WHY EVERY ONE’S A WINNER IN VEGAS...
It might all seem so grubby, plastic and shameful, but nobody here cares
BOXING’S grown-ups will tell you that tonight’s fight is a bloated, money-maddened, sport-cheapening extravaganza, between two fighters that have seen better days. Should have taken place five years ago, they sneer. Should have happened when they were in their prime. Maybe they’re right, but here’s the good news. Las Vegas doesn’t care.
Las Vegas doesn’t care that Floyd Mayweather isn’t knocking them over like he used to, or that Manny Pacquiao has been put on his backside more times than is comfortable. Las Vegas doesn’t care about the moral imperative to boycott the pay-per-view because Mayweather’s attitude to women sucks.
Las Vegas doesn’t care that $250,000 for a ringside ticket is an affront to humanity in austere times. Las Vegas doesn’t care that the guy paying it didn’t give the money to Nepal instead. Las Vegas doesn’t care if you find it fake, plastic, soulless, grubby, greedy, gaudy, shameful or shameless.
It has heard it all before, and worse. The fight game has, too. It has been pronounced dead, or at best dying, been read the last rites and consigned to a pauper’s grave. Yet here it is. Raking it in once again.
Last weekend, a quite dreadful fight between heavyweights Wladimir Klitschko and Bryant Jennings — they were booed out of Madison Square Garden by those that remained awake — drew HBO’s best boxing audience in three years, probably just by proximity to Mayweather-Pacquiao. The numbers speculated on for this event are off-the-dial nuts.
‘I don’t want to tell you,’ said co-promoter Bob Arum. ‘ You won’t believe me if I did. Hell, I don’t believe me when I see them.
‘I can’t talk because we’re in new territory. It’s a new world. It’s like asking Columbus his opinion of the New World.
‘ He wouldn’t know, he thought he was in India. “Hey, Columbus — whattaya think of the New World?” Andd he’d say, “What f****** New World?”’
They talk like that, in boxing. On one famous occasion, around a big fight, Arum contradicted himself from one press call to the next. He was asked to explain. ‘It’s simple,’ he said. ‘Yesterday I was lying, today I’m telling the truth.’
So is he telling the truth about the figures around Mayweather-Pacquiao? We reckon so. Las Vegas veterans say they haven’t seen the place like this since the days when Mike Tyson would roll into town followed by an unnerving invasion of Blood and Cripp gang members from Los Angeles, a menacing growl of a presence in n the resort casinos and clubs.
In terms of sheer numbers, Rickyy Hatton’s followers caused perhaps the greatest commotion with theirir singing, carousing and insatiable thirst. The famous Strip was, quite literally, drunk dry.
This is different. Beer is a cheap vice by Vegas standards. This fight is about the money, and it is money that is landing, hourly, in the private planes lining up at McCarran International Airport. The reason just 500 tickets made it to general sale is because seats in the MGM Arena have largely been reserved for the highest of high-rollers, celebrities or those willing to pay in the hundreds of thousands just to be in the room when the gloves touch at 9pm local time.
It says something that the deal offered by the Bellagio hotel — $18,000 for a two-night stay with two fight tickets thrown in — now seems something of a bargain.
The day before the fight, the most expensive asking price on broker site StubHub was $351,000 per ticket on floor side E, rows AA to CC. (Although there is, of course, a difference between asking it and getting it — particularly when another vendor had seats in the same area for $87,755).
All this for a fight that should have taken place five years ago. Well, that’s just it. This is boxing and different rules apply. It is not always about the sport. Sometimes it is ab about the occasion, th the event, or the in individual. The fifth biggest grossing fight of all time was a complete mismatch between Tyson and Peter McNeeley, a desperately mediocre heavyweight from Boston who didn’t make it throug through round one. McNeeley announced he would wrap Tyson in ‘a cocoon of horror’ and the payper-view take-up soared to 1.5million, amounting to revenue of $96m. Despite this, Tyson put his opponent down twice before McNeeley’s trainer stepped into the ring after one minute and 29 seconds.
Why the interest? This was Tyson’s first fight after serving three years of a six-year sentence for rape. There was a ghoulish fascination with the man who would emerge from incarceration. In sporting terms it was barely a contest; but it was most certainly a main event.
And tonight’s fight is, too. Boxing is unique in its rhythm. Football is one breathless peak after another. Chelsea may win the title tomorrow. Then, on Tuesday, Real Madrid face the best Italian team in several decades, Juventus. The next night Pep Guardiola returns to Barcelona for the first time, as manager of Bayern Munich. The last day of a major golf tournament can be exciting, but there is only a morning to think about it; two days maximum for a Grand Slam tennis final.
But, for boxing, Mayweather-Pacquiao is the only game in town, and it has been that way for months. Every day, more anticipation, more tension, more talk, nearer and nearer. Las Vegas will be fit to burst come tonight. The MGM Grand has the fight, but other hotels fly in superstar entertainment to carve their slice of the action. The Fight Night Party at the Cosmopolitan hotel’s Marquee nightclub, for instance, will be hosted by Jay-Z. A prime-area table on the dancefloor can be bought for £50,000.
Meanwhile, at the MGM Grand hotel, visitors crowd around a cordoned-off area just to get a look at the passageway where ticketholders will walk to access the venue — you can’t even see the doors to the arena from there — while others take photographs of an empty fake boxing ring in the lobby.
A permanent display of exhibits has been donated by Floyd Mayweather Jnr. Illuminated behind glass are his belts and ring apparel, red leather and black fur for Shane Mosley, a Mexican theme complete
with sombrero for Oscar de la Hoya, silver fur for Hatton; there is a matador outfit Floyd wore on Dancing With The Stars, his fur shorts for the staged fight with Big Show at Wrestlemania XXIV.
This is not a temporary exhibition to coincide with his fight appearance. Mayweather has bequeathed these artefacts to his home from home at the MGM, just as JMW Turner left his art to the nation.
This is the nearest Vegas gets to authenticity. Mayweather may one day be regarded as the finest boxer there has been, and here is his work: his prizes, his gloves. We are invited to stare at these pieces of his life as we might the paint-spattered floor of Jackson Pollock’s studio in Springs, New York.
And it is easy to mock, to peer down one’s nose at Vegas and the fight game and all the hyperbole and kitsch that surrounds this place — but that reads it wrong.
To say that the New York-New York hotel has a cheap-looking fake Statue of Liberty, or a much weedier rendition of the mighty Empire State Building is like going to Disneyland and complaining it’s not a real palace or that isn’t a genuine six-foot mouse wearing a band leader’s costume. It is what it is. It is Vegas.
Yes, there is a part of the Venetian hotel and casino that garishly mimics the Rialto Bridge in Venice. But guess what? If you go to the real Rialto Bridge today, you can’t move for tourists, either — and what spare pavement exists is taken up by young African men selling knocked-off Louis Vuitton handbags.
The true Ponte di Rialto, standing since 1591, has always been lined on both sides by shops. Indeed, the powerful Venetian Republic, and the explosion of culture and ideas that made it the most important city in Europe for a century or more, was completely built on commercial acumen.
Those marvellous gilt bronze horses on the front of Saint Mark’s Cathedral? Nicked from the Hippodrome of Constantinople after the fourth Crusade.
No, Venice isn’t Vegas; but it would recognise some of its imperatives. The economist John Kay actually compared the economy of the ancient city to Disneyland. He said it hasn’t got the real financial structure a conurbation requires, being so utterly reliant on tourism, and should charge entrance fees like an amusement park.
See, we can sneer at the Venetian hotel’s pretensions — but it’s not so far removed from its Italian ancestors. Anyway, what news on the Rialto (the Vegas one)? It’s fair to say both sides are talking a good game, as the clock counts down to show time.
‘I know my guy is going to deliver,’ said Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach. ‘I can’t promise you the same about Floyd. He put on a lot of muscle to fight, so I hope that is what he does. Then again, he could run all night — I’ve seen fights of his where I’ve fallen asleep before. But if he tries to run this time, we’ll cut the ring off.’
This brought a sharp response from his opposite number, Floyd Mayweather Snr. ‘I don’t think there’s going to be much of a fight,’ he predicted. ‘Short? Pretty much. They’ve had all this talk about how scared Floyd is, but we will whup him any day, any time, any year, any moment. Pacquiao’s been hit a few times now, when your ass just goes to sleep — and if you take too many of those, the chance is it will happen again. We don’t care what they say. We’re not scared. They’re scared.’
Actually, no- one is scared. For Vegas, for boxing, that’s the beauty of this one: whatever unfolds, by the time that last private plane departs McCarran and the final high-roller cashes in his chips, everyone will be a winner.