Boxing is reborn. Boxing is dead. Boxing merely exists.
It won’t be as prolonged as the hype, mercifully, but part of the legacy of Saturday night’s Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao welterweight championship fight is examining what it did for a sport that has been rendered irrelevant.
My kneejerk, morning-after suspicion, admittedly clouded by staying up until 2:30 a.m. to watch the foolishness and all subsequent analysis: Not much.
What this exhibition (and I use that word literally) proved is that if you sell something long enough, people will buy it, even if there are no recent, performance-related reasons for doing so. Perhaps that explains the uninspiring parade of candidates we’ve watched compete for our nation’s highest office in my lifetime, come to think it.
Call me a bitter consumer if you wish, but that isn’t the case at all. Yes, I paid $99 for the privilege of watching this hootenanny, a dollar figure that translates to 18 more punches than Pacquiao landed all evening. I’d do it again, if the conditions and participants were right.
Were those ingredients right Saturday evening? If we had taken an honest inventory of the details ahead of time, instead of plugging our nose and swallowing the sales pitch, certainly we would have said no.
Mayweather is 38. Pacquiao, two years younger, with significantly less tread on his tires. These are ages when you’ve customarily on the verge of has-been-ism in most professional sports.
Not boxing, mind you, but that’s a new phenomenon. The reason Bernard Hopkins can hang on into his 50s, Roy Jones Jr. into his late 40s, and Wladimir Klitschko likely until he and Hayden Panettiere become grandparents is because the level of competition is pathetic. Boxing’s talent pool is the depth of a bathtub these days.
Some of it is the sport’s own fault. My childhood, years in which the sweet science meant as much to me as any other athletic activity, was characterized by too many titles and weight classes, too many high-profile tragedies and too many sleaze-ball promoters.
We didn’t do anything substantial to change the recipe, in part because like everything else related to the 1980s, the money train was cranking into the station. There were superstars, namely Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard and Mike Tyson, worthy of attention and capable of bringing eyes and fannies to the closed circuit or pay-per-view screen. What was not to love?
Then the world evolved. The economy tanked. Attention-deficit disorder became a thing, and we all acquired it, to some degree. Unless it was a trilogy of Micky Ward and Arturo Gatti standing in the center of the ring, beating the hell out each other and toasting it with a beer together afterward, boxing couldn’t carry our need for instant gratification.
Mixed martial arts could, and does. Ditto for the NFL. Now we prefer our action guaranteed, and in short bursts. And there are no guarantees in boxing, where the commentators remind us that “styles make fights.”
The styles of Pacquiao and Mayweather were an ugly juxtaposition, in large part because nobody’s style meshes well with Mayweather’s. He has made it to 48-0 on the strength of sticking, moving, clutching, grabbing, ducking, mugging, and tattooing the faces of his frustrated opponents on their way in.
That’s what he was, is, and shall be, for as long as we’re insane enough to pay the entry fee. It’s the same style employed by Leonard and Pernell Whitaker in a not-so-bygone era, except now our overstimulated brains can’t appreciate it.
I’ve lost track of how many pro and amateur accounts I’ve read online, grousing that all Mayweather did was clinch and dance away from Pacquiao all night. Never mind that he landed almost twice as many blows. How did we miss that? We don’t watch boxing anymore. Our eyes aren’t trained to see punches land when they don’t turn the recipient into a human bobble-head.
Boxing has retro-chic appeal and always will. That’s why we saw so many filthy-rich, pretty people flocking to this thing. We love a good party, and we love a viable good-versus-evil story. For its many faults and shortcomings in a modern context, the traditional fight game proved that it still has the goods to deliver both, on occasion. Especially in light of the truth that in addition to having a shorter attention span, our bull-crap detectors are less calibrated than ever.
What did we really see Saturday night? Two shrewd businessmen who waited until the absolute peak of the demand for their product, even when most of us assumed that window had closed. Two professionals who made nice with each other every step of the way. Two corporate entities secure in the knowledge that they had nothing to lose and 400 million things to gain and split evenly.
Even in his attempt to feign disappointment and claim victory, his skin barely showing evidence of having left the dressing room, the defeated Pacquiao beamed and blew kisses to an adoring crowd as he returned to count his coinage.
The joke was on us. Boxing is dead, buried, and very much alive. And in a world full of inconsistencies and incongruities, where style dwarfs substance, somehow that makes perfect sense.
Kalle Oakes is a staff writer. His email is koakes@sunjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Oaksie72.
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