The sport of boxing is in a strange place. Gone are the days when a heavyweight title fight caught the attention of the world. The great personalities, the rivalries, the competition… it’s all fading as the sport is dominated by the same few people. Even the greatest pound-for-pound fighter on the planet, a true all-time great, Floyd Mayweather, his fights bring in millions and are true ‘events’ where the A-Listers turn up to be seen. But the fights themselves are so one-sided, such foregone conclusions that they barely register beyond the ripples in the boxing community.

Down under we’ve seen a unique solution to bring the crowds and the TV money back to the sport: Celebrity fights. This is the most farcical, ridiculous, utterly pathetic trend in professional sports and it seems that New Zealand is leading the charge. Hopefully Joseph Parker can claw his way clear of these shameful undercards.

However all popular trends reach a tipping point. Normally it’s when a song or a movie or whatever becomes so ubiquitous that you’re sick of it. It was cool until everyone else started liking it, ya know? In this case it was the opposite. Over the weekend celebrity boxing became so ridiculous, so utterly farcical that it was actually entertaining! Not in a pro-wrestling it’s-fake-but-we-don’t-care sort of way, but in a oh-my-Lord-it’s-like-a-trainwreck-I-just-can’t-look-away! sort of way. In a, shall we say, Mickey Rourke sort of way.

Professional actor/former pugilist Rourke made his return to the boxing ring in, uh, weird circumstances this past weekend. The now 62 year old (!) fought a man 33 years younger than he, and knocked him out in the second round. Mickey looked pretty fit for his age, but no 62 year old on the planet is beating a 29 year old professional fighter without some fortuitous circumstances. Rourke had opponent Elliot Seymour on the ground twice in the second before the ref called the fight, which was held/staged in Russia. Here are those two supreme blows.

The first one he may as well have slapped him, the second I’m not even sure connected (plus he took a swing after Seymour went down). If I was a judge, I don’t think I’d score any of those hits, yet Seymour went down twice.

It’s hard to believe, watching this, that Mickey Rourke used to be one of the great actors on the planet. He was hailed as the new Marlon Brando for a time. Legendary director Elia Kazan (the man who found Brando and James Dean, amongst others) called Rourke’s audition for the Actor’s Studio the best he’d seen in 30 years. His film breakthrough came in 1981 in ‘Body Heat’, a sexy neo-noir in which Rourke dominates every scene he’s in and probably caused more than a few unwanted pregnancies.

He followed that with a superb winning streak of films all throughout the 80s. Not quite a De Niro from 'Taxi Driver' through to 'Brazil' level of things but then again find me an acting streak that is. Just check out these tomatoes.

This was a rare case of a talented, intense actor who took challenging roles and was not afraid to put himself in humiliating situations for his craft. He could find the beauty and the wisdom in degradation. Hell, he played Charles Bukowski’s alter ego in 'Barfly', after all. He was a rebel and a bad boy. A tortured genius.

That also made him tough to work with. By the start of the 90s, his personal life started to get in the way of his professional one. People didn’t want to deal with him anymore, he was too high-maintenance, too unpredictable. He never wanted to be an actor anyway, as a kid he'd wanted to be a baseballer. In fact he had a promising amateur boxing career for a while before his acting one took off. 27 wins and 3 losses, with more than a couple first round knockouts.

So in 1991 Mickey Rourke announces that, despite being almost 40, he was returning to boxing. He’s quoted as saying that he felt like he "was self-destructing” and that he “had no respect” for himself as an actor. Rourke admitted a few years back that he knew he wasn’t gonna be challenging for any titles, it was more a matter of proving something to himself. Getting back to something primal and masculine to shake off that very manufactured and disconnected world of celebrity, where it doesn’t take too much to lose touch with reality. Rourke was always hell-bent on authenticity as an actor. But in films the bruises are painted on and the blood is fake. In the ring, the pain is real. Tangible. Brutal.

This was an incredible career move for such an enormous star. You could almost liken it to Michael Jordan playing a year of baseball at the peak of his powers, or brilliant writers such as J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee or Arthur Rimbaud who published great works and then just stopped writing. Is it squandered talent, or the ultimate example of pure artistry?

Rourke fought eight times as a pro, winning six and drawing twice between May 1991 and September 1994. And he suffered for every one of them. A broken nose, broken ribs, broken toes, a split tongue, a compressed cheekbone. Even short term memory loss. He needed extensive reconstructive surgery to his face, and as can happen with that stuff it led to a very different looking Rourke. One of the most recognisable and attractive faces in the world, left savaged and beaten. Hence the puffy, plastic look of the man today.

This story isn’t necessarily a tragedy. Rourke continued acting through the most of the 90s and 2000s, catching the eye with his part in ‘Sin City’ in 2005, before his redemption role in 2008’s ‘The Wrestler’, where he played an aging fighter who continues to get into the ring despite the risks to his health as he struggles to cling to his past successes. Yep, art truly does imitate life, as they say.

‘The Wrestler’ won Rourke a bunch of awards, even got him nominated for an Oscar for Best Actor. It’s always fun to revisit those nominations and re-award them with hindsight. Some films stand the test of time, others really don’t. 2008 was a fairly flat year in this case. Rourke was up against Sean Penn (Milk), Richard Jenkins (The Visitor), Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon) and Brad Pitt (Benjamin Button). I’d argue there were at least 10 performances in the past 2 years that would have made their way onto that five-man ballot. Penn won, Rourke probably should have.

Which brings us chronologically to this latest little indulgence. That ‘fight’. I don’t know why it happened, possibly for fun, possibly for money, possibly for flailing ego. Technically it was an exhibition, so it doesn’t count towards career stats nor did it need to comply with any federation’s rulebook. I’m not saying it was fixed, but, I mean… y’know. OK, I am saying that. Which doesn’t matter, it was no more bound to the laws of the sport than the Harlem Globetrotters are. Those guys travel, they double dribble, they impede the other team, they abuse the ref… and it’s all good, clean, (slightly transgressive), fun. So was this. But that doesn’t make sensationalist headlines like this (from the Daily Mail Online – don’t bother) any less funny.

Poor Mickey Rourke. He could have had the world. But I can’t hold it against him. He chose a path of cleansing via physical punishment as an escape from the emotional torment he was put through as an actor. That stuff, it ain’t easy. Inhabiting different characters, finding the roots of their torment and exposing it to the world on a screen. He’s suffered for walking out on the institution that made him famous before it could sufficiently chew him up and spit him out and Hollywood is not a forgiving place. I don’t know why, but I feel like there’s something noble about that. People slagged Brando, too, for getting fat and moving to Tahiti, when all he was doing was trying to live on his own terms.

It’s a shame that Mickey Rourke hasn’t been in more quality films in the last couple of decades. It’s a shame that his face now frightens children; that he can’t smile anymore without looking like a Batman villain. It’s a shame that he wants to fight four more times.

But at least he’s inadvertently doing his best to ruin the scourge of Celebrity Boxing. At least he’s only barely pretending that this is anything other than a bit of a laugh.

At least he’s not Steve McIvor.