‘May-Mac’ pull off sale of century
THE world finally had the two of them contained on Saturday night, in a roped-off ring where they had to remain silent and just get on with it. Two mouthy welterweights, neither the best role model for his respective legion of young fans, throwing mocking looks and punches in a spectacle of the inevitable.
Conor McGregor, 29, a Dubliner more famous in some circles than James Joyce, entered the ring first – he is a mixed martial arts champion who was undefeated in professional boxing because he had never fought a round.
Follow ing soon after was Floyd May weather Jr, 40, easily t he best fighter of his generation; he, too, was undefeated, at 49-0. So, then: do the math. This wildly lucrative contrivance posing as a boxing match for the ages ended as expected. With clinical detachment, Mayweather pounded McGregor’s punch-reddened face until the referee granted mercy in the 10th round, declaring a technical knockout and perhaps sparing some measure of the Irishman’s future cognitive abilities.
“I thought it was close,” McGregor said immediately after the fight, to the concurrence of no one.
Mayweather, looking as if he had just returned from a light jog, summed things up with a charitable: “I think we gave the fans what they wanted.”
Perhaps. Some wanted Mayweather to win, some wanted McGregor to overcome impossible odds – and some hoped that the two would manage to knock each other out.
May weather has another record, a criminal one for hitting women, while McGregor has demonstrated a capacit y for low verba l blows touching on race, misogyny, May weather’s struggle with reading, you name it.
They staged their performance before 14,623 fans at T-Mobile Arena, many of the men in sharp suits and no socks, many of the women in cocktail dresses and heels, as if attired for a garish wake.
There were A-list celebr it ies, D-list celebrit ies, people who consider themselves celebrities, swarms of Irish people wrapped in t heir countr y’s t ricolours, and a posse of young women wearing shirts emblazoned with the name of a company whose website requires that you confirm you’re an adult. Also, some box ing fans.
Then there were the rest of us, the world, with the combat-sport spectacle available for broadcast in more than 200 countries and territories. Millions of viewers eager to pay to see a pugilistic confection.
Willing suckers, all.
All about the money
In one corner fidgeted McGregor. He grew up in the somewhat scrappy Crumlin area of Dublin and chucked in a job as a plumber’s apprentice to focus on mixed martial arts. He has since become the sport’s most popular star, with assorted championships and controversies under his belt.
He is a working-class god to some in Ireland, a cringeinducing embarrassment to others, especially given his habit of wrapping himself in the Irish flag as if it were a beach towel. He is quickwitted but crass, his lavish spending habits recalling for some the gross materialism that defined the rise and collapse of last decade’s Celtic Tiger economy.
In the other corner waited Mayweather, one of the most divisive sports figures of his day. He grew up poor in a family dogged by drugs and crime, but rose to become arguably the best pound-for-pound boxer of his generation.
His athletic skills and business acumen – in real estate, clothing and marketing, among other ventures – have made him astoundingly wealthy, an achievement he underscores by posing for photographs with stacks of money, the way others might pose with their children.
He has two convictions re- lated to domestic violence, and he served 60 days of a 90day prison sentence in 2012.
For months, pundits and scholars had debated the existential meaning of this event. Was it about the shifting fortunes in combat sports, with boxing in decline and mixed martial arts in undeniable ascent?
Was it about race, an issue boxing has exploited at least as far back as the Jack Johnson-James Jeffries fight of 1910?
Perhaps bits of all these themes were in play. So, too, was the age-old attraction of violent combat between men, the blood lust we pretty up with smiling ring girls and tuxedoed announcers.
But in the end, all the hype, all the blather, all the posturing, all the media, was about only one achingly obvious thing: money.
As Paul Rouse, a professor at University College Dublin who specialises in sport, said: “It’s a big ball of candy floss being confected by a small group of men who are making themselves extremely rich by packaging up something that people have always done and selling it through modern telecommunications.”
Do some more math. With the fight’s purse, plus merchandise sales, plus pay-perviews at $100 apiece, it is estimated that Mayweather – whose nickname is, in fact, “Money” – will earn more than $200 million. McGregor, it is thought, will earn a paltry $100 million.
Fitting, then, that the event took place in Las Vegas – staging it anywhere else would have been an affront to the mercenary gods.
The match belonged there – deserved quarantining there – along the Strip, where any authenticity is often just another act of illusion that leaves you double-checking your wallet’s whereabouts. Now it was fight time. In a city known for circuses and illusions, two men exchanged blows for less than 30 minutes. Nothing mattered, nothing was at stake.
And, when it was over, they hugged and laughed – a pair of business partners who had just pulled off the score of the century.
Millions of viewers [were] eager to pay to see a pugilistic confection. Willing suckers, all