the winner

This is the third and final part of our special report on the fight of the millenium opposing Cristina Keller and El Jodillón de las Pampas which was held here in the city of Porto, Portugal before an enthusiastic, if at times unruly audience.

It took De las Pampas more than thirteen hours to recover from Cristina's devastating mutatis mutandis blow. When he finally showed up he looked quite tame. Meanwhile both crowds, exhasperated by difficult words they could not understand, decided to demand action, real action. They were now requesting that Cristina and De las Pampas meet for a real fight before their eyes.

This posed a very serious problem for both contenders and the Portuguese authorities. Portuguese people are good at words, not at actions. There was the real concern on both sides that they would defraud the expectations of the crowd. After several hours of negotiations, involving two batallion of lawyers, one from each side, and too much talking and discussion it was finally agreed that Cristina and De las Pampas would meet for a real fight the following day at 3:00 pm.

People were so excited they could not sleept that night. They were about to see a fight involving real action, not mere words, between two of their most cherished idols. The following day before noon they were already demanding the Blasfémias arena, brown bags in their hands, in preparation for a long, tightly disputed fight.

They were soon to be disappointed, though. Cristina and De las Pampas entered the arena at 2:15 for some warming up (see here). Then, at three o'clock sharp, amid an enormous uproar from the crowd, the referee blew the opening whistle. That very same instant, as the referee was still looking at his watch, Cristina fired a tremendous blow with her right-hand knee on De las Pampas's genitalia which sent him rolling over the floor in pain.

As the referee raised his eyes from his watch, he saw Cristina jumping in celebration of victory while De las Pampas was lying on the floor in severe pain, his hands between his legs. He tried to get up but was unable to do so. The referee counted until ten and then raised Cristina's arm and declared her the winner by technical KO. The fight was over. It had lasted just 1.23 seconds.

A new war of words was about to start, this time extending to the whole country. The De las Pampas's crowd left the arena in tumultuous protests against the referee while the fans of Cristina hit the streets of Oporto in noisy celebrations.

The following day, the discussion about the referee's decidion made the front pages of newspapers. Radio and TV stations made it the only subject of their prime-time news. The nation was divided. The state-owned TV channel, RTP, organized a Prós-e-Contras debate on the issue, with seven experts on each side, mostly jurists, retired referees and boxing fighters.

In less than twenty-four hours more than a million questions had been raised and in need of urgent answers, v.g., why was the referee still looking at his watch, and not at the fighters, three quarters of a second after blowing the opening whistle? Was corruption involved? Why did not ASAE require De las Pampas to wear a special equipment protecting his genitals, an equipment which is available on the market at the price of twenty euros apiece? And what about the rules, don't they forbid fighters from hitting each other below their waists? Why was the floor of Blasfémias arena so hard that De las Pampas hurt his ankle when he fell down?

I would like at this point to convey to my viewers from all around the World the sense I got from this debate and how the the Portuguese excell at words. This is a people who can declare ilegal what is written in the law and take as legal what is proscribed by law. This was illustrated by the participation of several Law Professors in the debate.

First came Professor Ferdinand Copper from Coimbra. What an impressive man this is at quoting. In his initial intervention lasting for less than two minutes he quoted Socrates, the philosopher, Socrates, the country's prime-minister, José Saramago, the writer, Winston Churchill, the British politician, Pelé, the former soccer player, Euroliberal, the Blasfémias commentator, Castanheira Neves, his mentor at Coimbra, and Nossa Senhora de Fátima.

The two following Professors of Law, both coming from Lisbon and fans of Sporting, after presenting sophisticated arguments and making a number of quotations ruled in favour of De las Pampas. Then, came another Law Professor, this one from Minho University and a fan of F.C. Porto. He ruled in favour of Cristina. His argument is worth noting.

Briefly, he argued that even though the rules of the game make it ilegal for each fighter to hit his opponent below his waist, exceptional cases must be considered. One of such cases is when the fight puts face to face a man and a woman. The male fighter has in this case an unfair advantage because of the weight of his genitalia. This weight which, in the case of De las Pampas, he estimated at 1.574 pounds, shifts the centre of gravity of his body forward, giving the man a more aggressive posture and conferring him an undue advantage over his female opponent. In the case of De las Pampas he estimated this shift to be 0.398 inches. Thus, Cristina´s knee-blow at De las Pampas' genitals was simply an attempt to remove this unfair advantage from her opponent. If he could not recover and was sent directly to hospital that was not her problem. His conclusion was that Cristina Keller was a fair, lawful winner of the fight.

As I leave this country today and this special report comes to a close let me inform my viewers all around the World that the Portuguese Ministério Público has just announced it is opening a full, rigorous criminal inquiry on this case. With their peculiar sense of humour and taste for words the Portuguese people are already calling it here the Tomatos' Whistle.