Twice already stung by Las Vegas and its quirky ways, Gennadiy Golovkin returns with renewed hope this weekend, writes Elliot Worsell from The Strip.
THIS morning on the Las Vegas Strip I found myself walking behind Elvis Presley on a mobility scooter, and instead of seeming unusual, I was reminded earlier in the week when Kieron Conway of Northampton told me that his dream has always been to box here. because of his connection to Elvis.
This was not, I’m pretty sure, the kind of Elvis connection that Conway was hoping to experience, but it was nonetheless indicative of all that Las Vegas has to offer in 2022. In fact, if you had asked the man on the scooter by name, he would no doubt have called himself Elvis with a straight face, and in turn asked me if I wanted to pay for a picture with him. Then I would have said, “No, absolutely not,” but I would have had to accept the fact that here, where nothing seems real, his answer to my initial question was no less permissible than if he had turned around and called himself Randy himself, or Bill, or Todd.
That is the unspoken rule here in the desert, this place where everything is fake: the people, the monuments, the fun. It is here, day after day, that men and women will arrive giddily in droves, especially on marquee weekends (like Mexican Independence weekend), and will show up either prepackaged stupid or with every intention of getting stupid. during the course of your stay. Man or woman, they enter like ducks willing to suspend their disbelief and will believe anything and eat anything on the condition that it makes them feel good, becoming slaves of illusion, seduced by a world outside the real one that they have left behind.
Watching this transformation unfold in a fight week is a somewhat surreal experience. Plus, doing it sober is like stalking the grounds of Disneyland without a kid. The feeling of discomfort is much the same, as is the feeling of being terribly out of place, untethered, abandoned, lost. Soon he will have to accept that to endure this experience, drink and drugs are perhaps the only options.
In fact, stay in Vegas long enough, and rest assured, you’ll lose your money, your mind, or whatever faith you have left in the human race. Like a telegraphed magic trick, the place gets worse the more times you see it. Although blinded at first by all the lights, and the sheer size and scope of everything, you’ll likely eventually find that everything you can touch disappears the moment you do, poof! – and that those who take pictures of the “sights” will later look at those same pictures only to see nothing, nothing at all, in the background. (If some Native Americans believe that a photograph of a person steals their soul, here in Las Vegas the souls of everyone who has ever stopped to take a photo of the “Eiffel Tower” line the streets.)
Everything, it seems, is designed to seduce you and siphon off every last dollar and shred of dignity, from the air conditioning in casinos, which offers relief from the heat outside and carries the scent of a perfume sold only in strip clubs, to the homeless. the monk selling beaded bracelets and the half-naked showgirls in feathered headdresses offering something different from what they’re actually advertising.
Interesting scheme, that, was also this morning, as I was crossing a bridge for a change of scenery, I saw two of these feathered showgirls approach an old man and his wife, doing so in the hope that they would ask for a photo for money. . The approached man, of course, could see no problem with such a proposition and, to her relief, the man’s wife also apparently had the right amount of hangover to accept and allow her man to fulfill the most harmless of demands. fantasies.
That’s when, with the transaction in full swing, I realized that many of the men I’d seen posing with these feathered showgirls all week had all looked the same: pink face, gray mustache, belly hanging over the load. shorts and a t-shirt bought when they were young and in better shape. Easy to spot, they all seemed to have stolen a wife, eaten a previous wife, beat up a previous wife, or now moved on to their second, third, or fourth wife.
I noticed that some of these wives needed to drink to numb the senses and numb the pain, while others, from places more exotic than here, had a permanent expression of fear on their faces, their only consolation being the fact that They spoke little English. and therefore communication with her captor, or husband, would be forever limited.
Whatever the arrangement, older men were certainly the main targets of these feathered showgirls, especially if they walked alone and, better yet, exuded a certain loneliness or despair. In general, they would tend to offer less resistance than their younger, more demanding counterparts, and even if accompanied by a woman, it was often the woman, eager to breathe life into her stale relationship, who encouraged her man to move on. . and “indulge yourself”.
It’s a strategy as old as time, of course, a version of which exists even in boxing, a sport in which it still pays to be young, sexy and desirable. There, just like on the Las Vegas Strip, the cash cow, for example this weekend Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez, will deliberately target his prey and exploit any perceived weakness, both at the negotiating table and later, a Once the deal closes, on fight night. Meanwhile, the target, in this case Gennady Golovkin, will have a wide berth until he’s good and ready; that is, large enough to offer little resistance; that is, unable to walk past the pretty boxer with all the feathers without turning her head.
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Earlier in the week, I picked up my fight week badge at the old wedding chapel inside the MGM Grand and was reminded that people get married here. It was a sobering thought, as sobering as any this week, and it would resonate even more because on the flight he had spent five of the ten hours watching Scenes from a Marriage, a television series based on the Ingmar Bergman series of the same name. The original, a groundbreaking piece of television and far superior to the one I saw on Monday, was apparently responsible for an increase in divorce rates (from 2% to 3.3%) in Sweden at the time of its release in 1973, so harsh were his truths, so revealing was the message and reality he presented on screen.
The reality, which neither version of Scenes would evade, was this: Marriage is not only difficult, but in some cases it can be the beginning of the end. There are, he took pains to remind us, so many ups and downs in any typical marriage and much of the downward pressure a married couple will sadly feel comes from the institution itself rather than from any real, tangible issues between them. However, what Scenes also managed to communicate and show was that even in the worst marriages, there are occasional moments of light in the darkest of times. It is these moments of light, also known as hope, that represent the reasons why many people try, or just try, whether their marriage is finally planned and thought of or, if it takes place in the chapel of the MGM Grand, due to more than sheer spontaneity and an overactive imagination.
It’s as encouraging as it is terrifying, that thought. Because, in the end, despite the warnings, these people believe that their love is strong enough. They believe that they will somehow be different from everyone else. They believe in each other. They believe in hope. Which is what, in the Las Vegas sense, people come here full of. They come here hoping their luck will change. They come here hoping that their lives will change. They come here hoping that it will be better than last time.
Even Gennadiy Golovkin, a boxer good enough not to have to rely on blind, ignorant hope, arrived in Las Vegas this week willing to let bygones be bygones and try again, though aware that the house, if it came to that, it will. he still probably favors his opponent on Saturday night. His marriage, admittedly, is one of the most complicated in boxing, in many ways one-sided, and yet Golovkin, despite countless red flags for him, has once again fallen into the Las Vegas illusion; that is, the belief that here there is always a clean slate and you can, if you need a new start, be whoever you want to be. Yes, even Elvis on a mobility scooter.
