Don’t people kinda like circuses?
Iwas on vacation t he week before the Saturday night boxing match between ac t ual boxing legend Floyd Mayweather and mixed martial arts celebrity blabbermouth Conor McGregor. I present this as an excuse for writing down afterthoughts on the event, rather than thoughts. I am afraid I see the whole thing upside- down in contrast with the rest of the world. It was widely derided in advance as a “circus” or a “freak show” because McGregor, an expert in the kicking and grappling and grunting that is Ultimate Fighting, had no professional boxing experience and no hope of beating Mayweather.
What I keep wondering is this: don’t people kinda like circuses and, if we’re being honest, freak shows? From my point of view, there was an exciting subversive aspect to the whole thing. It was a sort of blasphemous Feast of Fools that broke up the usual summer sporting schedule.
Fans of sports find themselves continually being urged to take the businessman’s view of sports as a highly serious, cold, rulebound enterprise: we are all expected to live with salary caps and cynical late-season “tanking” and commissioners’ bloviatings and displays of civil religion. We have abandoned the old view of pro athletes as being engaged in show business; they are dignified exemplars now, better suited to creating MBA case studies than legends for children.
Mayweather- McGregor was just fun and weird and a bit stupid — the kind of playful promotional put- on that might happen between halves of a double-header in old-time baseball. (Could you write a one-volume history of baseball without mentioning the time Wilbert Robinson tried to catch a ball dropped from an airplane?)
But, of course, considered purely as business, Mayweather- McGregor turned out to be the one-day event of the millennium. It shouldn’t really have worked according to the usual premises of retail sports entertainment. Boxing does not really have standings, no championship was at stake, and neither man (leaving aside the inherent risks of combat sport) was really threatened with anything worse than embarrassment.
As the betting markets demonstrated, the bout combined the near-certainty of a Mayweather victory with the inherent uncertainty over details — and the omnipresent chance of a miracle outcome — that separates sports from the arts. How would McGregor attempt to pull off the impossible? How would he look, as a boxer? How long exactly would he last?
The high-flown objections to this as a spectacle seemed peevish to me. Yet the objectors later seemed to have been impressed by McGregor’s novice performance, and I do not really understand that either.
Surely the one thing McGregor was supposed to have going for him in the fight was superior physical conditioning. He told us so, mocking Mayweather’s alleged bloatedness at the weigh- in and referring to himself as a terrifying “Irish gorilla.” Video of McGregor sparring was leaked to the media selectively, but he had all the time in the world to show off, and boast specifically about, his innovative Riverdancelike fitness regime.
The gorilla turned out to be surprisingly short on energy — far more so than his opponent, who spent much of the week before the fight pulling late shifts at his high-priced Vegas strip club. Mayweather let McGregor punch himself out uselessly at the beginning of the fight, which is more or less exactly what you would expect Floyd Mayweather to do, and McGregor ran completely out of gas early in the fourth round. The suddenness of the transition was dismaying: I am sure it could be timed almost to the second in a video replay. Pretty soon McGregor was trying only intermittently to hit Mayweather, and the referee ended the fight when the Irishman quit defending himself outright in the 10th.
Nobody should have expected McGregor to master boxing in a month, although the confusing variety of defences he used in the early rounds is a damning testimony to the quality of his teachers, or possibly to his attention span. What I do not comprehend is that McGregor’s pure physical endurance was arguably much worse than we could reasonably have expected from a strong, impressively fit professional athlete. There are football, basketball, and hockey players who would have held up better. As for the supposed qualities of will that make McGregor such an idol to MMA fans, well, those do not seem to bear mentioning.
None of it will affect McGregor’s celebrity. The whole affair will surely redound to the financial health of the UFC more than it does to the rustic world of boxing. McGregor’s fans can reassure themselves that he survived on Mayweather’s turf, and that Floyd would be equally outmatched within the UFC octagon. He is much too sensible to ever be lured into one, but if it somehow happened, I think I can promise that he would at least prepare intelligently, and wouldn’t lose just because he ran out of wind.
As a columnist I am tempted, nay, almost obligated to bring Donald Trump into this, and to suggest that McGregor’s fans may be consuming his wild, imbecile talk as product, in a self- aware, almost postmodern way — in the same way that people now take in professional wrestling. Or politics. But I can see that I am running out of space, and so, happily, we will both be spared that contrived digression.