New York, NY– Earlier in the week, American hero Floyd Mayweather (41-0, 25 KOs) did an online chat with some fans, during which he was inevitably asked about the only fight anyone seems to want to see, a showdown between him and Manny Pacquiao (51-3-2, 38 KOs). There were many ways to respond to this: a strict decline, an explanation of the steroid controversy that has prevented it from happening, or an honest “I’m just in it for the money” confession. Mayweather chose “none of the above,” instead spouting gibberish about “yellow” people and “eating dogs.”
For those of you that haven’t seen it, here’s the extremely profane online video of Mayweather going off on Pacquiao and Asian people in general, in an attempt to make some sort of point about his masculinity. Needless to say, the point is fairly quickly lost:
The video is not entirely clear, so here’s a snippet of Mayweather’s soliloquy:
I’m on vacation for about a year, about a year. As soon as we come off vacation, we’re going to cook that little yellow chump. We ain’t worried about that. So they ain’t gotta worry about me fighting the midget. Once I kick the midget ass, I don’t want you all to jump on my dick. So you all better get on the bandwagon now… Once I stomp the midget, I’ll make that motherfucker make me a sushi roll and cook me some rice.
LET’S DO A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Let’s do a thought experiment, far from the world of boxing, for a bit. Think of the most overwhelming successful athlete in America; for the sake of argument, let’s just say it’s Roger Federer. Roger Federer is a pretty good tennis player, isn’t he? And he’s also popularly known to treat his fans well. Imagine if, during a live chat with his fans, Federer responds to a question about rival Novak Djokovic with a long-winded rant about Slobodan Milosevic and the Yugoslav ethnic cleansing war. Odds are that most Americans wouldn’t care because, let’s face it, you didn’t even know Djokovic was Serbian, much less that it was the Serbs that started the whole ethnic cleansing mess and that it’s highly offensive to accuse an individual that was born during that event of having taken part in it. But the powers-that-be in the tennis world sure know exactly what ethnic cleansing is and precisely how a permissive attitude towards ethnic and racial discrimination would do to their sport, and Federer would never be allowed in a major tournament again. Why do we have a different standard in boxing?
BOXING CULTURE ENCOURAGES RACISM
Well, for one, the culture in boxing is such that discrimination is not only tolerated, but encouraged. Promoters make millions by marketing fights on nationalistic terms, where coming to support your fighter becomes not just recreation, but civic duty. That’s why it’s impossible to distinguish Manhattan from Cardiff, Wales when Joe Calzaghe is in town, or why Las Vegas becomes Manila for one night when Pacquiao visits. Unlike many other sports, nationalism plays a role, and as long as it makes money, the ugly side of nationalism seems not to bother those in charge of the sport one bit.
…AND THE TOP BOXERS (AND FANS) DO IT, TOO
But, of course, blaming Don King or Bob Arum for turning the sport through which America manifested it’s greatness during the Second World War by having Joe Louis overpower Max Schmeling in New York into a cesspool of hate speech would take the responsibility away from the people actually behaving like racists. There are, of course, the boxers who act this way, and Mayweather isn’t the first or last to think that maligning an entire race for the sake of making money is okay. But there are also the fans that gobble this up– and yes, there will be fans who love Mayweather even more after this episode for “telling it like it is.” The fact that these people tend to be the loudest of a much larger group of fans and that the silent majority often refuses to put in the effort to silence them justifies the behavior, and alienates the casual fan that refuses to put in the effort to learn about a sport with such a putrid culture. The loss of fans in the sport has as much to do with a difficulty in promoting talent as it does with rejection from the mainstream because the best and brightest in the sport– the people upon whose shoulders lies the responsibility of positively promoting the sport– are constantly fueling a culture of hate that incubates in the darkest corners of the boxing fan world and somehow germinates out of there and rears its despicable head into the mainstream.
WANT UNIVERSAL APPEAL? TRY BEING UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTING
So what do we have to do to make boxing a sport with universal appeal? To protect its status as one of America’s (and the world’s) most beloved sports? The first step is rejecting racist invective from wherever it may come, be it the most obscure, anonymous commenters on the internet or the pound-for-pound best in the division. And no matter how talented Mayweather may be– no matter how much of the sport seems to hinge upon his professional choices– it’s time to say goodbye. Mayweather has become the Helen Thomas of the boxing world, and it’s about time we, as fans, raised our standards to the mainstream and bid this one farewell in both the symbolic and economic senses.