Tuan_Jim wrote:evrenb wrote:
Hey I thought this too...unless it was modified by the writer?? hmmm something smells fishy...
Look at this way. Merritt dropped off the face of the earth after boxing retired him in the 1970s, sinking into deep, foul, subterranean levels of depravity, beyond the comprehension of the ordinary Boxrec poster.
The man was, or is, existing far outside of civilised society, and the only reliable witness we have of his antics post boxing is Jack Newfield, who stumbled into him accidentally and reluctantly in 1991.
No journalist was ever able to track Jeff Merritt down, let alone interview him, in nearly 40 years of life after boxing. The man was the fistic equivalent of a sasquatch. And that was despite the revived interest in Candy Slim stirred up by Larry Holmes and Earnie Shavers, in the terrifying anecdotes taken from their respective books that carried deep into the cyberspace era of a supposed smaller world.
Now we're expected to believe that this man spoke to Jeff Merritt? This blogger, a writer without even a schoolboy's basic command of grammar & elocution, this simpleton semi-literate, somehow was the man who
found Jeff Merritt and spoke to him in depth about his career? This 'writer' who did not even bother to detail how exactly how he spoke to Merritt, where he found Merritt, whether he met Merritt in person, spoke to him on the phone or by email, how Merritt now lives, looks and sounds, this 'writer' who was unable to elucidate what exactly Merritt has been doing these past four decades - as if both the writer and the subject's only knowledge of Merritt is what's listed on his Boxrec fight record - this "prolific scribe" (as the man lists himself) who clearly has never read an essay in his life and does not know how to write,
this is the man who outwitted all other trained journalists and found a Jeff Merritt who just so happens to speak, apparently near death, in a Ducean dialect?
The story stinks, the writer is worse than unreliable, and the man who just so happened to share the interview with us? It's the final nail in the credibility coffin. I'm dismissing this ridiculous interview as bullshit of the lowest order.
