Scientific proof - Size doesn't matter!

So you have probably been waiting with baited breath (where does that saying come from anyway?) for the Nikolai Valuev - David Haye heavyweight bout that was previewed on Mattopia a month or so ago. You know the one, Big Guy (defending champ Valuev) vs Small Guy (David Haye).

If you don't remember you obviously have not been reading - For which i don't blame you, as the output this end has been sporadic to say the least. I apologise to my paying customers, the rest of you can just take what you get. Daily updates only happen Tour de France time, the rest of the year my 1000 monkeys are banging away at 1000 typewriters and sadly producing work that is not up the high standards of Mattopia and i cant use it. Its usually not even about sport. However i am closer to proving that the infinite monkey theorem is categorically incorrect.

Anyway if you are interested here was the original article.

The best bit was where David says about Goliath (whilst standing next to - and being dwarfed by - Goliath)

"I have watched Lord of the Rings and films with strange looking people, but for a human being to look like he does is pretty shocking"

which as you might recall is my leading contender for quote of the year.

Anyway, they fought.

The WBA world title was on the line, punches were thrown, men got sweaty, blood was spilt, commentators got excited, the little guy could not knock the big guy down and the big guy was pretty disappointing.

And it happened.

David beat Goliath.

I think the Bible predicted something like this, I'm guessing that's why Haye started so short with the bookies. God interfering in world sport again.

Haye produced a technically sublime performance to beat Valuev on a majority points decision and become the first British Heavyweight world champ since Lennox Lewis. Haye now must face former champion John Ruiz who is the mandatory challenger for the WBA belt.

After that Haye has his sights set on a few more big targets, namely the Klitschko brothers (Wladimir and Vitali) who between them hold the IBF, WBO & WBC titles.

In the end the little guy (191cm little guy!) had this to say.

"It was like hitting bricks, but it was a small price for being heavyweight champion of the world"

Well done. But it was a boring as hell fight. This just reaffirms for me that Heavyweight boxing has nothing to offer since Lennox Lewis departed and since Mike Tyson stopped doing his thing. Like threatening to eat children or getting his face tattooed or damn near killing another British World champ in Frank Bruno. That was when heavyweights were good to watch!

So in answer to my earlier question about baited breath - it is actually bated breath.

I know i was shocked as well. A spelling error!!

It’s easy to mock, but there’s a real problem here. Bated and baited sound the same and we no longer use bated (let alone the verb to bate), outside this one set phrase, which has become an idiom. Confusion is almost inevitable. Bated here is a contraction of abated through loss of the unstressed first vowel (a process called aphesis); it means “reduced, lessened, lowered in force”. So bated breath refers to a state in which you almost stop breathing as a result of some strong emotion, such as terror or awe.

Shakespeare is the first writer known to use it, in The Merchant of Venice, in which Shylock says to Antonio: “Shall I bend low and, in a bondman’s key, / With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness, / Say this ...”. Nearly three centuries later, Mark Twain employed it in Tom Sawyer: “Every eye fixed itself upon him; with parted lips and bated breath the audience hung upon his words, taking no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale”.

Sorry for the inclusion of classic literature into a sports blog. It needed to be done though. The monkeys helped me out with that stuff.



So in Summary

• David beat Goliath (again), when i am I ever going to learn and stop backing the big guy?
• David Haye is still the front runner for quote of the year.
• The term is actually 'bated breath' rather than baited breath.
• The sweet science has given us proof that size does not matter. Not that it matters.
• Mattopia should have increased output from here on in, even without the help of my monkeys. Bit annoying really. Do you know how long it took to assemble them all? The Cost? The naming? Names for 1000 monkeys was quite difficult, they cant all be called Bubbles after all. The food bills? The smell? The endless debates about punctuation and basic grammatical errors? The faeces throwing? (theirs not mine!) They will be the death of me. But it is the Infinite monkey theorem, i suppose i might give them another chance.
  
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