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Two marginally known fighters retained their hardly recognized championship belts at a sparsely attended 2001 boxing event in San Francisco.
Their names were Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. Mayweather’s most notable and career-defining moment, back then, was his failure to win a gold medal in the 1996 Olympics. Pacquiao was fighting for the second time since coming to America less than a year earlier.
“If I had said at the time that 13, 14 years later they would be fighting each other for hundreds of millions of dollars in one of the most anticipated fights ever, people would have considered me absolutely (expletive) nuts," Top Rank CEO Bob Arum, who promoted the card, told ESPN.com last month.
The inherent improbability of Mayweather and Pacquiao staging the richest bout in the history of boxing shouldn’t be lost on anyone a day after they finally fought, regardless of how it played out. Obituaries written for the sport of boxing Sunday outnumbered the amount of punches thrown in Mayweather’s unanimous-decision victory over Pacquiao Saturday night, given the fight’s perceived lackluster quality.
But boxing’s not on life support. The frustration will fade and the search for the next great fight will resume.
It’s probably wise to rest the idea of a bout matching the hype of Mayweather vs. Pacquiao anytime soon, but a pair of fighters will converge someday to revive its pageantry. It will be no small task, what with the expected $300 million in revenue Mayweather and Pacquiao generated for themselves.
MGM Grand Garden Arena contained as many celebrities as a posh awards show, as many billionaires as a restricted yacht club and as much media as a Super Bowl. That level of attention is fleeting. But it’s always been that way. Boxing has displayed its resilience on numerous occasions, which our city has witnessed firsthand for the past several decades.
Heavyweights such as Muhammad Ali captivated the American public throughout the 1970s, when no one had any idea a group of welterweights were a few years away from assuming control. Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns and Roberto Duran peaked around the same time in the 1980s and fought each other to give rise to arguably the most iconic venue in boxing history.
When the best and biggest fight of the era, Hagler vs. Hearns, took place in 1985, a troubled youth from Brooklyn named Mike Tyson had only two professional bouts to his name. Tyson filled arenas like no one else could into the 1990s, while Mayweather coped as a teenager in Grand Rapids, Mich., with a father in prison and Pacquiao lived on the streets of General Santos City, Philippines.
Fans are much like most fighters in that they’re always in a hurry. Just because there’s no definitive response to a question like, “Who’s boxing's next megastar?” doesn’t mean there’s never going to be an answer.
“You’ve got to be patient,” Mayweather said after his victory. “A lot of fighters want everything right now, and I was that same way. I wanted to fight every fight then and there. Put them right there and I’ll beat them. But when I got older and wiser, I realized you could wait.”
Almost three times more people than attended Mayweather vs. Pacquiao will fill a baseball stadium, Minute Maid Park in Houston, next week to watch Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight James Kirkland. It will mark the second straight fight that Alvarez has drawn a crowd of more than 40,000 fans.
The Mexican star leads the list of candidates poised to inherit the throne from Mayweather and Pacquiao, but it’s usually a fool’s errand to predict such things. The king whose empire reached its height Saturday had the best view when asked who would succeed him.
“I couldn’t tell you what guys are coming,” he said.
But rest assured, some guys are coming to spark a sport that’s already healthy enough it doesn’t need a resuscitation.
Case Keefer can be reached at 948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.
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