So Donald Trump and Joe Biden are cutting promos again.
Biden got the latest round between the two geezer nemeses going yesterday by telling a crowd at the University of Miami that he has no interest in debating the president over past treatment of women. Biden, now 75 years old, thinks more about confronting Trump physically. “If we were in high school,” said Biden, who hasn’t been in high school since the Eisenhower administration, “I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”
Trump, 71, came back at Biden this morning around sunrise via Twitter, tagging his tormentor as “weak” and adding basically that the former vice president doesn’t really want a piece of this. “He doesn’t know me,” Trump wrote, “but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”
Wondering how a bout between these Maalox Maulers would play out, we went to an old guy who can actually brawl. His prediction? Pain, for anybody who witnessed the encounter.
“If those guys went at it,” Terry Funk tells me, “it would be a very, very shitty thing to watch.”
Funk, the legendary Amarillo-based wrestler, is 73 years old. He first got in the ring in 1965, and forever endeared himself to fans as a pioneer of hardcore wrestling and mixed boxing/wrestling/martial arts bouts while touring Japan beginning in the 1970s. He gained a new generation of fans with his work in ECW in the ‘90s, and wrestled on and off right up through last fall. He says he’s going through some tough times physically these days, with an abdominal hernia that won’t go away and which forced him to retire from the ring—this time for good, he tells me.
But, fighters fight, as the saying goes. And wrestlers have a tougher time staying retired than anybody save maybe politicians. So as I pump him for thoughts on Biden and Trump posing as pugilists, Funk’s mindset changes. After initially saying he would prefer these dudes never throw hands—“Tough guys are not always a pain in the ass,” he says—Funk ultimately decides he just doesn’t want them to throw hands at each other. No, he now wants Trump and Biden to join forces. Against him. By the end of our conversation—Hernia? What hernia?—he’s ready to get back in the squared circle and make ass-kicking great again.
“I’d love to get in the ring with those two assholes,” he says. “Both of them at once would be fine with me. They don’t even have to tag in. If either one of them’s looking for an ass kicking, tell them to call me up. I’m over 70!”
Hey, assholes: You just gonna take that from an old guy?
Disclosure: Joe Biden has told some bad jokes I’d written for him.