I?ll get on my knees and pray. We won?t be fooled again.??Pete Townshend
?Won?t Get Fooled Again? was first released as a single in 1971 and was immediately enshrined in the rock ?n? roll canon. It wasn?t as sexy as ?Brown Sugar? by The Rolling Stones, which was released the same year, but most people loved it, with the exception of The Who?s lead singer, the venerable Roger Daltry, who told Rolling Stone in 2018, ?That?s the only song I?m bloody bored shitless with.?
Pete Townshend wrote the song as a cautionary tale, which was as misunderstood then as it is now. But ?Won?t Get Fooled Again? is an iconic rock anthem and its lyrics are ambiguous enough to have been appropriated, reinterpreted, and co-opted by divergent interests, which Townshend neither anticipated nor desired.
For example, in the May 26, 2006 issue of the National Review, ?Won?t Get Fooled Again? was ranked the #1 conservative rock ?n? roll song in history. According to the magazine, ?The conservative movement is full of disillusioned revolutionaries; this could be their theme song, an oath that swears off na?ve idealism once and for all.?
Townshend had his doubts, not about naivet? and idealism, but, insisting the song was anti-establishment, about projecting a subtext for political gain.
?The song has no party-allied political message at all,? he explained. ?It is not precisely a song that decries revolution?it suggests that we will indeed fight in the streets?but that revolution, like all action can have results we cannot predict. Don?t expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.?
The recommendation to ?Expect nothing and you might gain everything? might be relevant to tonight?s pay-per-view fight between IBF welterweight champion Errol Spence Jr. and Mikey Garcia, the four-division champion who is moving up in weight in hopes of wresting the crown. Both men are undefeated. Both men are brilliant boxer-punchers. Both men are near or at the top of their game.
But intangibles are always in play.
Other small men have challenged big men, instead of the more common big men fighting small men to protect their perfect records, many times in the past and the results, with rare exceptions, were as one might expect. Middleweight champion Stanley Ketchel fought heavyweight champion Jack Johnson in 1909. Another middleweight champion, Mickey Walker, fought men bigger than himself many times in the 1920s and ?30s. And there?s no forgetting, however hard one might try, the fight between Arturo Gatti and Joey Gamache in 2000.
Spence will make weight during the same day weigh-in, in accord with the rules of the IBF, and will rehydrate before the opening bell. They have this down to a science. Even if he comes in as a junior middleweight, the disparity between him and Garcia won?t equal the disparities between the fighters mentioned above. But a good big man almost always beats a good small man, no matter how skilled that small man may be. It?s less about partiality than laws of physics.
Tonight?s fight may be more competitive than many expect, but it just as likely will not. A body shot or broken nose could end it early. Whatever his walk-around weight, Garcia has never fought a welterweight, let alone a welterweight as gifted as Spence. He will be up against it. But both men deserve our respect. They are pound-for-pound fighters and no one begrudges what they will earn considering the risks in the present and down the line. But the matchmaking looks less like a confection that a backroom concoction cooked up between in-house fighters and called ?the best versus the best,? despite the overwhelming odds in Spence?s favor.
No one expects Spence to fight WBO champion Terence Crawford any time soon, if ever given the givens. But with the many welterweight belts in circulation, almost all in possession of PBC fighters, why isn?t Spence unifying the titles? I hope I?m wrong, but a blowout is a real possibility. If that happens, the final words of ?Won?t Get Fooled Again? may end up encapsulating tonight?s fight and all that preceded it.
?Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.?
