Somewhere during the broadcast Thursday night of the Miami-Georgia Tech football game, a commercial broke across the screen advertising UFC 103, a mixed martial arts fight card featuring somebody named Vitor Belfort against some guy named Rich Franklin. For a pay-per-view price of $44.99, it stated, I could see it all live Saturday night from Dallas starting at 9 PM ET.
Guess what commercial aired next? Undefeated former welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather’s returning to the ring against Juan Manuel Marquez. For a pay-per-view price of $49.95, that commercial stated, I could see that card live as well Saturday night. It would be coming from Las Vegas, and starting at 9 PM ET, too.
I’m going to watch the latter. I’d already planned to. Boxing promoters better hope there are a lot more fans like me, too. UFC 103 Preview and Predictions | Breaking Down Mayweather-Marquez
Because if there was one thing those back-to-back commercials underscored, it was that the big fight Saturday night isn’t between Mayweather and Marquez, or Belfort and Franklin for that matter; it is between Mayweather’s classic fighting sport, boxing, and the still relatively newfangled fighting sport known as MMA.
If this UFC event beats Mayweather-Marquez, boxing will be holding a second fiddle on the fight front. MMA will have knocked out a guy in Mayweather who once was part of a PPV record draw when he beat Oscar De La Hoya, the king of PPVs. And MMA is threatening to do so with a couple of guys tugging a card considered to be no big deal even among MMA aficionados.
I wish I could dismiss that fact like mere fiction. I still love boxing with all its warts and dismiss MMA as something I can see after closing hours any night on Bourbon Street. I don’t get MMA. It’s not my cup of blood. (That reminds me: Dear MMA fans, please stop telling me how much more humane your sport is than boxing because no one has been killed in it. That’s pure myth. Tell it to the family of Sam Vasquez in Houston, to name one.)
But anyone like me who doesn’t believe Saturday is about something more than what happens between Mayweather and Marquez is delusional. Saturday night isn’t so much about how Mayweather looks after his brief retirement. (Marquez at his age and smallish size is tailor-made for Mayweather’s return.) It is about whether he can hold off not only Marquez but the rising tide of MMA as well. MMA organizers know it “No matter what happens on Saturday night, boxing is in trouble. Period. End of story. They’re in trouble.” — UFC President Dana White and they are circling in the waters.”No matter what happens on Saturday night, boxing is in trouble. Period. End of story. They’re in trouble.” — UFC President Dana White
“No matter what happens on Saturday night, boxing is in trouble. Period. End of story. They’re in trouble,” UFC’s irascible boss Dana White said Thursday. “[The UFC] continues to grow every year. We’re up this year from where we were last year in this horrible economy.”
Those are fighting words, indeed, and the booty is PPVs, the ultimate barometer of success in the fighting sports. They are the lifeblood of fight games and boxing can’t allow it to be siphoned away by some hyped up version of itself. (Note to wrestling fans, who put up outrageous PPV numbers too: I don’t recognize Vince McMahon and your WWE stuff for the same reason I don’t watch special effects flicks — it’s made up.)
Longtime boxing promoter Bob Arum sadly sounded like UFC’s often juvenile boss White when he used homophobic phraseology to denounce MMA in an on-camera interview with FanHouse’s Ariel Helwani during a recent Manny Pacquiao-Miguel Cotto press conference in Yankee Stadium. Arum told Helwani that UFC fans were “a bunch of skinhead white guys who are watching a bunch of people in the ring who look like skinhead white guys.” The 78-year-old businessman then stooped deeper into the well of repulsive insults by impugning MMA fighters and gay people.
With the challenge of this weekend, Arum would be wise to adopt the Jets’ coach Rex Ryan approach to marketing by robo-calling previous PPV boxing buyers and plead with them to dial in again Saturday.
And if Arum hasn’t apologized for his smear, he should — publicly — unless, of course, the types of fans he wants to attract to replace all the hemorrhaging followers are those with such Neanderthal-like thoughts. I’m referencing the first part of his first charge and all of the second. Given that MMA addressed a swastika and white-power tattooed fighter simply by asking him to cover his offensive body art with athletic wrap doesn’t sit well with me, either. Any MMA organization the guy wanted to fight for should’ve forced him to rid himself of such offensive ink. MMA fans should be demanding it too. I haven’t heard a hue and cry. But that’s an issue for another column.
For the purview of this column, Arum’s charge was evidence of his level of concern for the rising tide of MMA and its threat to the game from which he loves to make money. Arum’s statements were preceded by similar coarse observations about MMA from Mayweather, who dismissed MMA as the only fighting sport white fighters can find in which they can thrive. Undoubtedly, that didn’t win Mayweather many new viewers for his upcoming bout and may have cost him some.
Mayweather, now 32, should be particularly concerned about Saturday because he never proved to be Oscar De La Hoya as a draw. His bark is louder that his bite. He and the late Arturo Gatti fought for a super lightweight title in June 2005 and attracted 365,000 buys, and many of those came undoubtedly because of the huge popularity of Gatti. Arum promoted Mayweather’s fight with Brooklyn bad boy Zab Judah in April 2006 and it sold just 375,000 PPVs even though Arum boasted it would rival the 1.4 million buys De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad Jr. brought in 1999. Mayweather versus Carlos Baldomir late in 2006 did worse than all of the above. Now Mayweather is returning to the ring with boxing organizers hoping — if not praying — that he can be De La Hoya.
If Mayweather-Marquez is in Mayweather’s old draw range, boxing will be dusting itself off as it tries to get up from the canvas.
