Barber Shop Boxing – Does It Drive You Nuts As Well?

By “Bad” Brad Berkwitt

Have you ever noticed when you are sitting in your favorite barbershop that the topic of boxing always seems to come up? The only problem is that most of the talk about boxing is incorrect. For example…Barber number one tells barber number two that was some fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Marvin Hagler. Barber number two agrees and customer number four rings in with, that he feels Hagler could have beaten Larry Holmes.

Could have beaten Larry Holmes? While you are sitting in the chair watching whatever amount of hair you have left on your head fall to the ground, you want to ring in with “are you guys nuts?” Robinson never fought Hagler, and Hagler was a middleweight who could have never fought Holmes at heavyweight.

But you keep your mouth shut because in the barbershop, tempers can fly high, so you pipe up with a valid fact about boxing… You say “that was some fight between Aaron Pryor and Alexis Arguello back in 1982.” Barber number 4 and customer number 6 respond, “yeah that Pryor was some middleweight, I will tell you that.” Middleweight? Pryor was a junior welterweight and never fought at anything higher than welterweight. In fact, he fought as a lightweight, but moved up because the lightweight’s at that time would not fight him.

So is there a moral to this story? Shoot, I don’t know, but I have to laugh because every morning when I used to live and work in Virginia, I would pass up  a barbershop, that when I looked in the window, I saw a barber reading a newspaper waiting for his first customer and probably scanning to see who won the fight the night before between Sugar Ray Leonard and Keith Thurman. I just had to laugh…

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