Tom Humphries/LockerRoom: I love this bloodbath that's going on between Alex Ferguson and the chaps. It's free, it's entertaining, it's going to run and run. All that and it confirms what we always knew. Rich folks don't have friends, they have interests. As in commercial interests.

I don't know who's right and who's wrong. Did Fergie get the half of the horse that gets past the post first or the half that makes manure and baby horses? Did he get custody on weekdays? What's it worth in terms of glue? All I know about horses is that they bite me when I go to stroke their noses and they take the mickey when I place bets on them. I don't care really.

I know this though. Fergie is overmatched. Whatever football has paid him it won't be enough. When things get litigious and ugly hard cash is the only weapon of mass destruction you need. The chaps could kill Fergie just by dropping some of their spare change on his head. Fergie after all has never contacted a small country from tax exile and said, "Here's 50 million, make yourselves a stadium."

I enjoy the whole slugfest because it's guilt-free and for as long as we can all write about it without one of the chaps suing us it'll be fun. It has a nice old-fashioned edge to it as well. The whole thing is PR-free. There's no oily retainer on either side counselling against saying this or doing that because somebody will end up looking bad. Frankly, my dears, they don't give a damn.

Best thing though, it's rich guys. Nobody gets hurt. My guess is that Fergie will run out of money or face the prospect of running out of money and pull up short in the end but in the meantime it's grade A, premium entertainment. Which is rare.

Normally when you get feuds in sport they are ugly and tinged by the fact that great athletes are soiling their dignity. There's a part of us all that loves a good scrap but usually we come away and feel a little guilty and by the time the newspapers get done moralising we feel as if we've just brought the kiddies' pet chicken to a cockfight.

Some day soon somebody is going to make a list of great sporting feuds and sure as anything somewhere up near the top will be that between Benny "Kid" Paret and Emile Griffith. I imagine I first heard of Benny Paret on such a list.

The timbre of Paret and Griffith's story is a little different to anyone else's. When poor men have a grudge with each other it's hard to wring laughs from it.

Benny Paret came out of Santa Clara, Cuba, back when it was still possible to do so by means other than a raft made of tyre inners and driftwood. Like a cliché, he settled in the Bronx and fought and scrapped till at 23 years of age he was welterweight champion of the world.

You want the poor-boy-made-good part? When he was lean and hungry and couldn't get onto a bill fighting a tomato can he fell in love with a dancer. He'd send her flowers and his friend would write the amorous notes that would go with the blooms because Benny could neither read nor write.

World champion. That meant something. There was one welterweight champion back then, not 37 or 76 or however many there are now. Paret could box and more than that he had a brass jaw. You could hit Benny Paret all night and he wouldn't fall over. It was thought to be a good thing.

He became champion in 1960 and the world of which he was champion was a simpler place. Las Vegas had a louche innocence but was not yet the world capital of boxing. Cable TV was somewhere in the future. Boxing was Madison Square Garden and in the States boxing was Gillette Fight Night on the television. Television liked Kid Paret.

He lost his title to Emile Griffith in 1961 when, surprisingly, he got knocked out. He won the belt back though in a rematch that people now call controversial but which in Toots Schors and Lindys and all the other adjacent watering holes of the time they thought was crooked.

Paret was under pressure. The papers and the television created such a fuss he was obliged to offer another bout to Griffith. First though he was going to make some money and he agreed to fight a Gene Fullmer on a televised bill in Las Vegas. The money lay in the fact Fullmer was a middleweight. In the middleweight division they used $100 bills to staunch the blood from their noses.

So Fullmer and Paret fought one December night and poor Kid Paret got liquidised. Knocked down three times. Counted out in the 10th. Outclassed and overmatched.

Paret had to get back to the tiresome business of fighting Emile Griffith again.

About 12 weeks later, on March 24th, 1962, he got back into a ring with Emile Griffith. By now the two men despised each other. Familiarity had bred what it's supposed to breed and in an era when the histrionics of an Ali had yet to inspire a thousand limp imitations these were just two men who itched to do each other damage.

Paret had been a sugar-cane cutter in Cuba. Griffith had earned a crust in the rag trade working in the Garment District of New York City. Unusually for a boxer, he enjoyed designing millinery.

Paret found the whole idea of fighting somebody who liked making drawings of women's hats a little suspect. He voiced the opinion on several occasions that to enjoy designing women's hats one had to be gay. He didn't say "gay" though. And he wasn't just musing aloud.

For his part, Griffith had the memory of the second fight, when he considered Paret to have finagled the belt by possibly unfair means. Now these insults.

At weigh-in it almost descended into a genuine fist-fight, not one of the choreographed, made-for-TV events wherein today's lugs attempt to dislodge each other's millinery. It was ugly but it was good for business. The music of the cash register drowned out everything else. The Gillette Fight Night people were coming along. So were over 7,000 punters.

On the night Paret was beaten senseless. He reached the 12th round spent and weary and then lay on the ropes with his hands by his side and took 20 blows to the head - 20 unpunctuated blows in five seconds. Just punchbag speed. Fight fans had to count the blows on the slow-motion replays. Afterwards they chastised the referee, Ruby Goldstein, for not stopping it, but all who were there said the beating was mesmeric.

They took Paret to hospital, looked in his skull and shook their heads. On April 2nd Benny Kid Paret died. His wife, the dancer who received the flowers and the notes from a proxy, Lucy Paret, who was seven months pregnant at the time of Benny's death, got $28,000 and ended her days in a trailer park in Miami.

Griffith made $2 million from almost two decades of pro fighting. He fought Hurricane Carter and Dick Tiger and dozens of others who haunt the pages and the records lists.

Paret left behind two sons. Neither discovered who their father was until they were in their 20s. In fact Albert, the eldest, was serving a 15-year stretch for armed robbery when he met a fellow con who had seen his father fight.

So the big rich guys tossing money and insults across the airwaves at each other? Bring it on. Let's have it live with Paxman refereeing. Let's see them butt horns.

Kid Paret and Emile Griffith are just names from the past now, bit players in sport's eternal morality play. The little guys always get hurt. The big guys usually don't get what they deserve.

Sit back. Maybe this panto will be different.