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 — is 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…
The reason I’m still thinking about this because any number of promoters weighed in on the deal this past week. First up was Top Rank’s Bob Arum, who got all taunty and said he loved the idea of the UFC airing a show opposite Pacquiao-Marquez III because the UFC isn’t any competition, prompting a rant by the UFC’s Dana White that Arum was a “greedy pig” who never invested anything in his sport. If Arum had left it at the notion that boxing wasn’t in competition with mixed martial arts because there’s only about a 5 percent overlap in the audiences, he wouldn’t have come off so bad or invited White’s wrath. But White absolutely nailed Arum — a promoter who is good at what he does in many ways but has been the #1 or #2 promoter over the past couple decades that has seen boxing fall on such rough times, and who doesn’t try to make boxing grow in any way; all he does is build up his own business and the rest of the sport can be damned. Lou DiBella sided with White in the feud, but like every other promoter in the game, his ability to identify boxing’s illnesses hasn’t led him to do much of anything to heal them. Kathy Duva explained that promoters don’t get a big enough share of the purse to re-invest in their product, a claim that makes me dubious. It’s indubitable that overall, boxing’s model doesn’t allow it to do many of the things the UFC can…
Pacquiao has said similar things before, but for those who want a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, his remarks about feeling older these days probably offers the best hope for Mayweather ever signing on the dotted line, given his often risk-averse opponent sellection: “We have to accept that we don’t stay young. We’re getting older, in our mind we still think we’re young, but our body responds that we’re getting older.” It’s too bad that if we ever get Mayweather-Pacquiao, it’s going to be for some reason like that. It would’ve been great for a prime Mayweather to fight a prime Pacquiao, but every day that goes by, that’s heading toward the rear view…
Here’s the best clip from the weekend, for a fight that prompted the New Yorker beforehand to write a little about boxing but say little of great insight: heavyweight Robert Helenius’ big knockout of Siarhei Liakhovich (who suffered a broken nose in two places):
It’s great that lightweight Robert Guerrero’s shoulder injury won’t end his career. But here is a fighter whose ratio of talent to luck is all out of whack…
Don King had a birthday party and it was the most popular thing on the Internets for a minute. He also said heavyweight David Haye was scared to “hit the white man,” i.e. champion Wladimir Klitschko. Maybe he’s lacking in some youthful vitality to be the promoter he once was, but age hasn’t done a thing to his tendency to make provocative statements…
Via our Alex McClintock, here is a clip of bantamweight Abner Mares being used in a segment to test what a low blow can do to a human being. Considering he has since become famous for low blows, it’s amusing in an ironic way…
Never mind about George Groves signing with Matchroom…
Some boxing cinema notes and clips, all of which look and sound good to me: “Born And Bred” recently wrapped up in the theaters, but it’s already becoming available to people at home and will be even more so in December; “Sons of Cuba” is going to be released digitally soon on FilmBuff, although it’s already available in other ways, too; and pal o’ the site David P. Greisman caought up with “After The Last Round.”
