Crazy scene at the end of the 24/7 Mayweather-Ortiz season debut, even by the chaotic standard of the Mayweather clan. Floyd Jr. and Floyd Sr. nearly came to blows after a routine bit of arguing became a total reality show meltdown, complete with Jr. calling his dad a “faggot.” You stay classy, Mayweathers! (Go to about minute 22 if you wanna watch it unfold, although the rest of the episode has a lot of other good moments, too.)
…but wait.
Was it real? It looked real. But to hear Floyd Jr. tell it in court, he fakes going out to parties just to keep up his image, a sophisticated marketing ploy, and Mayweather family feuds are as much a part of that image as Floyd throwing money around at some Las Vegas club. Maybe this “partying as marketing” line is just the kind of thing you say in court when Manny Pacquiao calls you out for bumping court dates because you claim you’re too busy. Or maybe everything in Mayweather’s life — including all these so-called legal troubles — are an elaborate hoax.
This is the Mayweather cycle: play nice for a little while, say the bad guy thing is an act, do horrible things that suggest it’s maybe not an act, repeat. I usually find it tiresome. But whatever you think of what unfolded, that Mayweather father/son venom was compelling television. I’ll be watching next week for sure.
In other Quick Jabs this edition: Don King’s birthday is popular; The New Yorker pays attention to boxing for a second; Manny Pacquiao says he’s getting old; and yet more.
Quick Jabs
In retrospect, it feels a little foolish to have celebrated at the two deals HBO put together for Mayweather’s fight with Victor Ortiz or Manny Pacquiao’s third fight with Juan Manuel Marquez. It’s not just because that one element of the broader exposure for Mayweather-Ortiz, replays of 24/7 on CNN, got preempted this week by a hurricane. But the deal the UFC put together with Fox — it blew way any notion that midnight Saturday replays of a promo show on CNN was a great step forward. Even with the UFC planning on primarily doing pay-per-views still, it’s the kind of exposure that boxing once had and has suffered without, because some of the sinking HBO ratings can be attributable to a whole generation of fighters who are only seen by premium cable subscribers. It also makes Top Rank’s decision to turn away from CBS/Showtime for Pacquiao-Marquez III and back to HBO look shortsighted. After all, the most important aspect of that deal was the potential that it could get boxing back on network television, and HBO simply can’t do that. Hopefully, it’s seen as a wakeup call about why boxing people need to think farther into the future than tomorrow’s paycheck, what I see as the #1 problem with the sport; the UFC has already forced boxing to improve its product by being nimbler, smarter and thinking harder about the long game…
