I have an interesting sports take I want to share with you. You sitting down?
I think Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor are counting on race to sell their boxing match.
If my take seems hot to you, well — that’s because it’s been slow-cooking for over 11 years. The seed was sown back in September of 2005 when this Puerto Rican boxer named Miguel Cotto won what Jim Lampley called “a life and death struggle” with a Colombian fighter named Ricardo Torres.
I couldn’t understand what was happening inside me as I watched Cotto finish off Torres on HBO’s Boxing After Dark — I had never seen Cotto fight before, and in the post-fight interview he offered little in the way of charisma and even less in the way of English words, but for some strange reason his victory filled me with joy.
Around the same time, somebody named Floyd Mayweather started gaining prominence. I watched him brutalize the late Arturo ‘Thunder’ Gatti and then pick apart a fighter called Sharmba Mitchell (who already had a black eye before the first bell). I noticed Mayweather’s insane defensive skills and sharp counter punching and was impressed. But this strange thing happened after he wiped out Zab Judah four months later… when I went on the Internet, everyone was saying that Mayweather was a boring fighter.

I needed to get to the bottom of this difference in opinions.
Time went on, and Floyd Mayweather started to market himself and show off his made for TV persona. In between shots of his intense workout regimine, we saw him throw around a bunch of money and have one of his flunkies pick it up for him. He gave us all a video tour of his house, where he rode around on Segway scooters with the rapper 50 Cent. I thought it was all hilarious. He even spawned a mini-me fighter named Adrien Broner who copied his antics and took them a few steps further. I found Mayweather’s chants of “hard work” and ”dedication” while doing ungodly amounts of sit-ups to be inspiring and found both Mayweather and Broner to be entertaining, highly skilled athletes.
But these curious differences in opinion remained. The media and the majority of boxing fans detested the antics of both Floyd and mini-Floyd, while other fans defended Money Mayweather vehemently — even when he committed domestic violence and it became clear that he was barely literate. I noticed a pattern: this minority of fans seemed to consist of people who were black, like Floyd. And the boxing fans that hated Floyd (as well as the entire boxing media)? They were either white, Mexican, or named Steve Kim.
A light bulb lit up inside my brain. As a black and Puerto Rican man, could it be possible that I identify more with black and/or Puerto Rican boxers? Could this explain why I felt such a rush when Miguel Cotto starched Alfonso Gomez (of Mexico) or why I wandered the streets of Columbus, Ohio with a thousand-mile stare after he lost to Antonio Margarito? Was my dual ethnicity also making me immune to the negative feelings that other fans felt toward Floyd Mayweather and Adrien Broner?
I had to dig deeper.
To borrow a bit from Dave Chappelle: it turned out that boxing and race were quite fond of one another. I found out that even Adolf Hitler himself got caught up in this idea of boxing as a proxy race war. And remember that guy Riddick Bowe who fought Evander Holyfield in a classic trilogy back in the 90’s? Later in his career, during a match against Poland’s Andrew Golota, several low blows from his opponent sparked a Madison Square Garden race riot between blacks and Polish fans in the arena. And what about that 1976 boxing movie called Rocky?
While I was doing my research, another funny thing happened. I kept hearing about this sport called UFC that was “like real fighting”. People seemed to love it. There was this white guy called Chuck Liddell who was the main attraction. I watched a replay of one of his fights, though, and I saw him get KO’d by an arm punch while violating the cardinal boxing rule of not pulling away from combat in a straight line.
Even though the fighter who knocked Liddell out happened to be black, I figured this UFC thing wasn’t for me. But I kept hearing about it. Eventually I started hearing about this Irish UFC fighter named Conor McGregor. Mainstream (!) sports fans were waxing poetic about his cocky, charismatic attitude. Floyd Mayweather complained that he himself had displayed a similar attitude, but was hated by the public instead of being adored. The two fighters began a sort of public feud.

When it became likely that Mayweather and McGregor would meet in a Las Vegas boxing ring, I noticed the strangest thing yet: some people on the Internet were saying that McGregor, who’s not a boxer, could outbox Floyd Mayweather — who’s one of the most technically skilled boxers in human history. In spite of the fact that Mayweather has fought to victory forty-nine times against professional boxers without having been knocked down once, I even saw a few people say that McGregor (who would be making his professional boxing debut) would knock him out!
When the fight was finally announced, and Mayweather tweeted out this promotional photo of the two fighters, it all started to make sense:

Note: I wrote this in response to all the shitty moral takes on the Mayweather-McGregor press tour and how it’s gotten too racial. Bros: the business of boxing is fueled by ethnic pride, and everyone knows it. I watched Anthony Joshua vs Wladimir Klitschko with my three year-old nephew and even he knew to root for the black guy.
I submit that rooting for the fighter who matches your ethnicity more closely is perfectly natural and healthy. As such, it’s fair game for the #MayMac promotion to feed off of that sentiment. If you’re that sensitive about race, then maybe the sport that gave us Marcos “Chino” Maidana (because he looks kind of Asian) and the Mexican Liver Punch just isn’t for you. If that’s the case, just enjoy Slavery: The Rematch on the night of August 26th and you can go back to using the islamophobia hashtag on the morning of the 27th.
Oh and in the meantime: make me a sushi roll and cook up some rice.
