Hella Nation - Evan Wright [99]
The few women in the crowd strike the observer as disproportionately young, cute and attentive. They look the way really attractive girls in high school looked, like that one totally hot yet nice girl who sticks in everyone’s memory, who was shy and kind but was also a cheerleader and dated the most sadistic goon on the football team. They are like that but slightly grown up. The more their men boo and cast almost babyishly hurt looks at the octagon ring for not giving them what it had promised, the more their women reassuringly pat their legs, snuggle closer and smile optimistically.
By the end of the fifth and final round, Tito has achieved total dominance over Matyushenko, bashing his eye open so that it indeed swells up and resembles the promised “baby’s butt,” throwing him repeatedly to the mat and hands-down outwrestling the world champion. Matyushenko is so badly beaten he struggles to pull himself up when the round finishes. Tito is boundless energy and goofy grins. It has been perhaps the toughest fight of his career—the triumph of a mediocre junior-college wrestler over a world champion—but this seems lost on the audience, which greets his victory with tepid applause.
Tito starts to perform his standard crowd-pleasing routine. He mimes being a grave digger scooping out a trench for a vanquished foe. Matyushenko stands at the edge of the ring staring at his feet while Tito tosses imaginary dirt on him. The crowd finally cheers, happy to see the Tito they love, the showy winner. Tito suddenly abandons his routine. He walks over to Matyushenko, grabs Matyushenko’s arm and raises it with his own. It’s a gracious act, Tito’s best move of the night. The crowd boos. They came for blood.
PORTRAIT OF A CON ARTIST
By the time he was twenty-three, Seth Warshavsky was regularly being hailed as a visionary. In May 1997, his portrait appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and reporters began flocking to Seattle to cover the extraordinary rise of a new Net prince. Warshavsky was the founder of Internet Entertainment Group, an online porn company that, according to the Journal, used “savvy tactics” and “innovative technology that others are too timid to embrace” to “rake in millions.”
A Seattle native, Warshavsky was likened by Newsweek to the city’s most famous son, Bill Gates, and hometown papers dubbed him “the Bill Gates of porn.” Time compared him to both P. T. Barnum and Larry Flynt. But Warshavsky told reporters his fledgling porn empire was just a stepping-stone. With an apparent technical lead—he claimed that his websites offered the most advanced streaming technology anywhere on the Web—his goal was to transform IEG into a mainstream entertainment giant, a “Viacom for the new media.”
Later that year, Warshavsky’s renown increased exponentially when he released Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee’s X-rated honeymoon video on the Internet. Each time he spoke to a reporter, Warshavsky talked up an array of new ventures he was starting: an online bank; websites for gambling, extreme sports, golf-equipment sales, attorneys’ services, psychics and surgeons; a broadband deal to premiere Hollywood movies on the Web; and possible partnerships with RealNetworks and Excite@Home. He was profiled on 48 Hours and interviewed by Barbara Walters, and he even testified before the Senate, proposing legislation to protect children from Internet porn.
In 1999, Time placed him fortieth in its Digital 50—a list of the most influential people in high tech—ranking Warshavsky among the visionaries who had helped make the digital world “a practical, cool and fascinating place.” Time also noted that the company’s “highly respected infrastructure includes a fraud-control database.” That same year, IEG was reported