6 Things More Likely than Connor McGregor Beating Floyd Mayweather
#4: Tupac resurfaces
It’s official; Connor McGregor is going to box Floyd Mayweather Jr. in an actual, real, boxing match on August 26th in Las Vegas. They will have a weight limit of 154 pounds, use 10-ounce (boxing) gloves, and will each (probably) make over $100,000,000, with Floyd potentially taking home over $400,000,000. The Vegas odds have been hovering around -1,200 for Floyd and around +700 for McGregor.
The hype-jet has left the tarmac, been set to “max speed” and the pilot just drove his car out of the cargo hold like Dom and co. in Fast 7.
The fight. Is going. To happen.
That is, unless someone gets hurt in training, gets popped using illegal substances, the UFC denies McGregor the ability to engage in a non UFC fight, Floyd gets lost in one of his mansions without food or either of them just decides, “You know what? Nah.” But realistically, so much money stands to be made by each fighter — not to mention all the other parties involved, including the UFC, if only by way of McGregor’s inflated stardom — that the fight not happening is becoming less of an option by the tweet.
But it’s still more likely than McGregor winning.
First of all, I’m rooting for McGregor to win. How amazing would that be? ‘The-Shah-of-Shit-Talking’ enters into a different sport and takes down the undefeated champ!? It’s the stuff of Hollywood. It’s on par with an NBA player dropping a rap album… and it going quintuple platinum.
The thing about this fight though, is that, unlike NBA players trying to rap, we don’t have any historical references of elite UFC fighters competing in elite-level boxing matches. It’s like if the first NBA player intent on rapping, went to his agent and said, “I think I’m going to try being a rapper” and the agent is like, “Hmmm. How are you going to do that?” and the player says, “First, I’m gonna rap battle Biggie on live TV.” After sitting, dejected, with his head on his desk for a couple minutes the agent, if he was sufficiently optimistic, would zero-in on one thought: “Well, maybe something good comes from this. Maybe my guy drops one fire-ass bar and sets the Internet ablaze. Who knows?” But actually, if the NBA player stood to make $100,000,000 million for the event, regardless of outcome, the agent only gets to that thought after stopping by the yacht dealership.
It’s that “maybe”, that “who knows?”, that little kernel of possibility that McGregor lands one big punch, which holds roughly $600,000,000 worth of the world’s imagination.
At the end of the day, these two guys signed up to competitively punch each other as an entertainment spectacle, with referees and scores and the whole deal. It’s a sport, and there’s going to be a winner and loser. The winner, practically definitely, is going to be Mayweather and the loser, essentially absolutely, is going to be McGregor — statistically speaking.
Which got me thinking: What highly unlikely things are more likely to happen than a McGregor victory?
Here are six:
1. McGregor forgets he’s not in a UFC fight and tries some crazy monkey kick.
This happened to me once. Basically. It was in college, during an intramural soccer game. The other team had a free kick from about twenty-five or thirty yards out and I was a part of our three-man wall, built to prevent a direct shot on net. The kick taker suddenly ripped a shot right at my face. It’s not that I forgot you couldn’t use your hands in a soccer game, it’s just that my fuck-it-it’s-just-intramural instinct overrode my frontal cortex, and I batted the ball down with my hands. I got a yellow card and the game continued, but I felt a little strange afterword. Like the matrix had a glitch or something. If it can happen to me, it can happen to McGregor. In round eight or nine, after a couple pops to the chin, he could definitely glitch-out and try a flying knee or some jiu-jitsu takedown.
You know what could definitely not happen? Him beating Floyd Mayweather at boxing.
2. Drake uses an Australian accent in at least two interludes on his next album.
We all know how much Drake loves accents. He started with the Caribbean accent now he’s here. Did you know that the Giggs’ appearances on More Life are actually Drake doing a British accent with sound editing laid over the top? So where does Drizzy go next? I say Aussie accent.
More tune for your head-talk… mate.
One ‘ting less likely than an Aussie Aubrey?
A McGregor victory.
3. The singularity happens.
Are you familiar with the singularity? Basically, it’s the idea that technology is on the brink of altering our existence in ways so dramatic, that they’re incomprehensible to us now. Imagine the most unbelievable futuristic technological transformation on earth. It’s crazier than that. Different versions of the singularity have been posited: a machine run world where humans are enslaved or obliterated; a world in which humans and super-intelligent machines work side by side; a world where technology allows us to manipulate the human genome to our will, dramatically extending human life and altering what we do with it; a world where artificial intelligence, constantly learning at an exponentially faster rate, can manipulate every atom in the universe to achieve any end imaginable. Thought leaders on the subject have guessed at when such an event might happen. Nobody knows. Some say it’s a couple hundred years away, others say it’s only a couple years away, and still others say that it has already happened. If it happens though, there is no way to know how a technological singularity will manifest itself… by definition. Kind of like how a McGregor win is incomprehensible to current-day rational humans. Wait. Did I just make an argument in favor of a McGregor win?
4. Tupac resurfaces.
Tupac sightings are reported all the time. He’s released 7 platinum albums since his death (per Forbes.com) and even has a biopic that just hit theaters. By the way, are we sure that’s not actually Tupac playing Tupac in the Tupac biopic? Pac always had a flair for the dramatic. On record, on screen, on stage, in everything he did he had an acute sense for pulling on people’s emotions like a marionette. As gaudy as it is, can anyone unquestionably put faking his own death past Tupac? It would be the royal flush of dramatic undertakings. Okay. I know Tupac is dead. RIP to the legend. But that’s my point! I’m still more likely to see Pac in line at Starbucks on August 26th than to see McGregor beat Mayweather.
5. Trump stars in a ‘Billy Madison’ reboot.
This would probably be best as a documentary. Or maybe it’s a reality TV show… right up Trump’s alley. How perfect would this be? It may, in fact, be the only way that Trump can salvage what is, to date, the most embarrassing presidency in the history of the US.
Imagine this: Trump, at the podium during a special press conference, announces that he has assumed a position that — despite his posturing — he is woefully under qualified for. He actually knows almost nothing about the American system of government and has been psychologically crumbling under the weight of the lies that he told to win office. He is taking a leave of absence. For three months, while Pence mans the oval office, he will go through an intensive educational program. Every week he will study each grade’s curriculum — from grades one through twelve — relating to the US Government. If he passes each weekly exam, he will be allowed to maintain his position as POTUS. If not, he will work, for room and board only, as the Syracuse University sports mascot for one academic year.
Who can’t get behind a redemption story like that? Who can’t get behind a story of honesty, self-realization, and a hero’s journey to do right as a patriot, and a person?
I know, you’re getting all game-four-LeBron on me asking, “Why you talking crazy?”
Sure it’s sounds nuts. More nuts than McGregor beating Floyd though? Nope.
6. We learn to translate dolphin-speak.
In the 1960s there was a man named John C Lilly who, to quote his Wikipedia page was not only a “physician, neuroscientist, psychoanalyst, psychonaut, philosopher, writer and inventor” but also “a researcher of the nature of consciousness using mainly isolation tanks, dolphin communication and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in combination.” Pretty unique resume right? While Lilly never actually developed the ability to talk with or understand dolphins, he definitely brought the idea of developing interspecies communication more prominently into the zeitgeist. While his scientific methods have been questioned over the years, he is undeniably fascinating and can be thanked for inspiring a 1978 novel titled “Altered States” which eventually became a movie and featured this blessing of a trailer. After his NASA funded research project in the Bahamas — designed to practice speaking with aliens by speaking with dolphins — was shut down because his colleague jerked off a horny and distracted dolphin, the wind in the let’s-try-and-talk-to-dolphins sails largely petered off. In 2014 though, Dr. Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project, used an underwater translator and no (documented) psychedelic drugs, to understand the whistle of a dolphin. The dolphin ‘said’ the word “Sargassum” — a type of seaweed. Herzing hopes to confirm two-way communication between dolphins and humans soon. Connor McGregor hopes to confirm two-way communication between his fist and Floyd Mayweather’s face soon.
How do you say “not gonna happen” in dolphin-speak?
But, then again, there’s always that “maybe”… Who knows?
