The Great White Hippodrome
We've never seen anything like Mayweather vs McGregor before, yet, it's also a very old and familiar story in the prize-fighting game.
I am quite sure there has never been a fight like Floyd Mayweather vs Conor McGregor. Sure we've seen blockbuster boxing matches before. After all, it was only two years ago that Floyd Mayweather faced Manny Pacquiao in a fight that set every kind of money record in prizefighting history. The very same money records Mayweather-McGregor are trying to beat.
We've also had plenty of bizarre spectacles. George Foreman once boxed five men in a single night, and celebrity boxing is a thing after all.
What we havent seen though is a spectacle in boxing of this size.
Mayweather versus Pacquiao grossed over $600 million, a number unheard of before in combat sports. Their match was also between not only two professional boxers, it was between arguably the two best boxers of the last 20 years. Saturday’s contest, in comparison, pits the 49-0 Floyd Mayweather against an MMA fighter making his boxing debut. By most objective reasoning this fight should not be happening.
That fans are interested in it anyways should not be a surprise. Combat sports has long been sold on the personalities of its stars - and there are few personalities as big as Mayweather and McGregor - and by elevating the fight as meaning something more than the fight itself. Be it personal a grudge, a championship, or even more effective, a symbolic competition between opposing ideologies, nationalities, or races. This match has all those bases covered.
In Floyd Mayweather we have perhaps boxing's most polarizing figure. A superbly talented pugilist on the cusp of breaking Rocky Marciano’s fabled 49-0 record, who is also immensely disliked by many people in boxing. More so for his perceived calculated matchmaking and crass interest in money over sport than his many personal failings.
In his opponent, Conor McGregor, we have mixed martial art's most brash champion. The biggest star the sport has ever seen, who’s incredible talents in the ring are easily overshadowed by the incredible force of his personality. The fact that he competes in a completely different sport hasn’t been a hindrance to making the bout but instead one of its major selling points.
Combat sports has a long history of tapping into tribalism. Nationality, ethnicity and race are easily commercialized when trying to promote a bout. That is how Miguel Cotto versus Canelo Alvarez becomes not just another bout, but the newest entry in the long running Puerto Rico versus Mexico feud. Joe Louis-Max Shmeling, Larry Holmes-Gerry Cooney, and most notoriously Jack Johnson-James Jeffries, were all heavily sold as battles between nationalities and races. Therefore, in the grand scheme of things, a heavily manufactured feud between the sports of boxing and MMA is probably more preferable than the traditional appeals to tribalism we find in prize-fighting.
Even so both nationalism and racism have surfaced in the lead up to fight. Perhaps the participants have no interest in making this anything other than a fight between Mayweather and McGregor, but that hasn't stopped them from reminding us several times that this is a fight between a white Irishman and a black American.
Perhaps it's unavoidable. Even if the participants didn’t want to bring race or nationality into the ring with them they can't control how the fans see the contest. James Jeffries never asked to be the great white hope after all. At the same time, it is what helped make that the biggest prizefight of its era.
When trying to find a comparison to Mayweather-McGregor there are two matches that strike me as coming the closest. The first is from over a hundred years ago and didn’t even happen.
After Jack Johnson beat James Jeffries in 1910 there was a mad scrabble to find the next great white hope. Many turned to the champion of another sport to be their savoir, wrestling's Frank Gotch. That Gotch's boxing resume was very unimpressive didn’t seem to phase the fans clamoring to see him dethrone Johnson. Faith in Gotch, overrides any logic apparently. Gotch, aware that he would make much more off a long run as the champ in wrestling than a one time boxing match wisely turned down the offer.
The second match was Muhammad Ali’s bizarre contest with Antonio Inoki. There was nothing sporting about the contest which was originally arranged as a worked pro wrestling match. But the spectacle of the contest, the wrestling vs boxing angle, the size of Ali's fight purse, and the rehashing by both participants of old wounds from the war drew the interest of millions.
The resemblance between the two matches didn't go unnoticed by Josh Gross, author of the book Ali vs Inoki:
"99 percent of the discussion leading up to this fight is not about what is going to happen in the ring. People are talking about the money, the betting that is going around with the fight. The personalities involved. These promotions coming together. The UFC coming together with boxing. All these insular side things that in a real sporting contest, like a GGG-Canelo, you'd never ever talk about. So everyone is talking around the fight and not the fight itself."
McGregor too has noticed the similarities, referencing Ali vs Inoki during the pre fight build up. Perhaps he also remembers that by trying to turn it into a real contest Ali was left with leg damage so extensive it likely impacted the rest of his boxing career.
There is old term, long out of use, that perfectly describes the Mayweather vs McGregor match - hippodrome. A hippodrome was often used in the late 19th and early 20th century to describe a sporting contest, particulary a wrestling or boxing match, that had no real competitive purpose but was being held solely for financial gain. Many were fixed or fake matches but it wasn't necessary for them to be staged to be a hippodrome. Real matches could also be designated hippodromes. Often it was used to describe a match that was promoted to the audience as a legitimately competitive match but in reality was anything but.
Primo Carnera carefully built record masked his true chances against Max Baer. George Hackenschmidt’s debilitating leg injury went unreported before his match with Frank Gotch. Even without actually fixing these matches they were as good as predetermined, thus both were hippodromes.
It is impossible to see how McGregor wins this fight. An illuminative comparison was made by someone on Twitter between McGregor and boxer Vasyl Lomachenko. Even with his two gold medals and 396-1 amateur boxing record, Lomachenko still lost when he took the giant step up in competition to face Orlando Salido in his second pro bout. Yet many fans are convinced McGregor, who has no real boxing experience, is going to beat an opponent several rungs higher than Salido in his first professional boxing match?
Come Saturday night there will be a vast transfer of wealth from fight fans of moderate means to wealthy athletes, promoters, casinos, and cable companies when they pay to buy the payperview. Millions more will be just handed over to wealthy gamblers by those with the utmost faith in McGregor.
There is no point in telling the millions that buy lottery tickets every week that it is a waste of time. You can bring up stat after stat that your odds at winning are so low that you’d be better off investing those few dollars than wasting it in on a one-in-hundred million chance. But what if those few "wasted dollars" let you escape your current concerns to fantasize on a life without worry? Maybe that's worth a few dollars? After all, someone has to win.
"What if, just maybe, anything can happen." Those are the words of carnies, conmen, blackjack dealers... and fight promoters.