I Just Wanted to Watch the Fight

So, I've spent the past couple of weeks working with others to marshal an aggressive plan for the coverage of the Kelly Pavlik-Marco Antonio Rubio fight.

The background: The middleweight champion of the world, Kelly Pavlik, is a Youngstown, Ohio guy. A couple of years ago, he pulled himself off of the canvas to earn the right to be called champ.

It looked like this:



Last fall, Pavlik lost a non-title match to Bernard Hopkins. Knowing the champ needed a rebound, Top Rank Chairman Bob Arum decided to stage Kelly's next fight in his hometown, in the relatively new Chevrolet Centre.

This would be the first championship fight in the former steel town's colorful history and quite a boost to the local economy. For months, The Vindicator staff planned coverage that included:

• Daily newspaper coverage throughout fight week.
• An ambitious plan for Vindy.com featuring everything from voting on ring card girls to picking a national anthem singer to live round-by-round scoring during the fight (along with video, etc.).
• And, since our production facility was a few blocks from the venue, a "Chevy Centre Edition" for sale to those departing the fight and partying downtown within minutes of the end of the fight.

Hence, the days have been long, the headaches many and the stakes were high.

Now, I knew almost from the beginning that my place would be on the newsroom floor, hence putting the staff's biggest boxing fan in the one building downtown blocks from the arena that would NOT have a feed to the fight (to get the feed, our company would have had to pay a commercial rate based on fire marshal occupancy that would have been exorbitant).

Not to be a victim, I hatched a plan. A few months ago I grabbed a Slingbox off of Woot.com that I had never found time to install. What is a Slingbox? It is a device that sends your home cable feed to your home computer, even when you are far away.

Read about it here:

SlingMedia.com

So, I ordered the PPV Saturday and even was careful to record it, too, on the DVR. I hooked up the Slingbox and within an hour, I could watch the Rat Pack Tiki Bar TV's cable feed from anywhere in the home on my computer.

Just to prove my technical prowess, I made a screen grab of a current show on one of the HBO channels here:



So, I grabbed my laptop and headed to work Saturday afternoon. I was pretty full of myself, until I discovered a problem: The newspaper's firewall was blocking the feed.

The systems people confirmed this. I was frustrated, but resolved myself to watch the fight after work.

The evening saw a culmination of good people executing good plans, both for Team Pavlik and for Team Vindicator. Kelly won when Rubio's corner stopped it after nine grueling rounds. We had dummy copies (printed a day earlier) of the "Chevy Centre Edition" at ringside as the fight ended to whet the audience's appetite for post-fight hawking and we hit deadlines for both editions.

Our regular edition looked like this Sunday morning:



Our Web site is chock full of stuff:

Vindy.com

I got home a little before 2 a.m. Mary was still up: She actually gave me round-by-round byplay so i knew where things were heading throughout the fight. I sat down with a large, cold beer and decided to watch Kelly pummel Rubio. Flicking on the DVR, I was met with an error message.

Of the three DVRs, we've never recorded on this one. Hence, we would not have known that it had a problem. Alas, once again, i was being prevented from watching this fight.

I could have cried, but didn't. "My Cousin Vinny" was on, after all.

It was a fight night, I'd never forget, even if the only actual fight I got to see was Vinny wrestling Ms. Mona Lisa Vito back into the courtroom...

More later,


Mark