Following protracted negotiations of over a year, Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor tonight both confirmed that they’ll be meeting in the squared circle on August the 26th, in a 12-round contest hosted by the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. The fight will be the first of UFC superstar Conor McGregor’s Boxing career, and the 50th of his opponent Floyd Mayweather’s.
Dana White, the public face of UFC management, told ESPN when asked what was in the deal for the UFC that:
‘I don’t know what it means for UFC…Conor McGregor is a guy who has done a lot of good things over there for the sport and for this company and he wanted this. And obviously the fans wanted this too… Not only for him, but at the end of the day, my job is to make fights that the fans want to see’.
The clamor amongst Boxing fans for the fight has been far from deafening, but with two cross-over stars facing off in an unprecedented clash of different combat sports, there will be a level of curiosity from casual fans as to what will happen when the two men meet in a Boxing ring.
Particularly vocal in condemning the potential fight was Golden Boy founder Oscar De La Hoya, who has called the bout a ‘circus’ in an open letter to Boxing fans, which is in danger of derailing efforts by those involved with the sport to ‘dig (boxing) out of the hole that Floyd and Manny Pacquiao shoveled by waiting seven years to put on a fight that ended up being as dull as it was anti-climactic’.
While some within the Boxing community have expressed frustration with De La Hoya himself in the past concerning negotiations between Golden Boy fighter Saul Canelo Alvarez and Gennady ‘GGG’ Golovkin, fewer would disagree that the fight could potentially damage the sport in what has been something of a pedigree year for Boxing so far. Fights such as Anthony Joshua v Wladamir Klitchko, Andre Ward v Sergei Kovalev II and the aforementioned, and long sought-after Alvarez v Golovkin have all been seen as positive for the sport following a period of arguably unnecessary protracted negotiations and lackluster match-making
While De La Hoya’s remarks may be slightly overwrought, fears that the Mayweather v McGregor exhibition match could be harmful to the sport are grounded in a genuine worry that those who buy the fight are to be taken on a farcical journey which is designed solely to pad Mayweather’s record and make him and his new opponent a serious amount of money, which it invariably will. Ultimately, the test as to whether the fight hurts Boxing will be how many PPV buys it makes, and how the Alvarez v GGG bout performs a month later following in its wake.
Conor McGregor also played his part in announcing the fight, taking to Twitter to remark ‘THE FIGHT IS ON’ alongside a picture of Floyd Mayweather senior, a dig at Floyd’s age and 18-month retirement. This is a strange tactic by Conor if it is indeed an attempt to get under the skin of Mayweather, given how many Boxing fans are skeptical of the seriousness of the fight in the first place; re-emphasizing that Floyd is forty years old and has not fought since beating Andre Berto in September 2015 will hardly enamor those who view this duel as a cynical one, and he’ll be well advised to big-up his opponent rather than belittle him from now on.
As for the fight itself, it is difficult to conceive a scenario where McGregor could give his vastly more experienced opponent a difficult fight, unless he was being carried for the benefit of the paying audience. Being unable to fight in the manner that he has all of his career, using every part of his body to inflict damage on his opponent rather than only the fists, McGregor could, and indeed should, find it difficult to transition to Boxing, where he is not going up against a typical opponent, but one of the most frustrating fighters in the entire history of Boxing, and by consensus one of the most accomplished and skilled defenders the sport has ever seen. A disqualification for McGregor should the frustration of trying to catch Mayweather become too much, as it did for Victor Ortiz when he fought and lost to Mayweather in 2011 (the perfect example both of how elusive and baffling Floyd Mayweather can be), is a very real possibility.
