The most striking thing about the hysteria surrounding Floyd Mayweather’s fight against Manny Pacquiao on Saturday night was the hunger it revealed.
People—millions of them, it seems—were starving for some boxing.
There was a whole world out there primed for the sweet science to make a comeback, or at the very least a world craving the glitz and guttural thrill of a single big-ticket fight night. By the time Mayweather accepted Pacquiao’s best shots and spent the rest of their time together scripting another of his patented unanimous decision wins, one thing was clear:
Maybe this didn’t turn out to be a “super” fight—but boxing can still turn out a superfight.
ESPN went on location for it. Hollywood dressed to the nines for it. All over the country, entire extended families so willingly forked over the pay-per-view’s inflated $100 asking price that broadcast providers literally couldn’t take their money fast enough.
As MMA fans, we stood on our tiptoes and gazed across the aisle with equal parts skepticism, longing and—if we’re being honest—jealousy. Mayweather vs. Pacquiao was a bona fide cultural phenomenon, dominating the mainstream news cycle with a ferocity that our own beloved little sport has yet to come close to matching.
As we watched Jamie Foxx stumble through the national anthem and heard the stories about Tom Brady hopping a midafternoon jet from Louisville to Las Vegas because this was a fight he simply couldn’t miss, we wondered: How is this possible? What about us? Will MMA ever hold a fight this big?
The answer to at least that last question seems short and clear enough.
Unfortunately, no, probably not—at least not for a long, long time.
For the astute MMA fan, there were lessons to be learned from last weekend’s extravaganza. As much as we all like to joke about boxing’s demise, when it comes to appealing to a huge, crossover audience, the venerable sport of traditional prizefighting still has a few major advantages over MMA.
For starters, there is history, plain and simple.
Boxing is perhaps our oldest professional sport. It’s as deeply entrenched in our cultural psyche as its modern stick-and-ball counterparts and has arguably been more socially important than any (besides, maybe, baseball). Viewed this way, it makes a certain bit of sense that boxing can still swoop in to set pay-per-view records when it has a matchup that feels halfway historic.
Even if Mayweather vs. Pacquiao is the only boxing match they watch this year, the sport feels familiar and comfortable to today’s fans. To the untrained eye, the whole thing is actually pretty simple. Just two guys trying to punch each other, is all. As long as you don’t spend much time dwelling on the actual physical damage inflicted or the character of the men inflicting it, perhaps there is a sort of cozy nostalgia to it.
By contrast, modern MMA is less than two-and-a-half decades old in America and is still very much finding its legs with the mainstream. If you live and work inside the so-called “MMA bubble,” it’s easy to forget there is a nation of people out there who continue to think of our sport as a weird sideshow.
There’s an entire generation of PPV buyers who still turn away from MMA because, for example, they think it’s wrong to “hit a guy when he’s down.”
The bad news for MMA is, it’s going to take some time for those biases to wear down. The good news—if the sport survives long enough—is that they will indeed wear down.
Yet history can’t be the only answer here. A good bit of boxing’s ongoing ability to stage the occasional megafight must also come down to pure aesthetics.
The UFC has always taken pains to cast itself as fairly lowbrow. While boxing embraces pomp and lavish spectacle, MMA is a stripped-down affair. Where boxing announcers go black-tie, MMA play-by-play guys only recently started wearing sport coats—and looking pretty uncomfortable in them, at that.
While boxing cultivates a sense of over-the-top pageantry, the UFC consciously cut out the smoke and pyrotechnics years ago. In many ways, that more spartan approach helped the sport during its formative stages. It made MMA feel young, hip, maybe a little bit dangerous. Those of us who considered ourselves savvy and cutting-edge enough to tune in were at the forefront of combat sports’ revolutionary new wave. We could feel it.
But today? It’s possible MMA’s lean-and-mean vibe has lost its utility. Maybe at some point we replaced the feeling of underground, DIY cool with just being small-time.
A fight like Mayweather vs. Pacquiao can cast itself as family entertainment. Parents can plant their kids in front of the TV and tell them they are about to see history. Your grandmother can watch it, maybe even in the same room with a few of your college buddies.
Why? Presentation. Even if it isn’t, boxing strives to feel classy. Even if it isn’t, it feels safe.
On the other hand, MMA makes most of its money selling itself to young (mostly white) men. While boxing at its highest level at least makes a nod toward the champagne-and-cocktail crowd, the UFC only recently began asking us to embrace Harley Davidson, Monster Energy Drinks and the #BudLightLifestyle.
Where boxing occasionally manages to wake from its slumber, shake off the dust and adopt a kind of classic elegance, MMA feels forever mired in its own nu-metal roots. That look, frankly, is starting to feel as dated as barbed-wire tattoos and foil-skull T-shirts.
To this list of advantages you can add that boxing feels more inclusive and multicultural. In the moments before Mayweather and Pacquiao fought, there were performances of the American, Mexican and Pilipino national anthems (note: Remember what we said earlier about pageantry?).
The UFC doesn’t do any of this. It typically prefaces its live events with a video of its own highlights set to the music of The Who. The video is awesome, but it doesn’t set the same vibe or the same expectations.
In addition to that, boxing’s biggest stars feel like A-list celebrities. Why? They get paid a lot more, for starters, so they seem more like legitimate superstars. Mayweather may well be a despicable human being, but he turned himself into one of his sport’s most polarizing and profitable brands, basically by flaunting his own wealth.
In many ways, boxing’s lack of a strong, centralized power structure has worked against it, preventing the matchups fans wanted to see the most. If it has had any positive effect at all, however, it’s that fighters are left to promote themselves as the sport’s biggest attractions.
The UFC, on the other hand, has always promoted itself and its own brand above any of its athletes. This makes good sense, too, since—as we recently learned—fighters can fall out of the limelight at the drop of a hat, while the company and its executives are in it for the long haul.
But while the UFC has been undeniably effective in engendering a fair amount of brand loyalty, it’s clearly the athletes who drive PPV sales. If the fight company always insists on promoting its own logo above all else, it’s unlikely any UFC fighter will ever rise to the level of notoriety of a Manny Pacquiao or Floyd Mayweather.
To date, the UFC—and, by extension, the sport it largely represents—has been successful in creating a niche for itself. It has, at the risk of exaggeration, changed combat sports forever. It could even be that some of the negative reaction to the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight came from fans who’ve gotten used to the faster pace and highlight-reel finishes common inside the Octagon.
As MMA is currently presented, though, it’s tough to imagine it ever winning the kind of widespread appeal necessary to have a fight of such colossal magnitude. It’s difficult to foresee our sport becoming palatable enough that the Worldwide Leader puts it on par with the Superbowl, or that Robert DeNiro, Beyonce and Louis CK all want to be there. Not within our current identity, anyway.
Perhaps the most pertinent question, then, may be: Is that OK with us?
If it is, if we are happy with who we are and are too set in our ways to change; so be it. If we are not satisfied however, if we want to someday be considered capable of competing with the biggest nights in combat sports history, then perhaps we must realize that a few of the very things that made our sport popular now hold us back.
Maybe a bit more evolution is in order.
If that’s the case, here’s some more good news for you, MMA fans:
We’re young yet, and evolution is what we do best.
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The most striking thing about the hysteria surrounding