USA TODAY International Edition
Next super- fight: Will viewers pay?
A fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor, which now seems inevitable because of the magnetism that truckloads of money brings, would be many things.
It would be a boxing match — it qualifies for that description despite the fact that one of the combatants, Ultimate Fighting Championship superstar McGregor, has never boxed competitively as an amateur or professional.
It would create a circus- style wave of publicity involving interrupted bouts of trash- talking in an attempt to build hype and therefore profitability, a process that some would argue has started with Mayweather and McGregor regularly indulging in social media verbal sparring.
It wouldn’t be the first time a fighter from one combat discipline has forayed into another, but it would be the first instance of someone starting that journey by taking on one of the best fighters in history, which tells you all you need to know about how slim the likelihood is of the contest actually being competitive.
But more than anything, the event would be a referendum on the public and, specifically, its ability to forgive and forget.
This will be, after a few logistical hurdles are overcome, a matchup created solely for fiscal purposes, so it is OK to view its potential success through that lens. To make the extraordinary sum desired by Mayweather, the longtime pound- for- pound boxing champ, and McGregor, the hugely popular Irish mixed martial artist, they will need to convince the masses that this is something worth paying for.
The sales pitch will need to be that this is must- see fighting entertainment, a one- off extravaganza. A so- called Fight of the Century, if you will.
Yet that process will be made significantly more difficult because the last time a fight with such hyperbole rolled around was only two years ago, and it completely failed to deliver.
More than 4.6 million people, nearly double the previous payper- view record, pulled out the plastic in May 2015 to pay $ 99.95 in exchange for Mayweather’s long- awaited battle with Manny Pacquiao, and they got a dismal return for their money.
It was a low- action, one- sided snoozer with a miserable undercard, and many who paid for it vowed never to be so duped again. Across the board, boxing PPV sales since have been way down. Mayweather’s ensuing fight, and his most recent before announcing his retirement, was against Andre Berto 19 months ago and was estimated to have sold about 10% of the Pacquiao figure.
This is the cord- cutting generation, and a shift in the way the public consumes and pays for sports isn’t coming, it is well underway. Yet we are in many ways still sporting romantics. While there have been enough over-trumpeted disappointments to make potential viewers wary, we still hope for more, still find ways to cheat our mind into thinking that something dramatic or improbable or historically noteworthy could take place and that the next event could offer something we can’t miss.
That is what Mayweather vs. McGregor will rely upon, if, as it looks more and more, it takes place this summer. The latest step toward it occurred over the weekend, when Mayweather “officially” came out of retirement, with the caveat that he was doing so purely to fight McGregor.
Mayweather long ago became a master of sculpting his persona in such a way that statements generate maximum publicity, and often you wonder whether every piece of news that emerges about him is self- scripted.
One that certainly wasn’t came last week during Mayweather’s speaking tour of Britain, when a truck covered with his “TMT” company branding was targeted in an arson attack in Birmingham, England, and went up in flames.
As the publicity machine continues to whir, he will hope it is not an omen for sales of his crosssport blockbuster to do the same thing.
But it likely won’t, not because Mayweather- McGregor is a viable or fair contest, or because it’ll be the Fight of the Century, or even because McGregor has any kind of chance at all, but because our memories are short.