In boxing parlance, a "tomato can" is a hand-picked schlub brought in to go a few rounds with the champ, whose odds of scoring an upset are comparable to say, Madison, Wisconsin landing the next games of the Olympiad.
While these guys are technically professional fighters, at least when they're not earning a living as roofers, drywallers and doing other jobs that don't require a background check, it's not uncommon for the town drunk to take one glassy-eyed look at one of these soft around the midriff ham 'n' eggers and think to themselves, "I could take 'em"--especially if he's facing the other way and I'm swinging a barstool. It's no accident then that "punch drunk" has become part of the lexicon as we'll see in this story.
A London man, on the back end of a two-day drink and cocaine-fueled bender, “weekends” as Keith Richards calls ‘em, walked up to a fellow shopper, 23, and accused him of "gie' in evils” to him. The shopper tried to ignore him (having no clue what “gie’ in evils” means, we would have done the same, though we assume the language barrier didn’t apply here), but the drunk would not quit. He got in the man’s face and punched him before pulling out a sharpened key and slashing the man across the chest. He then challenged the man to “Gie us your best shot”. What the cocaine-addled thug didn’t know about the man in the grocery store buying baby-wipes was that he coached boxing for a living, and a bare-knuckled punch from him is not something that most people would willingly invite.
The boxer laid out the drunk with one almighty shot that smashed his jaw and left him in hospital for two days. The judge took the accused’s having to stick to liquids for a long while into account when accepting his guilty plea to a charge of assault, rather than the attempted murder charge he had been brought in on. The judge gave our binging friend three years in prison, where he will no doubt have people “gie’in” him their best shot, invited or otherwise.
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