Every amateurs' dream: one point v Alcaraz for A$lm

At English fairgrounds in another century, miners on their day off and loitering drunks and boyfriends out to impress their dates would gather at the Boxing Booth.

- Rohit Brijnath Assistant Sports Editor

A tout would dangle “a pair of well-worn boxing gloves” and call for “a challenger from the crowd”.

Have a go, lads.

If – wrote boxinghistory.org.uk – they lasted three rounds against one of the fairground’s rugged, high-class boxers, the amateur would win “a small monetary prize”. This was an idea as old as time: Appeal to every man’s ego, dangle a prize, summon the public, put on a show. Sport as entertainment is older than we think.

Every sports fan is a spirited sucker with an unmet professional dream. It’s why Justin Timberlake and Hugh Grant line up to play golf alongside the pros in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship. Or chess folk shuffle and wait to challenge Grandmasters. One comedian joked that football fans come to matches dressed in team shirts because they hope the coach will pick them in case of an injury.

But that's the thing about us amateurs, we have an unembarrassed, joyous, outsized idea of our own skills. We'll try anything. One English boxer, Ron Gray, who fought on the undercard of the Muhammad Ali-Henry Cooper fights, wrote that in the fairgrounds “it’d be midday till midnight and you could have 20 fights a day... I once fought the same guy six times, same day!”