High Grade Pugilism and the Return to Acceptance of the Fight Game
“Boxing is the toughest and loneliest sport in the world”
– Frank Bruno
Many years from now, when most of us are long dead and the myths of today like climate change and rugby union are long forgotten, prizefighting experts and ring historians will recall the Floyd Mayweather-Ricky Hatton battle as the fight that saved boxing. It was a classic duel between two greats of the fight game that lived up to its billing as one of the great all-time match-ups. In an era when reality rarely matches the hype in professional pugilism circles, Floyd Mayweather and Ricky Hatton surpassed the grand hoopla with a display of boxing that will go down in pug history as a classic. For once, the promoters managed to get two champions at their peak to square off in the ring and those two champions actually boxed.
There were no losers when the final bell rang in Vegas last Saturday night. Not in the sense of character and legend, at any rate. Bookmakers certainly managed to differentiate but that is by the by. It was a prizefight for the ages and one that resuscitated the dying sport of boxing.
Not that boxing should ever have been near death. It is probably the oldest of all sports and it should certainly be the most pure. But the sport, over the last quarter-century and probably a touch longer, has been eaten from inside by an ever-increasing horde of flesh eating maggots to a point where the sport lay unconscious and malnourished in the gutter, like a beaten junkie in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
When the Marquis of Queensberry wrote the rules for professional prizefighting and the game had developed into what can be regarded as a recognised sport, champions were respected and revered and, as such, business was good. There was no tougher man on the planet than the heavyweight champion of the world and the public was captivated by his presence, both in and out of the ring. Whether it was love or hate, punters felt something about the champ. From John L. Sullivan in the infant days of the professional fight game through Jack Dempsey in the twenties and Joe Louis in the forties and Rocky Marciano in the fifties, all the way to Ali, the heavyweight champion was The Man and the sport of boxing reigned supreme. The fight game was king.
There was also a certain romance about the ring that attracted many to the sport. The loneliness, the brutality, the intestinal fortitude required to step into the squared circle, the simplicity and the complexity of the sweet science wrapped tight and intertwined like a chocolate chip cookie. It was viewed as a way out of the ghetto, an avenue to prosperity for those not born into it. It was pure and legitimate and accessible. Amongst the blood and gore of the ring stood a certain nobility, a belief that boxing was an equalizer. If you worked hard, you would get your shot. Heroes like Rocky Graziano and Jake La Motta and Sugar Ray Robinson personified this. There was a connection between the champ and the common man.
By the seventies, however, boxing was on the decline and by the eighties the game was in free fall. It had become a circus and not a particularly entertaining one. The leeches had crawled in through the ear, when Ali had made boxing the hottest ticket in town, and one at a time latched themselves to each and every vein and proceeded to suck the life out of the sport. The sport became irrelevant in record time. Multiple sanctioning bodies had diluted any semblance of meaning in every belt and title, fight fixing was becoming increasingly flagrant, promoters came to run and ruin the sport through clownish antics and an insular look at the game and hopeless boxers were pushed to the top.
The one thing that has separated professional boxing and professional wrestling, dating back to the days when both existed in the carnival alleyways of Americana, was legitimacy. Boxing was not predetermined and wrestling was. Professional wrestling has stood the test of time as one of the most popular forms of entertainment across the world and millions have been prepared to suspend their disbelief to watch Ric Flair clash with Ricky Steamboat and Hulk Hogan battle Andre the Giant but the simple reality is that bookmakers don’t bet on professional wrestling. Boxing and wrestling were once poles apart in terms of legitimacy. By the seedy days of the eighties, however, the two industries were not very far apart at all. Boxing was no longer viewed as legitimate or tough or a major sport. It had not only taken the showmanship and promotional techniques of wrestling, they had taken the illegitimacy and the politics. The romance was dead. It had become a vile parody, a sick joke of what the sport once was. Aside from Tyson at his rampaging peak and Sugar Ray Robinson and Oscar De La Hoya and perhaps Roy Jones Junior, nobody gave a damn about the sport. It had gone from the alleys to the main event right back to the alleyway in less than a century.
Only a truly grand fight could save the sweet science. It would need to be a fight between two champions that people actually cared about at the high watermark of their career. Anyone who knows anything about boxing knew that the undefeated Floyd Mayweather and the undefeated Ricky Hatton could penetrate the hearts and minds of the populace. There was no way I was missing this.
The Fat Cats in the Punting Ace penthouse, however, had different ideas. Requests for an open ended expense account were squashed by the geeks in the accounting department and any hope of being sent to Vegas and the beating heart of the story seemed increasingly remote. So I did what any self-respecting writer would do: I took the first flight to Melbourne for a week of heavy drinking.
The plan was to spend a week in the belly of Melbourne consuming various quantities of cheap bourbon and gin before returning for the big fight. It all seemed very simple. I had obviously discounted what a week of cheap bourbon and gin and the abandonment of yet another assistant would do to my schedule. The cheap bourbon and gin, for the most part, your lauded author could handle but when his assistant, who had been on the job less than a week calls in crazed cackles and informs you she is has found the job entirely overwhelming and has made no arrangements since said author had left for Melbourne and that she was fleeing to Mt. Isa to work the mines (or the miners…I’m not entirely sure), things started to fall apart.
I would drink through the evening, get the first flight out and arrive in time for the undercard. I had assumed my eight-in-the-morning flight had been booked and I had a most civilized function to attend that was unlikely to finish before six. And nor did it though there certainly would have been an earlier finale had the rotund Indian girl smoking on the roof fallen over the ledge, as was nearly the case. Blood would have covered Brunswick Street and the curtains would surely have been drawn on fun.
But we drift.
There would be no first flight out of Melbourne. Nor would I escape until well after midday. There was a stiff and brutal conversation with a number of Virgin representatives, who removed my gin and informed me there would be no flights out for a while yet. When it was eventually time to board, two jackboot security guards hauled me off into a windowless room and demanded many answers in quick succession. I had nothing to hide but clarity tends not to be my strong suit, particularly after a night of heavy alcohol consumption, and they detained me until well past the scheduled time of my flight. They were not interested in having solicitors involved and they were not subtle in suggesting that if you walk like a bum and talk like a bum, you are probably a bum. Personal claims of being a member of the Diplomatic Corps only seemed to enrage them further.
When I was released, some hours later, my flight had long gone. If I was to make it back at all, it would be barely. I was rushed onto the next flight after creating quite the scene and made it back just in time for the fight. Had I have missed a single second of a single round of the most important match in the era of what will be known as The Bloodsucking Years, fire and brimstone would have rained down upon these two Gestapo hopefuls with such force that not even some two-bit Target in the middle of Buttfuck-Anywhere would have hired either of them.
After a high-speed cab ride that resulted in the near death of some slow-witted kangaroo, I had made it to the Officer’s Club with precious few moments to spare.
It was thrilling to listen to the passion in the crowd, the genuine adoration for the plucky Brit Ricky Hatton and the grudging respect of the champion Floyd Mayweather. There was a connection between fighter and fan. Tickets had sold out in less than an hour with half of Manchester seemingly making the pilgrimage, a crusade that seemed unlikely to succeed in any short-term sense. Chants for Hatton rang out like drunken angels across the Vegas night sky, the tension sending the mercury through the glass. The home town boy, an undefeated champion and the greatest pound-for-pound exponent of the sweet science in the world was roundly jeered, as was the Star Spangled Banner in the heart of Sin City, USA. For the first time in memory, people across the globe were genuinely excited about a fight. They did not order it out of habit and they did not head to the local club out of expectation. They did not talk about the fight out of necessity and they didn’t find it obligatory to watch due to any sick compulsion. There was genuine excitement.
And as hard as it is to believe, the fight lived up to the hype. The Hitman came out to fight and so did Mayweather. Hatton’s game early was aggression. Crash through or crash. He fought with a great deal of heart, taking it right to the incomparable Mayweather, stepping inside without fear. It all caught up with Hatton, however, to nobody’s real surprise. Mayweather proved he was more than just a dancer, mixing it with Hatton and then taking it to left field in the ninth, where Hatton’s head cracked back and forth as if on a swivel. Mayweather was landing his shots and Hatton was just taking them without protest. It was all over in the tenth. Hatton was knocked down twice by two brutal Mayweather shots, the latter displaying the punching power his critics said he never had. The shots were so brutally clinical that Hatton’s girlfriend was physically ill.
When the referee waved it away, nobody was disappointed. Mayweather fans had reasserted themselves once more. Hatton fans had been done proud by their courageous warrior. The two pugs raised each other’s arm and both walked out champions.
And because of those ten rounds, and those two men, boxing may have been sa