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Well done. You've sorted through the embarrassment of riches that is the modern podcast landscape and found me Rob Briden on my podcast.

In this series of Briden and I talk to among others, Harry Hill, Ben Elton, Charlotte Church, Steve Cougan and Dame Harriet Walter.

And that's just a few. We tend to chat for about 45 minutes to an hour never longer. It's terrific conversation,

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Back in April, two young boxers stepped into the ring at a sold out Las Vegas arena for a highly anticipated fight. One of them was the belt holder.

Pailing from Baltimore, Maryland, the current undefeated WS lightweight champion of the world, Jervonte, Tate Davis.

His opponent was a flashy young boxer from Southern California who had amassed a massive following on Instagram.

Both men were undefeated and the fight was built as about to determine the new face of boxing.

The bell, round number one, their moment of truth.

But amidst all the hype and anticipation, a theory had built in the boxing world.

That one of these fighters didn't really belong there. That one of them was for real and the other was a bit of a phony who was about to be exposed in a potentially dangerous fight.

L.A. Times, sports and culture critic Tyler Times followed this story up close and today he takes us inside this fight and explains why a young boxer marched into a fight that was almost certainly doomed.

People don't come to play fight when they get into the ring. They come to fight for their families, they come to fight for their lives, they come to fight for something usually much much much bigger than themselves.

It was a clear difference in terms of who might be coming to fight for real and who might be coming to fight for life.

From Wondering, I'm Andre Skelto, it's Wednesday, June 21st and this is The Lead.

Tyler Times, you have written about a variety of sports for the L.A. Times and before that for the ringer.

I was wondering first if you could just talk a little about boxing and what it is about the sport that seems to make for especially good stories and storytelling.

I mean boxing has the pulse of a lot of the undercurrent of America right from the beginning of our country to where we're currently at now.

A lot of the way that handles sort of our social issues, some of the narrative pieces of what makes a story good, it all exists in boxing.

Someone you know fighting hard to get to somewhere, she's your underdog like getting over a mountain, it ties itself back to so many different parts of everything that we really do here as a country.

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