Richest bout e fans, money an n
The purists may hate it but the Mayweather, McGregor fight is a showbusiness event like no other, reports Ben Hoyle.
THE fighters glared at each other and for a moment there was a still centre to the storm of hype swirling around the most lucrative fight of all time. They were close enough to feel each other’s breath. Their expensively attired chests were nearly touching. Chomping gum furiously Conor McGregor, the cage-fighting champion who has never boxed professionally, removed his sunglasses to see his opponent more clearly. Floyd Mayweather, one of the finest boxers of all time but coming out of retirement to face a younger, bigger man, kept his shades on and stared back impassively, his eyes level with the Irishman’s nostrils.
Briefly, it felt like sport. For a few seconds you could almost forget the race-baiting and the homophobic slurs, the cartoonish posturing, the obscene materialism, the strained superlatives and the sheer silliness that have, over months and even years, built today’s boxing match in Las Vegas into a showbusiness event like no other. Almost, but not quite. Held up behind the men at the end of their final pre-fight press conference was a preposterous trophy produced by the WBC sanctioning body for the occasion. The ‘‘Money Belt’’ is made from alligator leather and contains 3,360 diamonds, 600 sapphires, 300 emeralds and 1.5kg of 24-carat gold. With no title on the line, it is flashy but unnecessary. The same charge has been widely levelled at the fight itself.
A lot of people do not want ‘‘The Money Fight’’ to happen. Purists have despaired and called it a grotesque mismatch and a freak show. Oscar De La Hoya, a former Mayweather opponent and all-time great who now promotes his own fighters, has said that ‘‘our sport might never recover’’. The veteran promoter Lou DiBella compared the spectacle to ‘‘when Evel Knievel tried to jump the Snake River Canyon.’’
Doctors have warned that it could end in tragedy. The Association of Ringside Physicians, a group of more than 100 veteran boxing medics, has condemned the decision to let it go ahead. Its president Larry Lovelace said: ‘‘The thing I truly fear, is that somebody’s going to get really hurt.’’ Two months ago, Tim Hague, another mixed martial artists turned boxer, suffered fatal injuries in Canada in his fourth bout.
Yet the fight has caught the imagination of the wider public in a way that more conventional match-ups have rarely done since Mike Tyson’s heyday a generation ago.
On the Las Vegas Strip, the most competitive entertainment market on earth, Mayweather v McGregor towers over every other show in town. The fighters’ faces stare down from giant billboards and video screens across the city. They are on taxi cabs, casino floors and restaurant televisions. Hotels, bars and lapdancing clubs are holding lavish viewing parties today, some of them priced at well over US$100 (NZ$138) per person. The streets are thronged with vendors hawking big fight T-shirts, caps and headbands. One of them, Francisco Ramirez, 44, complained that sales were slow but then dropped into a shadow boxing stance and predicted that ‘‘McGregor is going to go like a tiger from the first second’’. He has paid US$650 for a ticket at the back of the T-Mobile Arena to find out if he is right.
The victor will literally light up The Strip: the 550ft High Roller observation wheel at The Linq, the tallest ferris wheel in the world, will turn its lights red and white and blue if Mayweather wins and green, white and orange if McGregor triumphs.
Mayweather, 40, has claimed that he will make more than US$300 milllion from the fight, in part thanks to what is expected to be record-breaking pay-per-view sales. McGregor, 29, will earn a reported US$100 million. Total revenue is predicted to reach US$650 million.
By some predictions it will be seen by almost one in six Americans, watching at home or at fight-night parties in bars across the country. Viewers in more than 200 countries or territories will be able to watch it live on television or the internet.
Stephen Espinoza, who heads sport for Showtime, the cable network hosting the fight, seemed briefly flustered by the scale of the production at the press conference on Wednesday (Thursday NZ time). ‘‘There is no