In boxing, you do what you have to do. Pleasing the crowd, fulfilling pre-fight boasts, they're nothing but peripheral concerns. Boxing's not a game, so you do what you have to do.
Against Nikolay Valuev, David Haye did what he had to do. No frills, no showboating, no flights of unnecessary machismo. He hit, he moved, he hit, he moved - all the way to the world heavyweight crown.
As the great Evander Holyfield said beforehand, the perfect tactics against the 7ft Russian lead to a "boring fight". Call it boring, call it boxing at its purest.
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Don King in a duffle coat in a provincial German shopping mall. You could almost see it in his hair: "Where in the name of Muhammad Ali did it all go wrong?"
In common with television chef Gary Rhodes, King appears to be lowering the voltage in tiny increments, labouring under the misapprehension that the general public won't notice. One day the shaven-headed promoter will kick back in King Towers, spark up a monster stogie and say to himself, "you know what Don, I think you got away with it".
Nuremberg may be a long way from Kinshasa, Zaire, where King made his name masterminding "The Rumble in the Jungle", or indeed Las Vegas, but never let it be said that the Germans don't love their boxing.
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BBC Sport in Nuremberg
"People have said to me throughout the years, 'the heavyweight division, it's not like it used to be'. My plan, my mission is to return it to the old days..."
For a few seconds David Haye looked repentant, as if he had suddenly been forced to examine his own methods and didn't like what he'd seen. Then the confidence returned, a wry smile crossed his lips and he proclaimed: "There are no boundaries, no limits. As long as people are watching and boxing's on the map, that's all that counts."
The question had been posed by an elderly German journalist who wanted to know - like most of the Germans at the pre-fight news conference wanted to know - whether Haye thought he had crossed the boundaries of good taste in hyping his fight with Nikolay Valuev in Nuremberg on Saturday.
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Hello. I have been working for the BBC for almost a decade now and cover almost all sports, but particularly cricket and boxing. It would be good to hear from you - just don't be nasty or my mum might get upset.
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