2017: A race odyssey
Sad sign of the times with black vs. white promotion
LAS VEGAS — The fight was over now, and the glittering array of celebrities — Robert Kraft! A-Rod! J.Lo! LeBron! — had long since filtered out of T-Mobile Arena to board their private jets and discuss Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s 10-round technical knockout of Conor McGregor.
But the two celebrities who made the biggest Vegas haul Saturday night — Mayweather and McGregor — remained behind for a post-fight press conference, with a podium set up on the very stage where, less than an hour earlier, they were trying to beat each other’s brains out.
Only now it was if they were two old men sitting on a front porch somewhere and talking about personal soap operas that had played out so long ago that neither of them seemed to remember what the big fuss was all about in the first place.
Allow me to refresh their memories: Throughout the run-up to this fight, so much trash was flying back and forth that it was as though the nation’s sanitation workers had gone on strike. McGregor, a white man from Dublin, Ireland, talked the most trash. And his trash was particularly gamey, as he frequently referred to Mayweather, a black man, as “boy” during his various rants, proclamations and promises.
Interesting that McGregor stayed away from the real stuff: Mayweather has been convicted of battery against women. Twice.
If McGregor was as unhinged as he wanted us to think he was, might not he have gone there?
Instead, and as recently as Friday, during a glitzy weigh-in production that was as much a floor show as anything being offered on the Strip, he suggested that Mayweather was lazy, that he may have a gambling problem.
There was, then, a racial underbelly to this fight.
Sometimes it was flat-out uncomfortable: It’s the 21st century, and no white man can refer to a black man as “boy” and not make everyone want to open a window.
Sometimes it was in the background. As was pointed out to me by Los Angeles Times columnist Dylan Hernandez, the official poster for this fight showed Mayweather’s face over a black background, McGregor’s over a white background. And this image was everywhere, including the swipe key to my room at the MGM Grand.
Is this really necessary? Do we need to have a heapin’ helpin’ of Great White Hope stew placed in front of us as a pre-fight appetizer, complete with McGregor advancing the plot by going with the boy bit?
It was all so clever — not so odious as to inspire protest marches, but with enough of a whiff that you couldn’t not notice it.
The post-fight press conference was a wonderfully pleasant affair, proving either that a) McGregor was merely reading from a script during the weeks and days leading up to the showdown, or b) the two men really do hate each other but were able to summon very good acting skills for the post-fight presser.
Mayweather spoke first, going on and on about the fight, about his strategy, his retirement, his father, etc. It was while he was talking about the advantages of the old iPod over the new iPod — seriously, that’s what he was saying — that he spied a dressed-to-the-nines McGregor emerging from a tunnel.
“Come on up here, Conor!” said Mayweather.
Suddenly they were two old army buddies. They were former roommates reunited at a college reunion. They were a long-retired double-play combination brought back for old-timers day. Alan Trammell. Lou Whitaker.
As it happened, this fight, though laughably contrived, didn’t need an Archie Bunker-esque subplot to be memorable. We’ll remember the fight because, surprise, surprise, it was pretty good. No, it wasn’t great
boxing, and the guy we thought would win the fight won the fight. And while it soon became obvious that Mayweather had a very simple game plan — let McGregor win the first three rounds and then move in for the kill as the Irishman began to wear down — there was at least a shred of doubt over the outcome as late as the opening bell to the fifth round. (Just a shred, mind you.)
I’m no boxing guy, which in a weird way makes me just as qualified as anyone to write about what happened in the ring Saturday night, since this wasn’t real boxing. It was a retired exchampion getting himself back in shape in order to fight a mixed martial arts champion who never before had competed in a professional boxing match. There was, then, a goofy leveling of the playing field: Retired guy vs. novice. A spectacle is what it was, and I know how to write about spectacles: I covered the famous speakerphone press conference at Weeb Ewbank Hall back in ’97 when Bill Belichick was named fake head coach of the Jets, with Bill Parcells signing on as a fake “consultant.”
I’m OK with spectacles and I enjoyed this one. If you were in attendance or made a pay-perview investment, I suspect you enjoyed it as well.
The fight itself was the contrivance. As for dropping a dab of racial strife into the mix, that would have been a cheap stunt had it been done a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago.
That it was done in the year 2017, with all that’s happening around us, is unconscionable.