It's amazing how in this country if you have some game, some angle, you can become a millionaire with very little effort. Look at Conor Mcgregor. A very good but not an off-the-charts dominant champion that achieved legendary status. Even more so not a boxer. Yet he moves to the head of the line and gets a fight with Mayweather. Of all the thousands and millions of boxers throughout the world training their ass off devoting their lives to their sport that will never get within spitting distance of Mayweather have to watch as some guy who boxes as a hobby gets the champ and the money that goes with it.
Very astute point.
I would think it must be a little disheartening for lifelong professional boxers to accept that all the time they put in paying their dues is not enough to fight Floyd Mayweather, while Conor McGregor gets that fight on the basis of name recognition and hype alone.
Perhaps such a pill is easier to swallow while knowing that Floyd Mayweather likely would have stayed retired had that fight not been set up.
I think a more purist example of the type of politics you're speaking of would have been Georges St-Pierre being granted the middleweight title fight he got with Michael Bisping at UFC 217.
GSP definitely paid his dues...but so too did the middleweights in line for a title shot, who were all more recently active than GSP.
Although in fairness to GSP, he held the UFC middleweight division up by 16 months...but relinquished the belt after only one month, even though UFC rules allow champions to hold the belt for 12 months. So in that sense, GSP gave back 11 months of the 16 months he put the middleweight division on hold from negotiations and other things. So he ultimately only cost the middleweight division five months.
The purist in me takes issue with incidents like this...but the practical economic side of me acknowledges that boxing and MMA are both businesses, and need to generate money to exist as professional sports.
What's funny about this to me is that people actually thought Conor McGregor would beat Floyd Mayweather.
Although he probably did more damage to Floyd than Floyd did to him - not that either did much damage, based on how they looked and talked/walked after the fight. That's one thing about boxing - all the damage is relegated to the head, and can be avoided by a defensive boxer like Mayweather...and is just not as powerful for the lower weight fighters compared to the heavier fighters - especially those in the heavyweight class.
You're bang on about politics [name recognition] playing a role, and how that must sting a little for superior boxers - actual boxers - who paid their dues.
But perhaps they came to terms with the fact that Floyd Mayweather retired after his Manny Pacquiao fight, and would not have come back for any other fight unless it was a big money, easy win.
As for Conor - he performed above expectations people who know boxing had for him, and made a cool $100 million...so even his loss was a win.
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