Many of us love our work and our people in the fight industry. Sometimes things are distant, difficult. Things happen. Creeds and colours work together. We know the sons of immigrants have put their fathers, their families and their communities on the map. Spit and toil, blood and sweat, hours and hours…in the service of an art so primeval many of us celebrate its beauty as if it were poetry.
Yet sometimes, it hurts us. It hurts us because the very industry we defend with our spirits, chase with our words, hurry to when the bugle sounds…embarrasses all of us when it falls apart.
In the hubris, right now, between the lines of the great argument developing into a legal, moral, ethical morass involving the camps and promoters of Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jnr, we have boxing at its ugliest, more brutal and more visceral than flying blood and sweat on the canvas…
Boxing’s greatest fight – or what might have been exactly that – is becoming boxing’s biggest embarrassment. It becomes a play of epic proportions, a quasi-election campaign, the protagonists looking for the upper hand in a battle that means nothing.
Removing my professional hat for one moment, I feel for the fans of this sport. Fans who pay money, travel, eat drink and breathe the sport, and who all, at once, were celebrating a fight to saviour in 2010. Actually, not ‘a fight’. The fight. It was being talked about already as The Fight of the year.
Pacquiao-Mayweather had to happen in 2010. I have already likened it to Hagler-Leonard, cited it as the fight of a generation, seen its colossal wealth at $200 million US dollars, begun to ruminate on the fascination and styles of the two protagonists.
I felt suspisciously pessimistic when Bob Arum announced that both men had agreed the fight. Then the inevitable. They tried mediation earlier this week…it failed. Bob Arum announced so. The battle lines were drawn up, then rubbed out.
Mayweather-Paulie Malignaggi now. NO thank you. Not interested. Pacquiao-Yuri Foreman. Ok, so Pacquiao moves up another weight class to 154lbs. Marginally more interersting, history in the making….but not Pacquiao-Mayweather. Not as Freddie Roach puts it “one of the greatest fights of all time”.
I know this is Pacquiao’s toughest fight. I know because I have stood with Roach for an hour, just the two of us, discussing the fight. And he does not talk of Mayweather’s weaknesses. He talks of his strengths. But the fact that this is/was Pacquiao’s toughest fight is what makes it so interesting, so intriguing.
Mayweather is the favourite. Clearly. But Pacquiao is the fighter consistently denying the odds. It’s a fight millions and millions of boxing fans, and sports fans, worldwide, want to see. Yet boxing is so fractured, so riddled with the self, so in denial of its worst excesses, it has offered, and withdrawn.
It feels like a promise broken. If this fight does not happen (and I suspect it eventually will, in September 2010), every boxing fan in the world should feel let down.
The latest sequence in this sorry saga came from Golden Boy Thursday afternoon from California.
A statement from Floyd Mayweather insisting he did want the fight. I, like you, am tired of the smokescreens.
It’s time for the two camps to sort out their acts. Because the world is watching. Take a look from the outside, and see what damage is being done to the image of boxing…
A statement from Mayweather read:
“Throughout this whole process I have remained patient, but at this point I am thoroughly disgusted that Pacquiao and his representatives are trying to blame me for the fight not happening when clearly the blame is on them.
“First and foremost, not only do I want to fight Manny Pacquiao, I want to whip his punk ass.
“Before the mediation, my team proposed a 14-day, no blood testing window leading up to the fight. But it was rejected. I am still proposing the 14-day window but he is still unwilling to agree to it, even though this is obviously a fair compromise on my part as I wanted the testing to be up until the fight and he wanted a 30-day cut-off. The truth is he just doesn’t want to take the tests.
“In my opinion it is Manny Pacquiao and his team who are denying the people a chance to see the biggest fight ever. I know the people will see through their smokescreens and lies. I am ready to fight and sign the contract. Manny needs to stop making his
excuses, step up and fight.”
