By Bart Barry–
Saturday at MGM Grand, over which a 20-story Manny Pacquiao banner likely will not drape, American welterweight Floyd “Money” Mayweather will make a rematch with Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana as part of Mexican Independence Day festivities. Mayweather will seek the definitive victory that eluded him Cinco de Mayo weekend. The fight will happen on Sept. 13 in part because nothing cries ¡Viva México! quite so proudly as an American fighting an Argentine in a casino’s sanitized climes.
Consensus among aficionados is that Mayweather won their first tilt while being beaten upon most satisfactorily, beaten upon in a way that can bend a career trajectory and eventually enable more realistic record comparisons with prizefighters of greater accomplishment. Those who would dissent with official scorecards, though, raise an interesting thought experiment: What if the fight had been scored like Maidana was the prohibitive favorite, not Mayweather, with a full 25-percent anchored to ring generalship?
What is most alarming about the latest installments of Showtime infomercials, alarming at least for the rematch’s box-office revenues, is how, with fewer dramatic scores and gasping narration, and frumpy Warren Buffett in lieu of spacey Roger Mayweather, Floyd is no longer odious at all. He wishes to be. Like an aged magician trying to conjure one more white bunny out the black hat for a birthday party whose kids have seen the trick nine times without promised cake or ice cream, Floyd inadvertently loops back on himself, often in the same clip: I don’t have to talk about how great I am, because I am the greatest and nobody is better than me, because I don’t have to talk about how great I am.
Made to look like a witling on social media by a scorned rapper pal, Floyd can no longer shout smug witticisms at an upturned camera; now YouTubers get Professor Mayweather, fatigued in yellowing light, offering a discourse on how little he cares what anyone says, shortly before securing his yoga mat in a perimeter of hundred-dollar bills. Hip-hop culture, such as it has been for 20 years now, is more synonymous with thespians teaching suburban kids how to appear menacing than anything militant or self-assured, or even clever, and Floyd has long, and oddly, wished to supplant the genuinely macho thing he does for a living with a ruined art form’s hamfisted thuggery. Still, has any public figure in even this meretricious age performed so many hours of heartfelt insecurity as the “Money” documentaries, invented by HBO and aped by Showtime, drive Mayweather to?
A living, breathing antonym for the word contentment, Mayweather has unflinchingly shown how much cannot be bought with so much money. After years of giving neither strippers nor a fiancée nor a harem of ageing women a dot of genuine enthusiasm, in Episode 2 Mayweather spiritlessly drives his squadron of luxury automobiles to his boxing gym – wherein he joyfully watches other men smash one another for the duration of a sadistic, 31-minute round. An embellished $500 million in career earnings, the Big Boy Mansion, an apartment’s worth of footwear, nine employees just to count rope skips, $10 million in sports cars – and the only time the man flashes the feral grin of his true nature is when watching a spectacle men perform round the world, free of charge, outside a hundred thousand bars every Friday night.
Is it any wonder someone grounded as Marcos “El Chino” Maidana does not respect Mayweather? One gathers from watching the men at choreographed “media” events Maidana looks Mayweather’s way and thinks: I’ll never box like him, I’ll never have a fraction his money, but, che, I’m so much happier than he is that, pues, oh well.
Expectations are unusually low for this event – not only does one hear nary a peep from his peers about the fight, but an unknown middleweight vacating a meaningless belt, midweek, stole its headlines, and an incredible Friday morning performance by a different Latin American, Nicaragua’s Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez, assured aficionados would have better things to discuss last weekend – and they might yet be missed. The feeling is that Maidana had his best possible fight against Mayweather in May, and Mayweather ultimately made adjustments enough to prevail, and so, whither something finer?
Worse yet, Maidana appears to believe an abundance of desperation was his greatest flaw last time, a belief both his trainer and his trainer’s trainer rushed to disabuse him of, and a pensive Maidana standing unperturbed across from a 37-year-old Mayweather, one whose brittle hands have fairly stiffened but one opponent in 8 1/2 years, make for a pay-per-view spectacle almost certain to leave Mayweather’s endearingly thrifty new advisor Warren Buffett feeling cheated. While referee Kenny Bayless is quite good and generally not officious, he was recently selected to atone for Tony Weeks’ disobedience in May, allowing Maidana to punch Mayweather several times after Mayweather specifically told him not to, and Bayless knows better than to ignore what prefight instructions he’ll be given in Mayweather’s dressing room.
Expect a far more sanitized thing, one that resembles a sporting event more than a fight, immediately after Maidana’s first skyhook righthand caresses the back of Mayweather’s head, Saturday. Barring a delightful surprise, the circus barking will commence round Round 9, comparing Mayweather to whichever great comes to mind, asking in a solemn tone if there’s anyone left for Mayweather to face, without pausing to ask how this legend who needed 24 rounds to win definitively against Marcos Maidana might have done in a Montreal ring with Roberto Duran.
It matters little, alas. Floyd Mayweather is now the ringmaster of boxing’s dilapidated big top.
Bart Barry can be found on Twitter @bartbarry
