Another week, another tournament, another exhibition match.
Friday saw a couple of impressive debuts for tournament night. Jeanette Kuhn started off the evening with an impressive win over veteran slugger Dewran Wopat. The third fight of the night featured a solid victory for Allison Tobias, also making her tournament debut, over second-timer Arsinoe Dagger.
Allison's victory in particular was a good moment for me. While her recent debut might lead one to think that she was a new arrival to the Averlast Gym, in fact she and real-life husband Diedrich Price have been around almost as long as I have. Schedule conflicts kept them away from the gym on tourney night before, but one could still often find them sparring each other or others during the week.
So that amounts to a whole hell of a lot of practice time before Alli finally made her leap into the tournament. It was a thrill to finally watch her in action.
Hopefully that schedule will stay clear on future Fridays.
My own match was a lightweight vs. middleweight exhibition match against snake5608 Boa. Longtime readers of this blog would recognize this as a rematch. Or maybe a re-rematch. While it may have lacked spectacle, as we two cagey veterans of the ring maneuvered around each other, looking for openings and dodging the big hits, snake was a challenge as always. The end result was a close call, but finally the decision went to me.
While fun and challenging, my match, being an exhibition, was "full of sound and fury," but "signifying nothing". Like my loss to Leafouur Smythe last week, these matches don't go on anybody's record. Happily, we're looking at an expanded middleweight roster, which will hopefully relegate the exhibition match to a curiosity, rather than a way to get the evening's only present middleweight a slot on the fight card.
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