Columbus Daron Best

From The Great Outdoor Fight

A recent photograph of Columbus Daron Best, seated outside his Florida fish-cleaning business.

1980 Fight Champion. History has been kind to Columbus Daron Best. After the lackluster 1979 victory of Dane "Bullard the Dullard" Bullard, virtually any subsequent competitor displaying a sense of style or showmanship could not help but be viewed in a favorable light by the malaise-stricken America of the late 70's / early 80's. As a result, Columbus Daron Best's victory is often gilded as the last "even moderately decent" Fight before the catastrophic mid-80's slump, despite the fact that a rational assessment by most Fight scholars suggests that, had he happened along a mere ten years earlier, history would regard him as little more than a footnote, a footnote that futhermore would only appear in certain excessively annotated and pedantic chronicles (the multivolume codices of Harold "Wheezy" Brown spring inevitably to mind.)

A successor in spirit, name and by his own account, blood to 1892 Champion Columbus Pedro Newman, Best was at best a solid, unremarkable champion along the typical vein, though his ardent devotees still wax rhapsodic about his fleetness of foot and the admittedly considerable efficacy of his trademark fifteen-point sternum punch. At the head of a respectable forty-man crew (defectors to a one from the internally-turbulent and strife-torn Ninescore Maggia), Best cruised through Day One of the fight and demonstrated traditional fealty to his men on Day Two by distributing equal portions of turkey and brandy to each one remaining, regardless of individual performance. (A cagey move, as this gesture could only have convinced Best's army of renegades of the wisdom of coming over to his side; they doubtless would have received no such largesse from Ninescore Maggia boss Vinny "The Squirrel" Squirrelli.) By noon on Day Three, only Best and nine others from his crew remained standing, his only serious contender (the Maggia) having collapsed early that morning due to vicious infighting. After wiping up the sad remnants of the Maggia, Best's crew reluctantly turned upon one another, and while Best certainly put on a good show in this final miniature Battle Royale, he was apparently unwilling to subject any of his faithful crew to his flashy signature punch, lending a certain anticlimax to the last day's proceedings and finishing the 1980 Fight not with a bang, but with a whimper, presaging the wholly depressing victory of Dudley Ray Saltser one year later.

His first and only fight thus complete, Best retired completely from the sport and relocated to the Florida Keys, where he currently owns an operates a tiny wharfside fish-cleaning business. Best's unremarkable victory nevertheless stands noteworthy as the greatest latency ever exhibited by a contender claiming Blood of Champion (eighty-eight years). Though he presented a careful enough pedigree to satisfy the Ruling Body that he was indeed blood kin to Columbus Pedro Newman, there remained some skeptics who questioned him at length on the simple fact that "Columbus", apparently a given name rather than a surname, could not possibly represent the family lineage required to claim Blood of Champion. Best reportedly replied that it "were like that Chinese thing", presumably referring to the traditional Chinese practice of placing family surname before given name. When pressed further by these same skeptics, who stated that neither he nor Newman could credibly claim Chinese ancestry, Best destroyed them all without mercy or compunction.

[edit] Quotes

• "Well, that came out... all right. No peach, mind ya, nothing like Lord Brannigan or that damn Jap (Ishiro) Yagi, and nary a candle's-fart on (Rodney Leonard) Stubbs. Damn sight better than that goddamn sonuvabitch with the pipe, though." - Young Jude Surrency, on the close of the 1980 Great Outdoor Fight, comparing Best to previous year's champion Dane Bullard.

[edit] Record

• 1980 - Champion, Last Man Standing