One of the more ill-fated attempts at reality television occurred in 2002, when Fox rounded up a collection of sideshow celebrities and paired them off in a boxing ring. It was called Celebrity Boxing, and it aired just twice that year, on Wednesday-night slots two months apart, before the plug got mercifully pulled. The final show — which was originally going to feature a main event between John Wayne Bobbitt and Joey Buttafuoco, but ended up reseeding Buttafuoco against pro wrestling’s Chyna after Bobbitt was arrested on domestic violence charges — was on May 22, 2002, 15 years ago today.
The fact that a man who’d had his penis sawed off by his wife some nine years earlier was supposed to fight the lover of the "Long Island Lolita" (Amy Fisher), but was replaced by an Amazon from the fictional world of pro wrestling, tells you everything you need to know about the concept. It was tabloid figures and Where Are They Now types — most of them famous for all the wrong reasons — slamming boxing gloves into each other’s headgear-protected faces. It wasn’t so much a guilty pleasure as it was a vehicle to morbid curiosity, a literal version of MTV’s Claymation series Celebrity Deathmatch.
The real-life spinoff may have had a worm-ridden core, but it was decorated elaborately with tongue-in-cheek legitimacy. Michael Buffer, the ballroom-ready ring announcer from real boxing, introduced the players with added gusto to exaggerate accordingly (Todd "Maaad Dooog" Bridges!). Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini was working color alongside The Best Damn Sport Show Period’s Chris Rose. There were backstage interviews with fighters like Manute Bol, who had to lean over people like a human boom mic. The presentation had the feel of a fairly trustworthy parking-lot carnival, the kind you might visit at the better shopping malls.
That year, TV Guide ranked Celebrity Boxing sixth on the "50 Worst Shows of All Time," 10 slots lower than The Chevy Chase Show. This is how Time reviewed the first three-fight broadcast, which took place in March of that year and featured a bout between Tonya Harding and Paula Jones in the main event:
"[I felt] genuinely sorry for its limelight-grubbing pugilists. Perhaps most pathetic, in each fight one of the boxers had the name of a gambling website — goldenpalace.com — literally written on their skin. Because, you know, getting pummeled in front of a hooting crowd for a few more fleeting hits on the fame bong isn’t truly humiliating unless you get branded like a steer, too."
For the second and final show, the principals weren’t being pimped out by Golden Palace, but the exploitative sleaze factor had already set in after The Partridge Family’s Danny Bonaduce beat the living piss out of Greg freaking Brady (Barry Williams) in the first broadcast. Still, it was a fight card with the kind of intrigue that saves shame for the morning after. The second card was diabolical fun on paper.
The curtain jerker was a forgettable affair between Darva Conger and the Belarusian Olympic gold-medalist gymnast Olga Korbut, who had been in the news just months earlier after she was arrested on a shoplifting charge. Conger won the bout. Later, the 400-pound former Chicago Bears defensive lineman William "The Refrigerator" Perry fought the 7-foot-7 former NBA center Bol, who was said — for anybody who followed the NBA in the 1980s — to have once killed a lion with a spear back in Sudan. In the lead-up, Rose compared the pairing to a fun-house mirror distortion, in which one minute you look stretched out, thin and vertical, and the next short, clumpy, and ovoid.
That turned out to be the extent of the drama — the different shapes. Bol, who showed marked improvement since his brawl with the Chicago Bulls’ Jawann Oldham back in the mid-’80s, put his 102-inch wingspan to good use. He was firing the jab, but they were just Nerf missiles bouncing off Perry’s head. They didn’t mean anything. Referee Raul Caiz warned them to fight or they wouldn’t get paid — which was especially cruel, considering Bol entered the ring as "The Sudanese Freedom Fighter" and was donating all his proceeds to his war-torn country.
One of the problems was Perry didn’t land any punches, nor did he throw any. He couldn’t close the range, and — if we’re being honest — it didn’t look like he was too interested in trying to close the range. The best he did was bear-hug him. "You’ve got to cut the distance, stay low, bob and weave a little bit, move your head a little bit," shouted the former boxer Mancini from ringside. Stuffed in his leotard and eye level to Bol’s waistband, Perry just did heavy rotations with his hands holstered, taking jabs for three rounds.
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Even the main event at Celebrity Boxing 2 was a dud of epic proportions. Buttafuoco won a decision against "Chyna" (real name Joan Marie Laurer), in a bout that never felt anything other than unnerving and unnecessary. Adam Carolla, who was rumored to have originally been asked to fight Chyna before Bobbitt fell out and the card was shuffled, was the smartest man in the room by simply saying "No." (Carolla wasn’t even in attendance.) There was nothing sweet in the science.
With those three fights, and the three from the first Celebrity Boxing, it could have just ended there. The show could have disappeared from the airwaves forever as something forgettable and atrocious, if it hadn’t been for Screech meeting Horshack in a crossroads of cult TV show doofustry that night. Celebrity Boxing’s idea to make fights between stars with glaring asterisks and odd sideshow appeal was captured in full spirit with Screech-Horshack. The show lives on in infamy because Dustin Diamond and Ron Palillo — a couple of stereotyped school-yard nebbishes from different eras of television — traded dukes.
It was a tragicomedy. It was the culmination, and the death knell. Fifteen years later, that fight isn’t so much memorable as it is seared painfully onto our collective memory bank.
Maybe it was because the first classic bout between Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward had taken place just four days prior and bloodthirst was lingering in the air, but Screech vs. Horshack actually carried a little buzz. Of the "fun" fights, this one stood out as the Battle of the Meek. What did Arnold Horshack look like, almost 23 years to the day after the last episode of Welcome Back, Kotter aired on ABC in 1979? And would Samuel "Screech" Powers, who called himself the "Horshack of the ’90s," still have the kinky hair, the grating voice, the meth-throes facial expressions and the mile-long neck that haunted Bayside all those years ago on Saved by the Bell? Could either one of them throw a punch? It was a ridiculous premise, one that compelled fans of either show — as well as fans of train wrecks — to tune in.
Of the two, Horshack — the "Sweathog" whose grunt-laugh echoed down the hallways of junior highs in the 1970s — was the more sympathetic figure. People still loved him. Screech? He wasn’t as lovable, nor was he all that funny. He was that annoying kid who plagued Mr. Belding for years and had that ridiculous, ultimately delusional thing for Lisa Turtle. You got the feeling the rest of the gang kept him around to make themselves feel better.
(In fact, the only indication we had that he could "fight" was in a confrontation with Zack Morris after he caught Morris kissing Turtle. He ripped Morris’s shirt and dared him to do something about it. To his credit, Morris didn’t retaliate — he just broke the fourth wall, as he always did, and spoke to his audience in a corroborative way).
The general sentiment was that Screech had an ass-kicking coming. Only, that’s not how things played out. It was unfair, really. Horshack was outweighed by 54 pounds. He gave up 6 inches of reach. He was 53 years old when he climbed into that ring in a Los Angeles studio lot (though he was listed as only 48), while Screech was 25. Palillo was filming the third season of Welcome Back, Kotter when Diamond was born. The fight was barely sanctionable, even with headgear and short two-minute rounds and the selling point of mutual television twerpitude. Only an exhibition, you say? Talk to Apollo Creed about exhibitions.
No, Screech vs. Horshack had a dark tinge to it. Each was to receive in the vicinity of $30,000 for the job, so why not a little bad blood? And that bad blood was in evidence right away.
Horshack shoved Screech after the instructions, which Mancini chalked up as "a little psychological warfare." Turned out, that was the most offense we’d see from Ron "The Pulverizer" Palillo. After that it was Screech blowing off two decades’ worth of pent-up, forever-pigeonholed-as-a-clutzdork frustration, and it just got sadder by degrees.
Diamond, who had trained with kickboxing coach Duke Roufus and kickboxing champion Jason Strout, had a vague semblance of technique. Though Palillo had one of Hector "Macho" Camacho’s old coaches, Ray Rodriguez, helping him out, he didn’t stand a chance. Immediately Diamond began finding a home for the right hand, landing shots to Palillo’s body. One shot, then another, almost exclusively into Palillo’s torso and sides. After a strike connected that completely turned him around, Palillo’s eyes went wild as Diamond was escorted to the center of the ring. Those eyes were like those of a horse after a snake shows up in the stall.
That’s when it kind of stopped being fun.
"I actually felt terrible for Ron Palillo," Rose says when thinking back on it. "First of all, I was a huge Welcome Back, Kotter fan … and I didn’t want anything to happen to Horshack. As dorky as Dusty Diamond can be, he actually was a trained boxer and had a huge size advantage. You could see Palillo was scared to death when he entered the ring. I was hoping Barbarino, Freddie ‘Boom Boom’ Washington, and Juan Epstein, the Puerto Rican Jew, would come to Horshack’s rescue."
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None did. Instead, Diamond played to the crowd, which was way more enthusiastic for a fight between quirky childhood stars than would seem wholly organic. He waved Palillo to come forward in a cringeworthy moment, and Palillo did, like an unsure toddler headed for open arms. Then Bayside’s most tolerated numbskull turned into Screech, The Dick. He delivered a big shot on Palillo’s chin that sent him reeling. Then he staggered him a couple more times with head shots before the end of the round. Palillo was saved by the bell, all right — and spooked.
As he staggered to his corner, a sad thought would return each time they’d show his crazy eyes, darting around in fear: How did Horshack, the brightest of the Sweathogs in Room 11, end up here, all these years later, getting his ass kicked for the enjoyment of strangers?
"If memory serves me right, I think he got dotted in the eye," Rose says. "When Palillo passed away several years ago, the first thing I thought about was Horshack’s nasty, hacking laugh. The second thing was how he ran for his life around the Celebrity Boxing ring."
The second round was Horshack’s undoing. He walked right into a joust of a right jab, and fell to his knees. After an eight count and a "what now?" stare-down between the two, Diamond slammed home a series of right hands, then a left, and Palillo was given another eight count. The referee, veteran Lou Moret, let him go back one more time, and same result — big shots from Diamond, Palillo unable to parry nor get out of the way, until it was over. Moret had seen enough. The end came at 1:23 in the second round. Palillo had a mouse forming under each eye, and looked bewildered, like he’d just seen the ghost of James Buchanan materialize before him.
That was when it got existential and sad, this best of the meaningless celebrity pairings in the ring.
What did we gain from seeing Screech pick apart a badly outclassed Horshack? Did we really need to see that? What did Horshack ever do to warrant a public lashing? Why did it have to be Screech doing the ass-whupping? Screech, who put out a sex tape in 2006 (and claimed afterward to have faked it); then put out a polarizing tell-all book in 2009, Behind the Bell (only to later say it was ghostwritten and taken out of context); and was finally jailed in 2016 after a stabbing incident at a bar (and told Mario Lopez — a.k.a. A.C. Slater from Saved by the Bell — that it was a nick, the most "expensive Band-Aid I’ve ever bought").
It was a horrible idea, dredging up tarnished names that we as a society might enjoy watch getting hit. A drunk idea that came to life. The marvel 15 years later is that somehow Celebrity Boxing got green-lit by Fox executives in the first place.
There were three problems: (a) None of these people could fight, which made the concept less funny by the minute; (b) watching infamous people that you’d just as soon forget bang on each other like gongs left a thick layer of grime on the soul; and (c) with the exception of Bol (and maybe Bridges, who took out Vanilla Ice), the least-offensive party kept losing. Nobody wanted to see Joey Butta-fucking-fuoco beat up Chyna, just as nobody wanted to see Greg Brady get dashed by Bonaduce.
But the fight that took the cake was that clash between Screech and Horshack, a pair of TV’s quirkiest souls from competing generations. Nobody wanted to see either nerd go down, but it was inevitable. Nobody wanted to see dignity take an eight count, either, but that’s what Celebrity Boxing delivered on May 22, 2002. That fight was sadly, brutally unforgettable.