Floyd Mayweather Jr vs Manny Pacquiao: A fight to remember

It was the sweetest bout I ever watched. Manny versus Mayweather. Now here’s the thing. The old-timers said, this was so, oops, it’s a terrible word: "so commercial". Man, all boxing is commercial! Ever heard about prize fighters? They play it up beautifully, like only the Americans can do. It was Las Vegas.

It was show business. The "impoverished" star from the "impoverished" nation. And the privileged Mayweather, who comes from boxing royalty, doing his thang. Oh no. It was good. It was bloody good. Did we get interested in boxing? Yes, we did. Did we get interested in America? Even more so. America. It was America all the way. It was new to us. The exaggerated announcements. The entourage. The selfies. Manny, the people’s man, took one. Mayweather, the serious sort, took none. And they kept announcing the names. Again and again. Names are fetishised. You are what your name is. This is boxing.

Hype

Was it all about the hype? Yes, yes, yes. Beiber was there. Mark Wahlberg was there. Jay Z was there. Beyonce was there. Everyone was there. Not wanting to be left out, I rounded up some friends (ie a very cynical landlord), and guess what, even I was there. On Sony Six. For free. I felt bad for America. Pay per view bro.

Manny smiled. He smiled even more. Mayweather looked grim. His kids made some cool moves for the camera. They kissed their hands and the kisses went into the lens tunnel and came out alive and kissing on the other side. For a moment I thought: these kids must be friends with Will Smith’s son. They must hang out. Wow. A childhoody. Will Smith’s son … but then he wasn’t there.

Sallubhai was there but. Ok, he wasn’t. But he would have been if I had my way. I hung out with Piggy Chops until she said, I have to go, I can’t shout out loud, Salman has a hearing problem. Full disclosure. Piggy wasn’t there. But then Piggy so Amreekan.

It was beautiful. The football freaks later said that some Bayern match was less commercial but, guys, please seven up and fanta off. Seriously. This is boxing. Working class kids who have a shot at owning the world. And they frigging do. MGM, the arena where it all happened, was dubbed Mayweather Got Money. You want the billing? No.

Of course, you can get your face smashed in. Cutie Cruz won the precursor bout but not without a black eye. We, in India, like the money but not the black eye. Buri nazar vaala etc. So we don’t really box. We do Roadies. It is an incredible sport; it’s about desperate talented individuals who want to make a hard buck. Tennis anyone? Promoters are kings. And king amongst kings was Don. These are the guys who set fights up. These are the guys who imagine the match-ups. You can come from anywhere. But in Vegas, you’ve earned it baby. It could be Manhattan too.

Sport

Or as Jeff MacGregor wrote, you are on “the avenue of the Americas, in a huge ugly room, shoehorned wall-towall with decidedly American types — stand-up comics and beat-down boxers, nightclub wiseguys and their inflatable molls, politicians and press agents and cabaret singers, sportsmen and showmen, cutmen and cornermen and chorus girls — familiar to everyone everywhere who has ever seen an American movie of the 1930s.” And then I meet desis. Who say boxing was such a lovely sport back then. It was Nutan in a swimming costume. Splash. Perhaps no other sport in history is so much about entourages. And yet, every fan stands alone. You don’t stand around going "Chelsea, Chelsea" in unison, though "Manny, Manny" came close.

That was new though. The new fan. Like me. Otherwise the boxing audience is a peculiar cocaine mix of the the has-beens and the might-bes, the Prada knock-offs and nugget cuff links, or as, Jeff, yes Jeff again, put it, “of hand-painted leopard - skin and tans from a can….There’s Botox in Spandex and Viagra in vicuna seated shank to bony shank, and everywhere the crippling weight of gangsta bling – gangblang – even by the wet and diamond-studded mouthful.” Such a beautiful game: the cleavage dips, the cynicism even deeper, and then there are the blackest eyes.

Classic

There is plenty of history to boxing. For the Americans, Joe Louis’s defeat of the Nazi-backed Max Schmeling in 1938 was a flashpoint in their sporting history. Several American writers have written about boxing: George Plimpton, Joyce Carol Oates, Gay Talese, David Remnick, and, of course, Norman Mailer, whose The Fight is a classic of the genre.

But here’s the clincher. Boxing, till the Mayweather - Pacquio fight, had gone into recession. Recession as far as writing about it was concerned. George Kimball, in his anthology, At the Fights, recalling the 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, writes, “More than 600 writers of varying stripes augmented the ringside crowd of 20,000 spectators ... Western Union transmitted more than a million words of copy, a record that would stand until Lindbergh touched down ... 17 years later.”

This fight changed everything. For our generation. I have to stop banging out the sentences. My hand trembles from wannabe Parkinson’s.