By Bart Barry–
Just in time for Mexican Independence Day weekend comes a showdown to warm cada corazon mexicano: Floyd Mayweather, an American from Michigan, versus Andre Berto, an American from Florida who fought for Team Haiti in the Games of the XXVIII Olympiad. Mayweather-Berto lacks an ethnic angle, yes, but it is fully bereft of aesthetic interests, promising in its awfulness to be an apt farewell to Mayweather, who has scheduled his next retirement for Sept. 13.
Saturday is the final fight of Floyd Mayweather’s career, and I know it’s this week because I just brought up BoxRec and checked; so little has appeared on Twitter, my exclusive source for boxing coverage, I read a book about architecture in the last seven days and visited an art museum in Austin, to prepare for another boxing column about anything but boxing, since vilifying the efforts of the PBC anymore feels lazy but a weekly writing habit is, as my friend and colleague Norm Frauenheim long ago put it, good discipline. It brings presence, and that is ever a subject worth treating.
As Mayweather finishes his career, or says he’s about to, he turns a trick few before him have: He leaves the sport noticeably worse than he found it. He has not loved the sport for about a decade, one calculates, and he leaves the sport at least a decade from hopefulness. Whether Manny Pacquiao’s legion of Filipino converts will stick around after Pacquiao retires for his first time is doubtful, but this is not: No one who came to boxing because of Floyd Mayweather will remain a moment after he leaves.
The PBC, an outfit whose leader achieved credibility in boxing through his association with Mayweather, has improved exactly none of its charges and will not either; Mayweather is the last Mayweather because the PBC assures no one who approaches his talent will again encounter sufficient coaching or matchmaking to improve him. For whatever else he became, Floyd was a fighter raised by fighters before he was a self-aggrandizing buffoon. Today’s PBC prospects begin as athletes and become self-aggrandizing buffoons at high speed, often accelerating at a rate that denies them even summercamps as fighters.
Some words now about Mayweather’s moral deficiencies, or more appropriately, the words of others fixated on Mayweather’s moral deficiencies. Floyd Mayweather makes his living by striking other halfnaked men with his fists. Has it been so long since Charles Barkley wisely declared he was not a role model that we’re back to demanding character of athletes, even those who hammer other men’s faces (and most especially when awareness of oneself can be raised by raising awareness of Mayweather’s misbehavior)? As Jimmy Tobin, an excellent writer and thinker on and off Twitter, mentioned recently, the bandwagon for Mayweather-Berto is apparently so slight moral grandstanders feel unsafe chancing a spot on it like they did in May, lest they slip into obscurity’s cruel morass, their very important message ignored by the good people who tsk loudly at reality TV.
There’s something both reactionary and juvenile about adults’ heartfelt opinions concerning Mayweather’s domestic-abuse convictions. Americans really don’t care, and before anyone takes to his hind legs to rebut that assertion, he should ask himself how much boycotting of the Mayweather product has been done in the name of Floyd’s convictions. There’s probably nothing serendipitous or causal about the growth shared between Floyd’s checking account and criminal acts, but in the face of all evidence, arguing Mayweather’s criminality helped him amass his fortune is strikingly more reasonable than saying it was a hindrance.
And again, so what? Mayweather changed his nickname from an aesthetic concern, “Pretty Boy”, to an amoral one, “Money”, and made himself an American icon – at least in the 15 minutes’ sense of the word – reducing his dreadful promotions to shopping sprees and his dreadful prizefights to more-dreadful prizefights, and still we participated because, well, we were told his talent and fights were historic happenings. Floyd’s perspective on morality was better than his detractors’, ultimately, because it was born of the one place in his life where he was above-average, much less exceptional: the prizefighting ring – where one’s improvisations are judged instantly and one’s errors are exploited milliseconds after their detection. There is, in other words, no time in a prizefight for the obnoxious moralizing that attends coverage of Mayweather between his matches; in a prizefighting ring, life’s Prediction –> Feedback loop reduces itself to a crystalline form like this: Too many predictions make you oblivious of feedback, and then you’re unconscious, and too much reliance on feedback makes you a heavybag, and then you’re unconscious.
Mayweather’s crude antagonism of those who resent his fortune will undo his fortune soon enough, as everyone knows, and then what will linger are the aesthetic judgments adults should have levied against him all along: Floyd’s promotional schtick is, like his fighting style, insipid. No entertainer in sports history has made more money boring more people than Mayweather. Saturday’s match with Andre Berto, a man who is 0-2 against men Mayweather has already humiliated, and 0-1 (1 KO) against a man, Jesus Soto Karass, not even Mayweather had the chutzpah to make an opponent, promises to be truly awful.
In this, his next last fight, Floyd’s professionalism and pride, ironically, stand as the best arguments against making a pay-per-view purchase: Floyd is far too good to lose to Andre Berto by accident and far too proud to throw the match on purpose.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
