By Bart Barry–
Saturday at MGM Grand Garden Arena, before a crowd likely to comprise not one person reading this column, American Floyd Mayweather finally will fight Filipino Manny Pacquiao. The time for manufactured enthusiasm is upon us, for tossing oneself wholly into the futility of shouting in print towards a volume to rival the industrial din of Time Warner and CBS and Walt Disney Company. To wit:
MAYWEATHER WILL WIN THIS FIGHT!!!
At long last, the event anticipated to break revenue records we’re told we care so deeply about arrives on our video-display devices – so order live today! Boxing promoters or managers or advisors, or whichever new euphemism they next hide beneath, are the direct descendants of yestercentury’s circus barker; they believe in an inexhaustible supply of nitwits to whom they can provide the tricky service of relieving one of his wallet, and they fail disproportionately more often than they succeed. But they will not fail Saturday, provided Saturday’s one-off cashgrab is the end of their tabulations.
There’s no way to calculate, immediately, the sum of resentment to be felt among boxing’s comparatively tiny band of loyal supporters – the ones who wasted money on Mayweather-Baldomir, or paid to be in Cowboys Stadium for Pacquiao-Clottey and its egregiously priced parking – but it will be an increasingly easy number to derive in the next five years, as local gyms continue to shutter and ticketsales at local shows continue to follow. Attendance for Saturday represents a proper perspective from which to consider the coming resentment; priced to ensure no rightminded aficionado attends, tickets that, bizarrely even for boxing, were not available till a few days ago betray the organizers’ organizing vision: the biggest boxing matches, made-by-television spectacles, someday soon will happen in broadcasters’ very studios.
Logistics are the reason the largest American boxing outlets cite when asked why they couldn’t broadcast live from, say, Wembley Stadium, where 80,000 Brits gathered to watch Carl Froch in 2014. Putting fights directly in studios should solve that problem. Promoters do not promote any longer in any event; they organize and book and contract vendors of every kind to do all the jobs promoters once did, though boxing was admittedly a touch late to the outsourcing trend, and the inaccessibility of Pacquiao-Mayweather would be collectively maddening if boxing fans did not, as one clever wag on Twitter put it, have Stockholm Syndrome.
That does little, however, to explain MGM Grand’s tolerance for the consequences of a rivalry between promoter Bob Arum and adviser Al Haymon in something so great and complicated as the historic gouging of sportsfans; why the hell is MGM Grand overpaying for this spectacle if not to bring folks to its slot machines? And because of the boxoffice delay, rest assured there will be fewer handles pulled along the Strip this week. Whatever inflated earnings reports crash down on aficionados’ bowed heads in the next month – the pay-per-view number has already been set over 3 million, and anyone who’s been interested in boxing for more than the last month, no more than 500,000 Americans in a nation of 300 million, knows no match has ever officially missed its predicted number; missed numbers do not get announced – rest assured total revenue should have been more.
A week after Pacquiao-Mayweather, Mexican Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will fight Texan James Kirkland at Minute Maid Park in Houston, and will do so before a crowd that should be about three times MGM Grand’s crowd.
“But oh,” cries a passel of aspiring businessmen from their parents’ couches, “they won’t make as much money!”
First of all, why the hell are you so excited about strangers making money?
Second of all, three times as many aficionados and potential aficionados will have a chance to see a major event in a sport you care about, which is better for your sport in every single way.
Third of all, when you cheer against your own self-interests, you don’t look wise or even pragmatic – no matter how expertly you cock the brim of your TMT hat – you look like a damn sucker.
Writing of which, there is a good chance Floyd Mayweather will win 10 or 11 rounds Saturday night. He is much larger than Manny Pacquiao, he has the back of a middleweight, however noble his perfectly ineffective 2010 crusade against PEDs proved, and Pacquiao has not been anywhere near the storm at 147 pounds he was at 130. Pacquiao is better than every opponent Mayweather has dared to fight, yes, and Pacquiao will hit Mayweather with more left hands than the sum of Mayweather opponents since Oscar De La Hoya, but there is a very good chance they will not affect Mayweather very much at all. The recent appointment of Kenny Bayless as Saturday’s referee, too, ensures Mayweather will be allowed to hold to a point of tackling Pacquiao if he’s so compelled, and Pacquiao has never been mistaken for Roberto Duran on the inside, anyway.
Is there a chance Pacquiao’s extraordinary conditioning and unique punching angles will cause fatigue enough to bring the bitch out of Mayweather? Actually, no, not really; whatever Mayweather supporters and everyone else may think, Floyd Mayweather is all fighter when he has to be. Much like Pacquiao’s match with De La Hoya 6 1/2 years ago, this fight will be incredibly intriguing for a round or two – though not $100 worth of intriguing. Much unlike Pacquiao’s 2008 match with De La Hoya, the things Pacquiao will need to do to cause an opponent’s slumpshouldered retreat to his own corner will not be things Pacquiao can do.
I’ll take Mayweather, UD-12.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
