By Bart Barry–
The announcement came sometime Thursday, or maybe Tuesday, the announcement there would be an announcement coming soon from a professional athlete about a future sporting event. It was a reminder how unserious our time is that adults awaited such silliness, but there we were, men who are otherwise grandfathers, fathers, professionals, role models, even, collectively saying, “Whatever the petulant demands, just satisfy them, please, so we can have our event, finally.”
Now we will, May 2 at MGM Grand, when American welterweight Floyd Mayweather fights Filipino Manny Pacquiao.
It’s OK to be happy about this development. Boxing, like perhaps no other sport in the world, makes curmudgeons of its fanbase. All begin by reading bitter men unimpressed by any development in the sport, and all promise themselves they will not become like those men; I’ll stop following it long before I become cynical as those guys, one thinks.
But shortsighted greed – to which boxing’s failures universally reduce – eventually affects in some profound and detrimental way a fighter who enchants a new follower of our sport, and his innocence and hopefulness gradually gives way to distrust and an unseemly pride in knowing things. None of us is immune to this; some of us express more loudly our distaste with what machinations subvert generally our sport and specifically its fighters and fans, but all of us experience it.
Winston Churchill accurately reported about those of us in the States: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” Floyd Mayweather, in announcing he will fight Manny Pacquiao five years and two Pacquiao losses after he was supposed to, has satisfied Churchill’s report once more, agreeing to do the right thing, finally, because he is, quite frankly, out of palatable options – after he’s tried everything else.
One imagines CBS CEO Leslie Moonves, who is wealthy where Mayweather is rich, said he was done seeing his child network, Showtime, embarrassed by Mayweather. With each new fight in the Mayweather contract bringing less money than his 2013 match with Mexican Saul Alvarez, the onus on Mayweather to make a larger prefight spectacle grew, until in September Mayweather produced his way to a potsmoking harem and human dogfighting circuit, captured by Moonves’ cameras, then went before a government commission and said it was all fake, edited to inaccuracy by Moonves’ staff.
Whatever it might have cost CBS to break its ill-advised Showtime contract with Mayweather, CBS’ revenues in 2014 were $13.81 billion – that’s 13, followed by 81, followed by seven zeros – which is enough to pay Mayweather $120 million, every fight, for 115 fights, and precluding Mayweather from accelerating the erosion of CBS’ journalistic brand would have been worth whatever pennies it cost the corporation.
For a chuckle, though, do imagine the conversation promoter Bob Arum, age 83, and Moonves, 65, had about what nonfinancial terms of the contract were most important to Mayweather: That he, and no one else, be allowed to announce the fight, via crappy digital image on a social network. Like adults patiently watching a child open birthday presents before they head back to work, Moonves and Arum must have marveled at the euphoria such a trinket brought the little tyke.
Immediately after Mayweather’s historic announcement, the heads of the sports departments at Showtime and HBO held a joint call and bubbled with what enthusiasm generally attends the salvaging of one’s job. “This is the biggest boxing event of all time,” said the president of HBO Sports, in an ahistorical attempt, one hopes, to target the same teenage demographic Mayweather’s announcement did. Or maybe Mayweather insisted on scripting HBO’s announcement, too – he is an executive producer at Showtime, after all – and desperate to return its status from official network of the Soviet Bloc farm leagues to “Heart and Soul of Boxing”, HBO had little choice but do as it was told.
The hyperbole above will be justified in one way, though: Mayweather-Pacquiao will feature prognostications from more and more-uninformed sportsfans than any fight in history. And here’s why: Every time biggest boxing events of all time happened in the past, be they Lewis-Tyson or Frazier-Ali 1 or Louis-Schmeling 2, boxing had at least a small place in America’s consciousness. Persons accidentally saw a fight on “Wide World of Sports” or read about a local kid in the newspaper, at least, before sallying forth with an opinion.
There’s a fair chance last weekend 10 million Americans hatched fully formed opinions, opinions they are now eager to share, having watched no boxing since Lewis beat-down Tyson 13 years ago.
“Money is the best ever, like his hat says . . .”
“Manny fights with a mandate from God . . .”
“It’s like that time at Wrestlemania when Hogan and Savage . . .”
Fact is, this is the second-best time for this fight to happen, from an aficionado’s perspective. The best time, of course, was immediately after Pacquiao dashed through Miguel Cotto, the man Mayweather retired to avoid in 2008, when Mayweather-Pacquiao might have happened in Cowboys Stadium and launched a historic trilogy our grandchildren would talk about. After 2009, Mayweather took six fights intended not to imperil him in the slightest, and he was right five times, until Argentine Marcos Maidana repeatedly hit him with skyhook rights in 2014 and revealed Mayweather is either badly overtraining himself or much older in the legs than his string of sponsored sparring sessions anticipated.
Pacquiao took the opposite route, coincidentally, being chased in 2010 by the monstrous Antonio Margarito – whom Mayweather bought-out a contract to avoid in 2006 – being decisioned by Timothy Bradley and being iced by Juan Manuel Marquez, before making farcical matches in remote places with hopeless underdogs in 2013 and 2014. In other words, Pacquiao might be recuperated enough, and Mayweather might be worn enough, now, to make their May match a good one.
Or maybe not. Vegas knows boxing much better than America at large, and Vegas has Mayweather a comfortable favorite – watching, as Vegas did, the absurd size disparity between Mayweather and Marquez in their 2009 sparring session, and knowing, as Vegas does, Pacquiao is much closer in physical stature to his nemesis Marquez than he is to Mayweather.
Pacquiao will land left crosses on Mayweather, just as Marquez landed right crosses, but will they have any memorable effect? That is a question worth answering that will be answered in May. Rejoice.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
