in the super-middleweight division after landing the WBC crown.
They are fighters with class, not punchers with pasts, who will probably view tonight's bill with a mixture of curiosity and cynicism.
The rest of us should just admire a masterstroke of sporting entrepreneurship that, as television and public interest withers, puts boxing briefly in the spotlight.
I've heard the genuine talk of the Toon about Mike Ashley . . . he's a nice bloke
The band of QPR fans that I met at Newcastle airport on Wednesday will have arrived home in pretty good form after their team's hard-fought draw at St James' Park.
They'll probably have spent some of the evening talking to the locals about Mike Ashley and his continuing inability to sell the club, or decide who's going to be the manager in the long-term, leaving poor old Chris Hughton to stew indefinitely as caretaker.
Having never met Mike Ashley, it's hard to have any opinions about the Newcastle owner that have even the slightest positive spin, so vitriolic has been the media campaign against him.
So it was interesting to talk to some of the staff at the club, who surprise surprise, like and respect the guy. They told me about the pricing structure this season which they say Ashley instigated, whereby a father and son can be season-ticket holders for £300 the pair. And they proudly showed me the area of seating where a gathering of blind and partially sighted spectators are hosted every week, given headsets to listen to the local radio commentary and are presented with very high quality match programmes in braille.
It's easy to smile when you're top of-the-table, but the feeling at St James' was upbeat, as friendly as you'd expect from the North-East, and betrayed none of the club-in-turmoil vibe I'd expected.
When, as seems inevitable, they're back in the Premier League next season, leaner, meaner and with a stronger core-spirit borne out of adversity, some rewriting of history might be needed and Ashley could even be seen as an angel of the north. If, of course, he decides to hang around that long.
reason to be cheerful . . .
Nothing pleases a sportophile (usually male) more than acquiring a new trivial statistic of no consequence with which to astound his mates. And so it was at St James' Park that I met the head groundsman, Andy, mowing the pitch with his 26-inch lawnmower. It was a glorious day but an exhausting labour of love nonetheless, with every stripe in the turf being mown four times in each direction. So here's the stat, courtesy of Andy. It takes a single groundsman mowing a top-class football pitch about four-and-a-half hours to complete the job, during which time he walks seven-and-a-half miles. If you are a true and rather nerdy sportophile, the only guarantee about the rest of the day is that you will repeat that fact to at least one other person with undisguised glee.
