If Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Margarito staged an MMA fight this weekend, fans would tear down Cowboys Stadium. They are coming to see a boxing match, not a street brawl.
There is a difference. Boxers are highly trained athletes who engage in a technically sophisticated sport. MMA fighters are entertaining. But as much as I respect the skill it takes to toss somebody through a glass window, I prefer the human chess match that is boxing.
Of course, I also prefer Don King’s hair to Dana White’s. The MMA’s advantage is that White is a much better promoter/dictator than the bouillabaisse of governing bodies and shysters that have turned boxing into a sport people notice maybe twice a year.
This weekend is one of those times, since Pacquiao is one of the world’s most popular figures and Margarito is a lying scumbag who cakes plaster on his taped fists.
Go Manny!
But the mere fact Pacquiao is fighting Margarito and not Floyd Mayweather shows how boxing’s biggest opponents are the clowns who run it.
I’m not asking for a return to the days when Muhammad Ali fought Ken Norton on “Wide World of Sports.” But Pacquiao-Mayweather has been derailed by pettiness, politics and greed over how to split a $100 million payday.
In that sense, boxing could learn a lot from the MMA. White runs almost everything from his UFC altar. So you get more frequent fights, better promotion and battles the public craves. The problem is once you’ve seen one MMA battle, you’ve pretty much seen them all.
If you haven’t had the privilege, I’ll save you the $39.95 pay-per-view. Two guys square off, they wrestle to the mat and the guy on top starts wailing away until the guy on the bottom either gives up or has his nose turned into a tomato.
Maybe I’m a combat snob, but I prefer the sophisticated slugging that is boxing. They don’t call it the sweet science for nothing.
I really tried not to call it that. Then I realized every article ever written about boxing uses the phrase, and I’d better not break the string. It began in England in the 1700s, when a chap named Pierce Egan wrote a series of articles about “The Sweet Science of Bruising.”
The irony made the phrase a keeper. Fighters have different styles, strengths and strategies. The goal is simply to knock the other guy silly, but how they arrive at that point can be fascinating. Or in Mike Tyson’s case, criminal.
His munching of Evander Holyfield’s ear wasn’t exactly what the Marquis of Queensberry had in mind when he came up with the boxing code. But modern-day pugilists like Pacquiao, Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr. have carried on the tradition of Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler and Alexis Arguello.
Before them came some of the greatest names in sports history. Sugar Ray Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Joe Frazier, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Balboa, Apollo Creed.
What if Rocky had been about an MMA fighter? Even a great actor/director like Sylvester Stallone would have hard time squeezing sufficient drama out of three five-minute sessions of rolling around on a mat.
“Cut me, Mick!” was the perfect line heading into the 15th and final round.
There’s also a reason the greatest sports films are about boxing. Think Robert DeNiro in “Raging Bull,” Russell Crowe in “Cinderella Man,” Hillary Swank in “Million Dollar Baby.”
Hollywood knows drama, and no sport combines personalities and conflict like boxing. The sad part is that in real life, the sport has been strangled by the con men who run it.
If only we could get rid of them, there would be no doubt which combat science is truly the sweetest.
