It's a long time from the mattress you tugged down to the floor the night you won the World Series. But not long if you close your eyes and remember, which is hard in the future.

It is hard because you are on television and this is the future and this is celebrity boxing. Except it is the future and celebrity boxing has become normal, accepted programming on sports and network television. There is good celebrity boxing and there is bad celebrity boxing now and Kelly knows he is on the bad side of the new reality.

Kelly shudders off camera and wishes he'd gone for the robe and shorts instead of the tights and ball cap he's planning on throwing into the crowd. All of the sudden he realizes he should keep the ball cap because there is not much more than that really. This is the kind of celebrity boxing that bears no mention on television unless something truly, awfully, embarrassingly dramatic happens…celebrities beating each other up does not pass for news anymore. That's what he is counting on anyway… Kelly hopes for a boring fight with little fanfare, a check that doesn't bounce, and the possibility of water skiing in the near future. But it is the future after all and not the past and you can't go back:

back to when you pulled the mattress onto the floor and the girl with it. And you undressed and redressed her so many times you lost count and you never did it the same way twice. Player? Rake? Bullshit. You loved every one of them. Explained the game to them on the floor with the mattress in a hotel room. The best hotel room. Gave them the best night of their life, and you too… You just got to keep doing it.

You could find the hotel again and maybe that girl, maybe tug that mattress onto the floor again, but you wouldn't rent the XXX movies anymore. Those days are over: $14.95 a throw; they're over.

yeah, the mattress on the bed the night of the World Series and you are awake long after she is asleep tracing lines across her hips which are not perfect but beautiful, and her breasts that have ugly scars on the bottom but you look straight at them and by doing so, make them attractive… you're not perfect either and you know it…you rub the inside of your leg where you took a cleat five hours ago… you are still alive, you whisper in her ear and she moans…my tongue on your back proves it…

Kelly waits for his name to be announced, thinks maybe he has made a mistake entering to Take Me Out To the Ballgame, bows his head and tries to screw up the courage to look hardened, and never resigned.