It was the fight that fans and the bottom-line boys had been drooling over, a surefire match that seemed to have everything going for it. All 11,601 seats inside the Mandalay Bay Event Center had been sold, as well as 30,000 closed circuit tickets available at various other casinos.
People wandered the Las Vegas Strip with signs reading “I need a fight ticket” hung around their necks, and scalpers peddled $1,500 ringside seats for anywhere between $3,000 to $5,000. By time the preliminaries were underway, scalpers were scalping scalpers.
From a business point of view, the fight surpassed expectations. It was the first non-heavyweight fight to break the million pay-per-view sales barrier, with approximately 1.25 million buys generating an estimated $64 million in revenue.
Those numbers pale in comparison to the windfall the Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao fight is expected to produce on May 2, but by 1999 standards it was pretty close. It was big enough to have persuaded mortal enemies Bob Arum and Don King to work together. They still hated each other, but there was too much money involved to walk away.
In the end there was only one problem — the alleged “Fight of the Millennium” between Felix Trinidad and Oscar De La Hoya turned out to be a dud. Trinidad won a controversial majority decision in a tedious, tactical match best remembered for what it wasn’t.
By far the most exciting moment came at the post-fight press conference (never a good thing) when Arum had to be restrained from attacking King, who was having the time of his life, wallowing in his triumph and tossing malicious bon mots at his apoplectic adversary.
“The lights are going out in Arumville,” boomed King, when one of Arum’s minions pulled the plug on Don’s microphone.
If only the fighters had shown as much passion.
Great fights are the lifeblood of boxing, the thing that hooks folks in the first place and keeps them coming back for more despite chronic disappointment and perpetual frustration. Most discouraging of all are the high-priced matches between the sport’s foremost proponents that promise much but deliver little. It has been a problem practically from the start.
The first so-called “Fight of the Century” was in 1910, between heavyweight champion Jack Johnson and come-backing ex-champ Jim Jeffries. There was no Internet, no television and no radio back then but it was the Mayweather-Pacquiao of its day. Certainly, the particulars were profoundly different, but it was the biggest fight that could be made at the dawn of the 20th century and fight-fever gripped the entire nation like never before. More than 30 promoters bid for the fight. The winner was Tex Rickard, who put up $120,000 in gold.
Today, Johnson-Jeffries is remembered for the racially charged atmosphere and ugly social upheaval in the wake of Johnson’s victory. The fight itself, as Jack London had famously written about Johnson’s title-winning knockout of Tommy Burns, “was no fight.”
Just as he had done with Burns, Johnson toyed with a creaky Jeffries, who was completely outclassed and in dire straights when the fight was stopped in the 14th round. It was one of the most famous and historically significant bouts of the era, but not a good fight, let alone a great one.
Boxing’s first million-dollar gate was also a fiasco between the ropes.
In 1921, Jack Dempsey’s manager, Doc Kearns, along with Rickard, came up with the cynically brilliant idea of matching the heavyweight champion against Frenchman Georges Carpentier. The fight was ballyhooed as a contest between the dashing French war hero and the rough-hewn champion and alleged draft dodger. It was the familiar good guy vs. bad guy routine, but with a twist: This time the American was the heel.
The carefully orchestrated publicity campaign lured more than 80,000 paying customers into the vast wooden bowl that Rickard had built in Jersey City especially for the occasion. In the dressing room before the fight, Rickard told Dempsey, “Knock him out, but for goodness sake not with one punch in the first round. Let’s give all these nice people a run for their money.”
Dempsey carried Carpentier into the fourth round, then opened up and decked him twice, the second time for the full count. All that was left to do was to divvy up the record jackpot of $1,789, 238, the equivalent of more than $23.5 million today. By then the fact that the fans had been duped was a moot point.
Of course, knockouts are not, in and of themselves, bad for business — quite the opposite. Mike Tyson is a prime example of a fighter who kept fans happy for years with a string of savage knockout victories, the majority of them against no-hope opposition. After a while, however, the appeal of one-sided blowouts wanes. We want to see out heroes overcome adversity, not eviscerate scapegoats tethered to a post.
As difficult as it might be to imagine in hindsight, there was hope that lineal heavyweight champion Michael Spinks would at least give “Iron Mike” a somewhat competitive fight when they clashed in 1988. And that hope, however slender, was enough to attract a crowd of 21,785 to Atlantic City Convention Hall to see the fight live and another 600,000 to buy the pay-per-view.
All told the bout grossed around $70 million, surpassing the 1987 Super Bowl as the highest-grossing single day sporting event in history up to that point. Tyson earned about roughly $22 million and Spinks around $13.5 million.
All the paying customers got for their money was 91 seconds of terrifying ferocity.
Then there’s the distinction between a great event and a great fight. All four examples in play here — Johnson-Jeffries, Dempsey-Carpentier, Tyson-Spinks and Trinidad-De La Hoya — were great events. None were great fights and are, in the main, remembered for all the wrong reasons.
Many ingredients have to come together at the right time to create a truly epic fight. Sometimes the most unlikely factor makes all the difference, and the mind-numbingly long gestation period leading up to last weekend’s announcement of Pacquiao-Mayweather could turn out to be one of them.
The prevailing school of thought is that at ages 36 and 38, respectively, come fight night, Pacquiao and Mayweather have begun their inevitable decline. If so, it might not be such a bad thing from the spectators’ point of view. Slowing down even half a step can leave a fighter more vulnerable to his adversary’s punches, and vice versa.
If Mayweather and Pacquiao have indeed slipped, it could, contrary to popular opinion, conceivably lead to a better fight than if they had met five years ago. Let’s not forget that both Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier had reached that stage when they engaged in the “Thrilla in Manila,” which was not only a great event but also considered to be among the greatest fights of all time.
The importance of Mayweather-Pacquiao being an entertaining fight can’t be underestimated. The biggest fights attract the largest number of casual crossover fans and create the best opportunities to make an impression, good or bad. Who knows how many first-timers and fringe fans were discouraged from becoming regular patrons by Trinidad-De La Hoya and other washouts?
Mayweather is an anomaly. He’s the undisputed PPV king, but most of his bouts in recent years have been more clinical than combative. Even his mega-fights with De La Hoya and Canelo Alvarez (the two biggest moneymakers in boxing history) failed to thrill.
But none of that seems to matter. Mayweather has turned the risk-reward financial formula upside down. As long as he remains unbeaten, Floyd’s fans are not going anywhere. Their pleasure derives from being aligned with a winner, not from the exhilaration engendered by extreme competition and radical changes of fortune.
Nonetheless, if Mayweather-Pacquiao PPV sales come anywhere near expectations, it’s safe to say a significant number of newbies will be watching. Obviously the best way to ensure they become repeat customers would be a great fight.
What exactly constitutes a great fight depends to a degree on individual taste. For me — and I suspect many others — it’s more instinctive than intellectual. What I crave is the rush that sweeps over me when the action inside the ring becomes almost unbearably exciting, an atavistic euphoria that only a great fight can provide.
The history of big fights is not particularly reassuring, but boxing doesn’t throw all its pearls before swine. Every now and then, everything turns out the way it should — a great event and great fight all rolled into one.
They are the pugilistic Atlases that prop up the sport’s unsteady structure — fights such as Marvin Hagler-Thomas Hearns, George Foreman-Michael Moorer, Evander Holyfield-Mike Tyson I and any time Erik Morales shared the ring with either Marco Antonio Barrera or Pacquiao. Just to name a few.
Could Mayweather-Pacquiao join the pantheon of iconic fights? It’s certainly conceivable. After all, they are both extraordinary fighters and first-ballot Hall of Famers, but as history has taught us all too well that’s not always enough. We’ll just have to watch and wait for the rush.
