LAST EDITED ON 04-04-05 AT 12:09 PM (EST)

>This may not be survivor but it is still a game with a 1 million dollar prize.

Yeah, except that Anthony now has no chance of winning that prize, and he should be self-aware enough to know that. You can't win merely by backstabbing your friends; you have to win in the ring.

If Anthony had beaten Jimmy Lange, he might well have had a chance to pick a fight in the second round. He could've double-crossed everyone at that time by picking the winner of Joey-Brent, and that would have made sense. Now Anthony will never get another chance to pick a fight, and you can be certain that one of the better fighters will take advantage of this opportunity to knock some sense into him, claiming to merely be "avenging" Joey.

>Do you really think Mark Burnett is just sitting by idly as the
>fighters map everything out ahead of time, making the first
>40 minutes of the show irrelevant? There is even a clause in the Apprentice
>contract that says the producers can choose who is going to be eliminated.

But there is no such clause in the contract for either Survivor or The Contender, so your statement is irrelevant. In The Contender, the loser of the fight gets booted, period.

Did Anthony's double-cross make for good TV? Sure. But Anthony isn't on the show merely to be a prop for Mark Burnett. Instead, he's on the show because he wanted to win -- at least, that's what he claimed. By pulling this stunt, he has ensured that he will not get past the next round.

>This is not a documentary on 16 middle weight fighters it
>is a "reality show".

So what?

>And as ratings dwindle the producers are going to do what they can to liven
>it up.

Simply put, they don't have that much control. That's the advantage of a reality-competition show: there are limits to what the producers can do, because they can't distort the competition. But they can exploit a fool.

>Why do you think they brought back Peter?

We have talked about that at length. Where were you? We know that Alfonso was originally the alternate, although we don't know what happened to the person he replaced. When Jeff came down with chicken pox, Burnett didn't have much choice, because he wasn't going to give someone a first-round bye.

>We have to remember that this is a tv show first and foremost
>and the idea is to entertain, especially for viewers who
>are not big boxing fans. And Anthony's decision was
>definetly entertaining to say the least.

I don't deny it was entertaining. I only add that it was stupid and counterproductive.

This is a unique reality TV show, because the contestants are participating in SOMETHING THEY ACTUALLY DO -- box. The gap between real-life person and reality-TV contestant is minimal here, unlike every other reality-competition show on the air. And you don't just walk away from the other contestants, unless you quit the sport. What Anthony did will haunt him for as long as he boxes.

Perhaps Anthony should change his nickname from "The Bullet" to "The Bullethead," because you'd have to have a tiny, bullet-sized brain to think this strategy would work.