Future beyond mega-prize fight tough to discern
As ever in boxing, no one quite knows who is in charge
Since Floyd Mayweather crows that it is his quest to separate the ordinary from the extraordinary, it follows that his showdown with Manny Pacquiao has morphed into a sui generis spectacular, an event without precedent in either the sums of money being spun or in the lashings of tinselly, Technicolor grandeur.
“Are we going to do record-breaking numbers again?” he asks, rhetorically, knowing that a US$200million cheque is already his to bank. The anxiety for boxing is the question of what, once the giant fight billboards at the MGM Grand are replaced on Sunday morning by those for a Barry Manilow concert, comes next.
For this fight must be the easiest sell since the days when an Elvis ticket in Las Vegas was yours for $15, lobster and steak thrown in. Few showpieces in sport besides “MayPac” have their own universally recognized diminutive.
There are signs, too, that the anticipation of Saturday night’s duel is having a spinoff effect for other boxers. Wladimir Klitschko’s victory on points last weekend over American Bryant Jennings, in a heavyweight grapple-fest so turgid that the fighters were booed out of Madison Square Garden, still attracted more than 1.7 million customers on HBO pay-per-view, the broadcaster’s highest boxing ratings since 2012.
The future beyond May 2, after this one-off episode of ring roulette has been resolved in favour of the red or the blue corner, is far less certain. But the likelihood is such a singular production, where Mayweather stands to earn more for one night’s work than Frank Sinatra managed in a 60-year career, will seldom, if ever, be replicated in our lifetimes. Boxing, left to its own devices, will instead revert to the type of internecine strife that leaves the punters bewildered and the protagonists shortchanged.
For an example, just look at the small print on all these “Fight of the Century” posters. The roster of stakeholders is dizzying: after Mayweather Promotions, Floyd’s very own vanity vehicle, come Pacquiao’s people at Top Rank, then a sequence of honourable mentions to sponsors Tecate beer, plus of course HBO and Showtime, the two U.S. cable networks that have signed each fighter to golden-handcuffs deals.
As ever in boxing, nobody quite knows who is in charge. Even the list of sanctioning bodies is unfathomable to the layman: IBF, WBA, WBC, WBO, WBZ (no, sorry, that last one is a Boston radio station).
Chaotically and opaquely configured, boxing lays itself open to a feeding frenzy by grasping hucksters. Money, increasingly, is its only narrative.
The cultural resonances of old, whether in Muhammad Ali’s status as a lightning rod for American dissent or in the black-versus-white overtones of Larry Holmes’s 1982 bout with Gerry Cooney, have long since been superseded by an unseemly cash-grab. The enticements are such that shadowy Svengalis operate for the enrichment of individual clients and give not a second glance to the good of the sport.
Where the NFL employs Roger Goodell as a US$50-million-a-year commissioner to help give gridiron a cohesive structure, boxing invests no single figure with any overarching power. The consequence is a Wild West-style lawlessness to echo the times when Las Vegas was nothing but an untamed swath of Nevada desert. Most promoters exist purely to make a buck as fast as possible, as the lines between competition and commerce become ever more blurred.
The fact that Mayweather is not only starring in this fight but hawking it — pressurizing Pacquiao to submit to demands that range from drug-testing to an inferior share in a 60-40 split of the proceeds — is merely accepted with a weary shrug of resignation.
Bob Arum, boxing’s 83-year-old kingmaker, is fond of expressing the sport’s predicament in simple terms.
It is, he argues, too brutal ever to sustain its appeal to the white middle classes. “Erm, any white guys in the house?” implored the rapper playing host to Mayweather’s grand arrival this week. Duly, there emerged on stage a young Scotsman, who had spent thousands on flying over for this occasion. But would he embrace the idea of seeing his children have seven bells beaten out of them? For Arum, the answer is self-evident. He freely admits that he would never have allowed his daughter, Elizabeth, anywhere near the ring.
Arum’s 70-strong stable of boxers is largely comprised of Hispanics and Eastern Europeans forced to break out of the same cycle of poverty that Pacquiao, whom the old promoter regards almost as a surrogate son, endured in the Philippines. Today, the amateur program that yielded nearly every great American fighter of the past 100 years is in all but irreversible decline, with boxing incapable of offering the same passport out of the ghetto that a basketball scholarship can. No billion-dollar Vegas pageant will change that.
All, however, is not lost. One of boxing’s most boneheaded recent mistakes was to put its premier fights behind a TV paywall. Mayweather vs. Pacquiao, at nearly US$90 a throw for those at home, ekes maximum reward from that trend, but there are at last glimpses that it is starting to be reversed.
Al Haymon, ironically the same man who represents Mayweather, has raised more than US$375-million to help restore headline bouts to free-to-air. NBC, its coverage led by Sugar Ray Leonard, is already on board with the idea. It all serves as a happy throwback to the late ’90s, when Oscar De La Hoya’s Fight Night on Fox would routinely draw more than six million viewers. Belatedly, it seems, boxing is waking up to the reality that “MayPac” will not provide a panacea for its troubles.