The Pat Mahomes and John Rocker fight gets a big platform, raises a bigger question

Herbert A. Simon won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978 for his work in microeconomics, specifically the concept of perfect information as applied to decision-makers within economic organizations. Today, Simon is more famous for coining a different concept — the attention economy — that explains so much of what we see in the popular media decades later.

By all rights, we should have stopped caring about John Rocker and Pat Mahomes decades ago. Neither man has thrown a pitch in Major League Baseball in 22 years. But celebrity is a strange concept.

Mahomes has since fathered the most recognizable quarterback in the NFL. Rocker has turned his infamous sideshow of railing against ethnic groups into a sizable social media following of sympathetic deplorables. Both men are in their 50s and well past their athletic primes.

Naturally, Mahomes and Rocker will be boxing each other in April.

It’s official. The paperwork was signed today. Pat Mahomes Sr vs John Rocker at Rough N Rowdy. April 19th. Real bad blood. @roughnrowdy https://t.co/Ax3r40WBwa pic.twitter.com/abVsaD5oGE
— Dave Portnoy (@stoolpresidente) February 12, 2025

Dave Portnoy announced Wednesday he's signed Mahomes and Rocker to contracts for the Barstool-sponsored Rough N Rowdy event. Fans of a certain age will be interested, perhaps, to see what one guy who went 8-0 with a 3.68 ERA out of the 1999 Mets' bullpen can throw at another guy who posted 38 saves for the '99 Braves.

That's not the plot point Herbert A. Simon would be interested in, however. Maybe Rocker and Mahomes' history as major league relievers gives Portnoy a selling point to guys his own age, but their attention span was always going to be up to the task of caring about this fight.

This fight exists because Rocker and Mahomes were participants in an (almost) street scrap last week on Bourbon Street, near where Patrick Mahomes was leading the Kansas City Chiefs to a lopsided defeat in Super Bowl LIX. A smartphone captured the fight on video, the clip went viral on social media and — voila! — the attention economy spurred into action. A new generation had a new reason to care about Pat Mahomes and John Rocker.

Professional fighters need months to prepare for a match, to say nothing of two guys whose athletic primes ended decades ago. What Portnoy is banking on, then, is that Mahomes and Rocker can take the time necessary to prepare for this fight and we'll still care. It's a stress test of our attention spans at its absolute worst.

Will anyone under 40 care about this fight in two months? Check back in April.

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