Body Work and Cheap Shots
A lifelong boxing fan copes with the impending wreckage of his beloved sweet science, at the hands of Mayweather and McGregor.
In the opening act of the 1982 lugfest, Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone’s titular hero takes on Hulk Hogan’s mountainous Thunderlips in a charitable bout. The boxer and wrestler circle around the ring, reciting questionable dialogue, as the crowd looks on in a mixture of horror and confusion at the novelty act. It is a peculiar bit of filmmaking, a product of early-80’s schmaltz, made even stranger knowing what the future held for Hulk Hogan.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown increasingly confused that the fight was only one round, and yet the arena was sold out. None of it makes much sense. Far be it from me to question the script continuity of someone like Sylvester Stallone, but it plagues me nonetheless.
All of this is to say that now, just days away from the farcical Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor bout, I cannot help but long for the days of Balboa-Thunderlips.
Boxing has been on life support for decades. How this happened in parallel with Mayweather’s bank account approaching one billion dollars is still a mystery. I have loved the sport since childhood, never willing to enter the ring myself, but always fascinated with the brutally human story lines of perseverance and loss. Plus, I watched enough Rocky reruns to convince a casual observer that I had just stared at the solar eclipse.

To see the sports world point its gaze at boxing only makes the spectacle more painful. The fight will not be competitive. As a matter of fact, it is going to suck. HBO boxing analyst and ESPN personality Max Kellerman thinks McGregor won’t even be able to land one punch. It isn’t even fair to the word “suck” to say this fight will suck. It’s going to be unwatchable.
The problem is that I’m going to watch it. Probably.
I am resigned to being a moron. A dope. A sucker. Mayweather’s appeal for over a decade has been that maybe he’s finally picked the wrong guy. Someone who can step in the ring, catch him with a surprising left hook, and drop him to the canvas. We have watched Mayweather fights, not because we love the sport, but because we hate the man. It has been a perverse exercise in vindictiveness, and it has made us all the poorer.
The price of admission to this particularly glitzy comedy of errors is $99 — only $89 if you’re willing to order the fight in standard definition. I’ll defray the cost with a few other curious onlookers, but we all know what the outcome is. We might as well pay the money to buy The Hangover 3 on demand. In case you didn’t watch that, I will happily fill you in: that sucked too.
The worst part of all of this is when the carnage is over, and the second-hand embarrassment has subsided, casual and non-fans alike will look back across the aisle to those few holdouts like me. “How can you still watch this sport?”
That’s just it. This isn’t boxing. It is a trash fire disguised as a prize fight in order to teach the masses how to order Pay Per View events.
In case you aren’t familiar with the sport, there is an expression that you’re bound to hear if you watch a bout long enough. “Putting money in the bank,” is when one fighter elects to use the early rounds to drive punches into the body of his opponent. At first, the payoff is not noticeable. But as the fight wears on, the opponent begins to break down as a result of the accumulation of body shots. It is a strategic investment by one fighter —money in the bank.
That is how the run up to this fight has felt. Press conferences have oscillated from painfully goofy to breathtakingly ignorant. Floyd offered up an ESPN interview sharing his thoughts as to why Conor is the safer bet “on paper,” a smarmy gesture fraught with faux-humility designed to drum up interest among the gambling community. These publicity machines have been putting money in the bank, grinding down rational people until they succumb to the spectacle.
These same rational people have been enamored by Ward-Gatti, Ali-Frazier, Corrales-Castillo, Klitschko-Joshua and, soon enough, Canelo-Golovkin. Boxing is an imperfect sport with an uncertain future. As the NFL grapples with new research regarding the longterm effects of head trauma, boxing must know that the wolf is closing in on the door.
The powers that be choose to expedite the process by closing the door from the inside. You’ve heard it from everyone. The fight is going to suck. But if the $99 doesn’t get you excited, at least you can wager on Justin Bieber wearing a hat before the fight.
Priorities. It’s just money in the bank. Conor McGregor is no Thunderlips.

