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Noon. MGM Grand media tent. A half-dozen tables covered with chafing dishes, prepped with hot water, stacks and stacks of paper no one will ever read. Media members hunched and disinterested, compulsively checking their phones or indulging questions from bored casino employees about whether they've ever met Geraldo Rivera. Security workers lingering outside on concrete sidewalks, under the one bush that protects them from a Nevada heat that seems like it is beaming from eight different suns in the sky, and each one is closer to the ground than the penthouse suites.The fight is not something that has engulfed a city, a consciousness, a sport. It is a lingering fog.
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A little after 1 AM, PST, Saturday. The Palazzo Hotel. Lavo nightclub. Upstairs. Diddy's party. Girls in every alcove, in stairwells and corridors, on couches, against walls. Girls who look like they want a husband, girls who want you not to tell their husbands, girls who could burn your brains with one look from across the bar. Girls who don't even care that you are alive in the first place. Girls who would divorce you via Snapchat. Girls with fake-gold necklaces and pictures of themselves as their phone backgrounds. Girls texting unsaved numbers "I have five girls what r u doing??"Wrinkly, tanned men with receding hairlines in Armani Exchange t-shirts and driving loafers, drinking Dom Perignon from the bottle, mumbling through the verses, waiting for the chorus, waiting for it to be loud enough that he can tell her he didn't hear her, so he can lean in with his hand on her lower back and his cheek against hers. Middle-aged men who dance like they are being chased by hornets. And then there are men standing motionless, near the bar, in the corner, men whose faces at every moment of every song looks like some combination of "constipated," "mugshot," and "opiate high." Puffed and taught, necks arched at the perfect degree, rearranging their feet as crowds approach so no one scuffs their shoes. You start to understand that men mostly fall into two categories: men who give several fucks; men who give no fucks.A tall man next to the DJ pours a bottle of Ciroc vodka into a small glass. Something goes wrong; he has poured too much. There is no room for orange juice. Tall man improvises, pours the orange juice directly into the bottle of Ciroc. Tall man morphs into the sunglasses emoji and disappears into the dark.The DJ plays "Shoulder Lean," "Through the Wire," "Lucifer," Drake songs. Every Drake song. You realize that in a club full of white women teetering in stilettos, a Drake chorus is practically seismic. The DJ yells at the club to make some fucking noise for Fight Weekend. The crowd sort of does, or maybe it doesn't, it's hard to tell. They're drunk. They're in Vegas. No one ever seems to need more reason than that.Follow John Saward on Twitter.You start to understand that men mostly fall into two categories: men who give several fucks; men who give no fucks.