The ManicaPost
LAST Saturday night’s culmination of a two-month promotional spectacle wasn’t a sham or a total farce, wasn’t an embarrassment to boxing or the worst thing to befall combat sports. It was actually quite good at times, really good at others. But, please, enough now.
No rematch, no do-over, no more circuit of coarse promotion and ballyhoo. Thank you, you gave us something to talk about during these quiet days of summer swelter and filled a hole in the sporting calendar. In return, we forked over our money so you could each pocket nine figures to spend on whatever your heart chooses.
Mayweather-McGregor was always going to be more like a soap opera than a sporting event, months of anticipation building up to a nerve-jangling crescendo. It wasn’t the greatest battle in history, but it was interesting enough, and as season finales go, it had its moments. The result was never in serious doubt, not even when McGregor won the first three rounds on the scorecards of most observers, if not two of the judges, who the Irishman decried as “biased” afterwards.
“It was a bit of fun, right?” McGregor said. “I have to say I enjoyed it. The boxing game is a lot different than the mixed martial arts game, from everything, the approach to it.”
Mayweather racked up his 50th fight as a pro, very convincingly as it turned out, after a few early flurries of excitement from his much younger opponent. He is now, at 40, and always will be, a vastly superior boxer to McGregor, who would be similarly advanced if the fight took place inside the octagon. The real question that was answered was about us – the public, the media, and what gets us riled up. Beyond any doubt, it is the show of sports rather than the sports themselves that fit that criteria, that we like talking about, and listening to threats of sporting violence and vicious verbal putdowns more than watching punches thrown and knockdowns recorded. – Online.
