Game theory | Boxing’s big night

It is about the “Money”

Floyd Mayweather’s marketing genius lies in making boxing fans hate themselves

By S.D. | LAS VEGAS

THE boxing match between Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao on May 2nd was widely billed as the “Fight of the Century”. If that prediction, bold even by the standards of event promoters, winds up coming true, then fans should steel themselves for 85 years of dreary bouts. The contest between the two finest pugilists of the millennium delivered no knockout, no knockdowns, not even a furious exchange leaving a sturdy competitor wobbling like a baby foal. Instead, after 12 rounds of mostly glancing blows, Mr Mayweather extended his undefeated record to 48-0 in a unanimous decision, besting his rival by a score of 118-110 on one judge’s card and 116-112 on the other two.

The only people at the 16,700-seat MGM Grand arena in Las Vegas questioning the result were Mr Pacquiao; his trainer, Freddie Roach; and his promoter, Bob Arum. Each of them insisted that the pride of the Philippines had fought a better match and should have been declared the victor—though Mr Pacquiao and his team also made excuses for his lacklustre showing by claiming he was limited by an injured right shoulder. “I don’t want to make alibis or complain or anything,” Mr Pacquiao said before doing just that, “[but] it’s hard to fight one-handed.” For everyone else, the only point worth debating was which represented a more disappointing anticlimax: the widely anticipated outcome (local bookmakers had given Mr Mayweather around a 70% chance to win), or the mind-numbing fashion in which it materialised. “We waited 5 years for that…#underwhelmed” tweetedMike Tyson, the most electrifying boxer of the prior generation.

It was always unlikely that the bout would live up to the sky-high expectations. During the past two decades boxing has been fading towards niche-sport status. Today, the only two active fighters with name recognition beyond hard-core fans are Mr Mayweather, a part-time reality-TV star, and Mr Pacquiao, a congressman and likely presidential candidate in the Philippines. For years boxing enthusiasts have longed for a matchup between the two that could put the “sweet science” back on newspapers’ front pages. But Mr Mayweather backed out of a scheduled face-off in 2010, and since then acrimony between their camps pushed the idea to the back burner. Only this winter, after most fans had resigned themselves to the belief that the encounter would never happen, did the pair reportedly bump into each other at a basketball game in Miami (though that could be a tale spun by their publicists) and agree to a date.

The long build-up encouraged fans and sponsors to cram the previous five years’ worth of boxing expenditure into a single evening. That made Mayweather-Pacquiao by far the most lucrative 47 minutes in the history of the sport—and probably in the history of sports altogether. Despite the unprecedented $100 price to watch on TV—and strictly enforcedfees of over $5,000 to show the match at bars and restaurants—it is widely expected to blow past the previous maximum of 2.5m purchases. Although the final figures have not yet been released, widely circulated projections forecast a stunning 3.15m. Five corporate sponsors paid a record $13.2m to affix their logos to the contest, with Tecate beer alone accounting for $5.6m. Six more companies shelled out $2.25m just to decorate Mr Pacquiao’s trunks.

On top of that windfall, gate revenue was estimated at $74m, or around $4,500 per ticket. That figure may somewhat exaggerate the true fan demand, since secondary-market prices dipped in the final 24 hours. Many scalpers wandering the halls of the MGM Grand were hawking their wares for barely any profit. “I’m not a greedy man. I wanna do right by you,” said Mark, a cigarette-scented gentleman who had bought four seats from a friend earlier in the week and only managed to flip one. Dodging the watchful eye of the yellow-clad security guards as he peddled a seat with a face value of $3,500 and a “clear view of the ring”, he leaned in close and said it would take just $3,700 to “call it a day”. But if the touts had overplayed their hands, that was of no concern to the boxers, who collected the lion’s share of the inflated revenue all the same.

With all of this money and attention focused on boxing, Las Vegas on fight night felt like the centre of the sporting universe for the first time since Mr Tyson’s heyday. A single ringside row accommodated Magic Johnson, Jesse Jackson, Sting, Michael Strahan and Terry Richardson. In keeping with Mr Mayweather’s ostentatious image, men sported diamond-studded ties, and women hip-conforming couture dresses with plunging necklines. The concession stand offered $450 snakeskin hats and $2,000 leather jackets. A member of Mr Mayweather’s entourage was showing off a gold necklace attached to a glass box filled with $10,000 in $100 bills and the logo of Mr Mayweather’s brand, “The Money Team” (see picture).

But no sooner had the opening bell rung than the most hyped match in memory turned into something approaching a mismatch. It appeared that Father Time had not been kind to Mr Pacquiao. Even though he is actually two years Mr Mayweather’s junior, the 36-year-old fights in a relentlessly aggressive style. When his magnificent high-volume assaults from unexpected angles pay off, as in his vicious second-round knockout of Ricky Hatton in 2009 or his utter destruction of the bigger, stronger Antonio Margarito in 2010, they provide some of the sport’s most compelling moments. But when boxers let their hands go, they cannot help but expose themselves to counterattacks. Even the greats can run into punches they don’t see, like Juan Manuel Márquez’s devastating knockout blow to the side of the head in 2012 that left many pundits wondering if Mr Pacquiao would ever fight again. Mr Pacquiao has of course dished out far more of these than he has received. But after his 65 matches, even infrequent pounding has added up. It was natural to wonder whether the stiff, flat-footed version on display in Las Vegas of the normally dynamic Mr Pacquiao was the product of taking one too many blows over the years.

In contrast, Mr Mayweather is arguably the greatest defensive boxer in history. He focuses entirely on avoiding punishment, and on delivering counterpunches that will fill up judges’ scorecards even if they rarely leave his opponents staggering. Although that strategy is a poor recipe for generating replay-worthy highlights, it has done wonders for his longevity. And it was Mr Mayweather that showed up in vintage form for the “fight of the century”. Mr Pacquiao had his moments in driving Mr Mayweather to the ropes, but the boxer formerly nicknamed “Pretty Boy Floyd” put on a defensive tour de force, invariably firing off just enough counters to stun his rival and circle out from danger. In the latter rounds, a tiring Mr Pacquiao resorted to throwing himself at Mr Mayweather like a bull chasing a matador. Of the 429 punches Mr Pacquiao threw, a paltry 81 found their target. At one point, Mr Mayweather even shook his head and said “nope” when Mr Pacquiao visibly hoped he had done some damage.

After vanquishing Mr Pacquiao, there is little more the newly crowned undisputed welterweight world champion can accomplish in the ring. Nor could he possibly have any need for further riches: he lived up to his preferred nickname of “Money” by pulling in an estimated $180m—more than the combined annual salaries of the 53 members of the reigning Super Bowl champion New England Patriots—for less than an hour’s work. Standing at the podium, he announced he would voluntarily relinquish his titles, box once more to fulfill a contractual obligation and then retire. “Give other fighters a chance,” he stated, after pausing for a long sip of soda. “I’m not greedy.”

The only victory that still eludes Mr Mayweather is in the popularity contest. The world’s best-paid athlete is also one of its most reviled: fighting in his own country, the crowd in Las Vegas greeted him with boos and hisses, whereas they gleefully chanted the name of Mr Pacquiao, a foreigner from an unfamiliar culture. The most widely cited reason for the public’s rejection of Mr Mayweather is his own misdeeds: he has a long, documented record of domestic violence, and served 60 days in jail in 2011 after physically attacking his ex-girlfriend in front of their children. But boxing fans have a sorry history of forgiving their favourite fighters for despicable actions outside the ring. Just next month the International Boxing Hall of Fame will induct Riddick Bowe, who stabbed his wife in 1998. If fans were otherwise predisposed to like Mr Mayweather, some of them would surely be making excuses for his inexcusable behaviour.

So what is it about Mr Mayweather that boxing aficionados—as distinct from the general public—find uniquely distasteful? It is surely not his bravado: talking trash has always been core to the sport’s appeal. Instead, it seems to be how little heed Mr Mayweather pays to boxing’s roots and essence as a raw test of brute masculine force and will. Mr Mayweather certainly doesn’t slug like, say, Earnie Shavers. But nor does he dance like Muhammad Ali, and lure opponents into his counterpunches. He doesn’t seem to take any more joy in a knockout than in a split decision. He feels no need to prove that he is “the greatest”, as Mr Ali proudly declared, by taking on his most formidable rivals at the peak of their powers. It’s not even clear that he likes boxing. What he likes, and likes unapologetically, is money. And he seems to see boxing as a means to that end rather than an end in and of itself.

It’s worth asking whether race plays a role in Mr Mayweather’s image problem. He is a master at analysing and exploiting the rules of the game to yield the greatest return for the least risk, both as a boxer and as a businessman. You don’t get to be the best-paid athlete on a planet that houses Lionel Messi and LeBron James without a formidable aptitude for marketing and deal-making. American sportswriters, a heavily white group, have a long and sordid history of depicting black athletes as physically gifted and mentally lacking, while attributing the opposite to whites: Isiah Thomas, a black former basketball star, once said that commentators emphasised his natural talent so much that their coverage sounded “like I came dribbling out of my mother’s womb”. Mr Mayweather makes an explicit and entirely justified claim to the historically white side of this spectrum. “Why don’t you just say I was smart?”, he said four days before the bout, in response to criticism that he had avoided fighting Mr Pacquiao for so long out of cowardice. “Five years ago, this was a $50m fight for me, and it was a $20m fight for him.” And in his own post-mortem analysis of his victory, he called himself “the smarter fighter, more calculated, more patient”. When boxing grandees like Shane Mosley and Lennox Lewis laud Mr Mayweather’s skill as a “technician”, it sounds like damning with faint praise. Would fans interpret those comments differently if he were white?

But Mr Mayweather also alienates fans in a deeper way that transcends race. The entertainment value of watching fellow humans achieve ever-greater physical feats cannot explain why professional sports have become such a large industry. Instead, people pay to watch sports for the same reason they pay to watch Hollywood films: their appetite for narrative. They turn these simple games into morality plays, into tribal battles, into tales of triumph over adversity. Mr Mayweather’s single-minded avarice disrupts fans’ suspension of disbelief that what happens in the ring is anything more than expertly packaged mass entertainment, or any realer than, say, Rocky. As a result, they hate him for bursting their collective bubble, and yearn for a fighter who pays appropriate fealty to the sport’s sacred clichés to send him to the mat where he belongs.

But the only way to root against Mr Mayweather in real time is to hold one’s nose and pay to watch his bouts—thus giving him the only thing he really wants. Mr Mayweather makes fans hate themselves for coughing up their credit cards to view what they know will be another grinding victory by decision. That makes them hate him even more, making it even more likely that they will remain paying customers. It’s a sad commentary on the sport that produced Mr Ali, an influential civil-rights activist, that the greatest achievement of the face of modern boxing is designing a marketing trap from which no fan can escape. But perhaps every generation gets the champion it deserves.

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