Exercise extreme caution with that remote control tonight, as always, but particularly in the 9 o'clock hour, when the ever-accelerating freefall of Western Culture is expected to crash through another barrier with the telecast of a "boxing" match between quasi-celebrity scandal babes Tonya Harding and Paula Jones.
LLLLLET'S GET READY TO TUMBLLLLE!
As matchups within the Quasi-Celebrity Scandal Babe Division go, this one's indecently decent, although I prefer the larger combatants, so when it comes time to promote the Camilla Parker Bowles-Gennifer Flowers bout, I'll be ready.
Few students of America's personality kaleidoscope would argue that Harding and Jones couldn't each benefit from a thunderclap left hook to the temple. But alas, the required delivery systems won't be present in the ring tonight.
Harding and Jones are avowed lightweights by most every conceivable definition, and Jones has signaled in pre-fight comments that her strategy will consist of whatever keeps her rhinoplasty in essentially the same configuration.
That's what I like about fighters. They always tell you exactly what they're thinking.
For her part, Harding has said she finds Jones "a wonderful woman" and plans to help Jones up should she knock her down. How sweet. The larger question seems to be: Who will pick the rest of us up?
Reaction to news that Dick Clark Productions had taped a three-rounder between Harding and Jones that will air tonight on Fox has swung on the narrow pendulum between annoyed bemusement and predictable outrage. One Scripps-Howard commentator hyperventilated that the bout is the cultural talisman of everything Islamic terrorists are talking about, an American culture awash in decadence. But the Independent of London termed tonight's slapfest "a tasty little encounter."
Its real molecular self is somewhere in between, but my personal objection is that I didn't get to cover it. Last Thursday's taping in Los Angeles was closed to the media, which tells you that, oh my yes, plenty of media would love to have brought you firsthand accounts. Had I been there, I'd not only have been able to recount all the fights I've covered that I only wish had been closed to the media, I'd probably have been unable to restrain myself from offering advice to the promoters as well.
My occasional ideas for a better product at Fox, mostly wrinkles in well-established themes like "When Good Pets Go Bad," such as "When Dogs Go In Circles," "When Ferrets Go Online," and "When Gerbils Don't Care," have been summarily rejected, it's true.
But I know from decades of covering fights that Fox is never going to move "Celebrity Boxing" into the lucrative pay-per-view market it deserves as long as Dick Clark is the brains behind the operation.
Tonight's fight, like all fights, needs Don King. Someone who can convince me that Paula Jones is "an extremely dynamic individual" and that Tonya Harding is indeed "one who has did it all."
Harding is infamous only for a small menu of things. To review: hiring her ex-husband to contract a goon to kneecap skating rival Nancy Kerrigan with a metal club prior to the 1994 Olympics, distributing her own pornographic wedding night video, nailing her husband with a hubcap, and getting evicted from her house for non-payment of rent. Not a lot, really, that would allow her to avoid her common media label, "disgraced Olympic skater."
Jones, who was so thorough a ditz that at the height of the imbroglio over former President Clinton's misbehavior she said in one interview, "Now Republicans, they're the good guys, right?" is most commonly labeled "presidential scandal queen." She was so horrified at the very public profile of her case against Clinton that she has since retreated into the intensely private world of just, you know, posing for Penthouse and modeling for No Excuses jeans.
I didn't know Paula was still trying to fine-tune her public persona until she took this fight as a substitute for Amy Fisher, aka the Long Island Lolita, whose affair with the dashing Joey Buttafuoco in 1992 cooled a bit when Amy shot Joey's wife through the Buttafuoco threshhold, inspiring one of the better knock-knock jokes in recent memory.
Knock Knock.
Who's the ...
BANG! Amy Fisher.
Ms. Fisher pulled out of the fight at the urging of her parole board, but I like to think it was really because they told her there'd be no gun play.
So don't tell me this ain't a classy show.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com
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