Writing the Pine

OK, so this article started out as a round-by-round analysis of the fight. YJ and I were going to keep our own scorecards and turn that into an article. Mid-way through the fight, I realized how ridiculous this was, because our scorecards (and everyone else’s who was watching the fight) would look exactly the same at the end of the night, 120-107 in favor of Mayweather. This meant that Mayweather won every round and had one knockdown, in his very first fight back after almost two years off from the sport entirely. I had to scrap the scorecards and shift the focus of this article away from this one meaningless fight to a bigger question. What does the future hold for Mayweather, and for the sport of boxing in general?

After tonight, it is clear that Mayweather is back at the top of his game and as the number-one draw in the game, the fate of a crumbling sport is in his hands. Mayweather clearly has the mass appeal to draw a large audience, but at the end of the day, I believe that he will be the final nail in the coffin for this sport.

The reasons are two-fold, with the first being that he is a boring  fighter to watch. Mayweather has a uniquely tactical, defensive, smart, and extremely effective fighting style that led to a career undefeated record. But at the end of the day, that does not translate to drawing in casual fans, which is what the sport desperately needs. He provides absolutely no entertainment value to his fights and only draws in the hardcore boxing fans, which is steadily decreasing in number. The sport desperately needs a shot of mainstream interest and Mayweather is unable to deliver on that. The second reason is that he does not have any true competition that could lead to any long-term rivalries. He fights in a period of time where all of the big-name fighters are either too different in weight to put on competitive matches (Marquez, Pacquiao, Pavlik, etc.) or past their prime (Bernard Hopkins, Oscar De La Hoya, Felix Trinidad, etc.).

I know that the public is clamoring for a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight to pit the two best pound-for-pound fighters in the world against each other. But this would more than likely just be a repeat of what happened tonight. Mayweather bullying around a great but undersized fighter for 12 rounds, fighting cautiously as always and never going for a knockout. The future of boxing is in Mayweather’s hands and it looks bleak right now. Let’s hope that Mayweather understand his unique position as a possible savior of the sport and is willing to make some individual sacrifices for the greater good of the sport.

Floyd, I beg you, please loosen yourself up, go for bigger punches and knockouts, change your defensive-minded strategy. Sadly, this sport needs you right now. It needs you to to become more explosive and more entertaining inside the ring (we all know how entertaining he already is outside of it). It needs you to be its savior. Right now, you have two destinies laid out for you. You can go down as a great fighter, like so many others before you. Or, you can be remembered as a transcendent figure in the history of boxing. An athlete who becomes a voice of his generation and bring his dying sport back from the ashes. Who would you rather be?