The “pay-per-view” bout I saw for free – and still didn’t get my money’s worth!

By Rajib Sen

Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather

You got me right! They spent five years bringing me a ringside view of what the promoters billed as the “Fight of the Century” – and delivered a clearly fixed dud! Mind you, my interest in boxing goes back to the all-time greatest of them all, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson (the only non-heavyweight in my book) and, of course, Mohammed Ali (nee Cassius Clay) among them. Sadly, I only got to see them in action in often blurred black-and-white newsreels and documentaries.

So, you can imagine what I was looking for when I discovered that I’d get to see the live telecast in my drawing room while people across the globe paid ($99.95 = Rs 5000 approx. each) through their noses to see the fight in question on their TV sets. And the fight in question turned out to be a questionable extravaganza promoted in every possible medium – from the Internet to the newspapers – by the promoters. And who were the promoters of the 2 May 2015 boxing match between Manny Pacquiao from the Philippines, and Floyd Mayweather of the United States?

In a brutal five-year fight, in one corner of the ring we had the company run by Pacquiao’s promoter Arum, Top Rank, as the premier promotional outfit with a long-standing relationship with HBO, broadcaster of Pacquiao’s fights. In the other corner, there was Mayweather Promotions, Mayweather’s own company, which has been competing against Top Rank and has aligned itself with Showtime.

Between them, these promoters had already won the big battle for money even before the two welterweight fighters got anywhere near the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas, USA, for their combat in the ring. The fight is a landmark event, and the two boxers will enjoy an outlandish payday for a night’s work. And it’s not even for working a whole night but only a maximum of 47 minutes! That’s right, calculating at three minutes a round and a minute’s break for 12 rounds.

That means that, in less than an hour, Mayweather would be making an estimated $180 million and Pacquiao around $100 million. The purse for the contest could exceed $100 million (Mayweather himself is expected to make “well over” that amount, with a pay-out that could be more than twice what any other boxer has ever received). Regardless of what happened in the ring, Mayweather was guaranteed a pay-cheque of $50 million – merely for showing up!

Not that he needs the money. At 38, Mayweather is already the highest-paid athlete on Earth. (ESPN wondered that “the zeroes in his bank account are so numerous, they blur together and become fuzzy to the naked eye.” Mayweather once used to go by the nickname “Pretty Boy” in recognition of his perpetually youthful good looks but, these days, though, he is more commonly referred to as “Money Mayweather”—“Money” for short.

Mayweather has a sportswear line and “lifestyle brand” called “The Money Team.” Justin Bieber helps him model it. The studio he once owned in Las Vegas was named Philthy Rich Records. He has been known to make wagers of $250,000 on the halftime scores of NFL games. He once counted out a million dollars, in cash, just for the spectacle of it. He wears $10,000 suits accessorized with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of jewellery. He collects cars — Bentleys, Rolls-Royces, you name it — and flies around on private jets. Want to know more? During fights, he wears $25,000 mouth guards made of $100 bills!

Nor is Pacquiao a bankrupt. He has the lucre to have twice run for and won senatorial seats in the Philippines and enough to be confident of a presidential bid in that country. And that doesn’t come cheap in any democracy.

So that explains the sham I had to sit through – with such obscenely-wealthy slouches flinging punches at each other and in the air, ensuring that neither literally draws blood (as I’ve known others in the past to have done – most appallingly, the time when heavyweight Mike Tyson bit off the top of Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997). There was wasn’t a single knock-down, let alone a knock-out or technical knockout (TKO) in this friendly padding around. If I got absolutely no thrills at seeing the scrap of a scrap for free in my night pyjamas in my drawing room, I wonder how those who went dressed up and paid small fortunes to actually be at Las Vegas – and more, at the MGM Grand Arena – felt to see the over-hyped “Fight of the Century”.