I’m no different from anyone else who’s paying attention to Saturday’s WBC super welterweight title contest between champ Oscar de la Hoya and welterweight king Floyd Mayweather, Jr.
I’m hoping that at some point in the bout a fight breaks out.
After separating yourself from the pre-fight emotion and hype you realize that with Pretty Boy Floyd, the chances of a real dogfight are slim. Mayweather has a champion’s heart. He has an elite athlete’s heart. But he doesn’t have a fighter’s heart. There is a big difference.
He is so talented with speed and instinct that he doesn’t have to fight you to beat you.
Just think back a few months to his contest with Carlos Baldomir. The hand and foot speed difference between Mayweather and Baldomir can be described as one boxer fighting in fast forward and the other in slow motion. Baldomir was so slow against Mayweather that Floyd could have sat in the pocket all night and hardly been in jeopardy at all.
We all wished that PBF would stand and fight the rugged champ, cut him down and knock him out. But instead of trading punches with the pug from Argentina, Mayweather safely danced, jabbed and pot-shotted his way to an easy 12 round decision win.
When I say “trade punches” we all know what a trade deficit that would have been. Why didn’t Mr. Flash stand and fight?
Fans booed instead of cheered. Many fans left the arena before the fight was over. He’s supposedly the best boxer on the planet and almost nobody cares.
Now here we are just days away from the fight that may break PPV records and gross revenue. There’s talk that two million or more consumers will pay the $54.95 for the extravaganza and if so, this will break the record- not only in the non-heavyweight divisions but in all of boxing.
It is our Super Bowl. And unlike the NFL, our Super Bowl doesn’t come around every 12 months.
Like most modern Super Bowls, will the hype be bigger than the actual fight? You know, it’s happened before.
The two biggest fights in recent memory are the Holyfield-Tyson rematch and the Lewis-Tyson bout. Despite the huge run-ups to those bouts, neither bout lived up to expectations.
Sure, the ear biting debacle made for great drama, but there wasn’t much of a fight when Tyson looked for the easy way out of the ring. Likewise, except for a competitive first round, Lennox Lewis merely beat Mike Tyson up in their Memphis match.
If you hated Mike Tyson, then I suppose you can say that those two bouts were “great.”
Lots and lots of money was spent by boxing fans on those two mega promotions and we certainly didn’t get much bang for our bucks.
The de la Hoya vs. Mayweather fight may indeed become the richest fight in boxing history, but is it the biggest fight ever? Not hardly.
It’s not even the biggest fight in modern times. If you are over the age of 40 like I am, then you probably can name several fights from the 1980’s that were much more important to the sport (and the casual sports fans) than this one.
Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Roberto Duran I & II in 1980 were much bigger than this.
When Leonard met Duran in Montreal, it was an international event. Newspapers across the country covered the promotion from start to finish. I’m talking page one sports, not page nine at the bottom corner. When Duran beat Leonard that night, it was the headline in sports pages the next day, not to mention the lead story in every sports report on television.
Speaking of Leonard, it has been widely reported that a couple of years ago at the BWAA banquet both Leonard and Mayweather were in attendance. Reportedly, Mayweather confronted Leonard and taunted him saying things like if they had fought in the same era, PBF would have wiped the floor with SRL.
Give me a break. Leonard had everything that Mayweather has and more. “The more” included a fighter’s heart. Leonard may have lost that first fight to Duran for fighting Duran’s fight, but to say a fight broke out that night would be the understatement of all time.
Forgive me for digressing.
The conventional wisdom is that Floyd will move and jab and flurry his way to an anti-climatic unanimous decision win. The conventional wisdom is that the bout will more than likely disappoint us rather than exhilarate us.
Most of the TigerBoxing staff has told me that they think Oscar is in for an embarrassing night. I hope they are wrong.
Mayweather may be almost as good as he says he is, but it is very difficult to cheer for the guy if you are a fan.
I sat down with my 12 year old son a few weeks ago to watch “24/7” on HBO. Minutes into the documentary, Floyd Jr goes on his first of many F Bomb rants. I had to turn it off.
I should have known better. Mayweather isn’t exactly known for his class. But there was little excuse for him to use such profanity, in my humble opinion, knowing that the cameras were rolling. True, this was a behind the scenes look, and Mayweather probably uses that language all day long, keeping it real and all of that. But the fact is, the cameras were rolling and someone should have thought about how desperately the sport needs to attract new young fans.
As “bad” as Terrell Owens is, can you imagine him going off on F bombs to hype a football game?
Mayweather isn’t playing the bad guy. He is the bad guy.
If boxing is on life support, is dying or is already dead like some lament, then what boxing needs is an Oscar win.
If a fight breaks out Saturday night, de la Hoya will win by TKO. It’s a totally unknown commodity but I don’t think Mayweather can stand up to the champ’s left hook, if the champ gets a few chances to land it.
With a de la Hoya win, boxing survives.
With a boring safety-first decision win by Mayweather, well, as Don Meredith used to sing on Monday Night Football, turn out the lights, the party’s over.
