Is âMoneyâ rich? For now
Is this weekendâs boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao really âthe fight of the Centuryâ?
The short answer: No. The more accurate answer: It depends on how youâre keeping score. If money (the stuff) is everything Money (the guyâs) fight is as big a deal as he says. If not Floyd is just riding the PPV wave that has created class warfare in boxing just like it exists everywhere else.
Hereâs your breakdown, starting with this weekendâs fight:
Purse: Â $300 million or so
In terms of money Saturdayâs fight is going to be unlike anything ever seen. As of todayâs projections Floyd stands to get about $170 million to Pacquiaoâs $95 million. As it stands currently the richest purse in boxing history happened in 2007 when Oscar De La Hoya and Mayweather split $87 million with Oscar taking the Lionâs share.
Eight years after that and 4 years after either he or Pacquiao (depending on who you ask) balked at a proposed fight that would have seen the two split $100 million the stakes have trebled. As long as each guy makes it to the opening bell on Saturday Pacquiao and Mayweather will get paid more for one event than any two athletes in history, even after adjusting for inflation.
As youâll soon see, if youâre looking for evidence of a just world boxing is a lousy place to start your search. Plenty of nice guys have finished first in baseball. In boxing, if the fighter himself isnât at least a little cruel he better be managed by Satan or heâs going to end up literally bankrupt and brain damaged. To see the fate of ex-boxers is to understand the merciful denouement of a bullfight.
Itâs a lot of money even if it does require taking a couple hundred punches to the face from a skilled professional.
Total Revenue: ~$500 million
Pay-per-view: $270-$360 million.Â
Pay-per-view was taken into the mainstream on September 16th, 1981 when Viacom Nashville offered the Ray Leonard vs Thomas Hearns fight to its 1-million subscribers and 50% of them took the bait. By 1989 when Leonard and Hearns fought a rematch that was way more than 5 years too late but still made more money than they had in 1981 it was all because of pay-per-view. Bob Arum saw it coming. One of the promoters this weekend and the lead promoter of Leonard-Hearns II said in 1989 â10 years from now people will look at what Ray and Tommy make as small potatoes⊠(Once there are) 100 million cable homes, 15% penetration would give you a $600 million fightâ.
Arumâs numbers are a reach but it was a pretty damn prescient observation. Adjusted for inflation the top earner in a Fight of the Century match-up saw his pay rise by .2% compounded from 1927 to 1972. As closed circuit TV kicked into gear over the next decade and fighters caught on purses inflated at a near double digit rate. Once PPV started in earnest things just went nuts.
Hereâs some perspective: In 1938 Joe Louis was paid less than $200,000 to knock out Max Schmeling in a fight that was basically billed as America vs Hitler. Adjusted for inflation thatâs only about $3.3 million. If it goes the distance on Saturday Floyd Mayweather will earn as much every 40 seconds for fighting an undersized slugger whoâs lost twice in the last 5 years.
The next time youâre tempted to bad mouth cable how about pausing to thank the folks at Viacom for bringing the miracle of PPV into our homes.
Promoters this weekend are hoping for 3-million PPV buys at $90 per but they secretly think it could be higher, even going as big as 4-million. Promoters also suggested ordering the fight early, just in case the worldâs cable grid goes dark from the demand of 1% of its users using the service over the course of one weekend.
Boxing promoters are full of shit for the same reason deer can run fast. All the ones who arenât get killed.
Above are the biggest all-time buys for PPV fights. The numbers look like theyâre growing because of that nice, orange Projection for this weekend. Below that thereâs been a steady erosion of demand for PPV boxing. Mayweather-De La Hoya was a fight between one old guy and a rising super star. Paq - Mayweather will determine the best fighter of the Great Recession. Itâs aggressive to assume you can raise the price by 80% and boost demand by 50% without improving the product.
Live Gate: $72 million but good luck paying retail.
International broadcast sales: ~$35 million
Closed Circuit: $13 million
Sponsorships: $12 million
Merchandise sales: $1 million
Cultural Impact: None.
No one really, deep down, in their heart of hearts cares about these guys outside of the Philippines and Floyd Mayweatherâs mirror. Pacquiao is a nice-ish, very likable guy past his prime. Mayweather is a jerk or very good at acting like it. If you bill something as the Greatest Thing Ever for 5 straight years youâre going to sell some tickets. Thatâll make a lot of money but not create a Fight of the Century.
But are the Super Fighters Member of the Super Rich? For now.
As a final acid test that can be applied to all eras, more or less, I wanted to figure out just how Big these Fights of the Century are in terms of what the stars are getting paid relative to less athletic rich people. To get some idea I adjusted the top purse in each event then divided it by the annual income required to be in the top .01% earners in the US.
In other words, âIf they did nothing else for the rest of their lives how long could these guys afford to live like the Super Richâ. Thatâs where you can really see the economics of boxing change with technology. In the era of Jack Johnson when fight news was conveyed via voice and telegraph the top purse was only equal to about 3 months in the .01%. Â Radio brought that up to a year, give or take and barring Great Depressions (sorry, ghost of Joe Louis). The math is intuitive. Bigger monetized audience = larger gross return. Man has been Monetizing Eyeballs for 50,000 years, even when we use different terms for it.
In 2002 the shells of what once were Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson were paid $22 million to have the fight they should have fought in 1993. In exchange they were granted 2 years of life in the Champagne Lounge. In theory Floyd Mayweather is about to get enough money to spend the next 17.1yrs of his life doing nothing but making it rain on strippers.
The math here is fuzzy. Floyd has a silly-expensive lifestyle. More ominously in terms of his post-boxing earning potential Mayweather has exactly $0 coming in from endorsement deals. Thatâs $30 million less than NBA genius misanthrope Kobe Bryant. Itâs hard to see Floyd stretching the payday out for nearly 2 decades without some radical lifestyle choices but itâs to his considerable credit that he could. Thatâs better than even Ali ever did.
Now compare the stakes at play this weekend to the real contenders for Fight of the CenturyâŠ
Tunney - Dempsey 2: Money Mayweatherâs got nothing on the Manassa Mauler
Event: Heavyweight Championship rematch between Jack Dempsey and champion Gene Tunney.
Location: Soldier Field, Chicago.
Paid Attendance: Â $35.9 million ($2.658 million in 1927. The first $2 million gate in history; a record that stood for 50 years)
Top Purse: $13.600,000 ($1 million in 1927 give or take (see below)
Tunneyâs base plus portion of the gate came to $990,445. Tunney understandably excited over the prospect of being the first boxer to get a $1 million check for one fight asked promoter Tex Rickard for a bonus. Rickard, the mold from which future boxing soulless scumbags like Don King would be cast, made Tunney give him $9,555 to cover the difference.
It would be another 66 years before Floyd Patterson would become the first fighter to really earn $1 million; thatâs what it took to sucker him into a second consecutive one round defeat at the hands of Sonny Liston.
Repercussions and impact: Anti-hero turns good-guy! The Golden Age of Sports starts to Die.
Promotional sizzle, Dempseyâs face beaten like steak:
Jack Dempsey was the heavyweight champion from 1919 to 1926 but by the time the Tunney rematch came around his only fight in the last 5 years was getting shut-out by Tunney. Of the 20 rounds fought between Tunney and Dempsey the ex-champ won exactly one: the famous seventh frame of the rematch when he floored Tunney with a crisp combination. That night was the first time in history boxers had to go a neutral corner after knocking down an opponent. Despite allegedly asking for the rule and being reminded of it immediately prior to the fight Dempsey stood over Tunney for several seconds before being shoved aside by the referee who only then began his count.
A quickly recovering Tunney got up at 9 and spent the rest of the round first avoiding Dempseyâs awkward rushes then countering them expertly. By the start of the following stanza Tunney was refreshed. He knocked Dempsey down early then was content to spend the rest of the night simply batting the tired but oddly beloved Dempsey from corner to corner.
Had it not been for those 14 seconds the Dempsey-Tunney rematch would have gone down as one of the more disappointing, one-sided, unnecessary fights in history. Without the stench of corruption the night would have disappeared. Huge fights are always priced to perfection. Buyers are guaranteed to either witnesses to history or be suckers. Thereâs rarely a middle.
Jack Dempsey: Probably not a super nice guy as a young man:
To fight wonks, Dempsey is known for modernizing an attacking style (later knocked-off by Mike Tyson) and his pummeling of the 6'6" Jess Willard.
Willard outweighed Dempsey by 60lbs, stood 10" taller and had never been hurt in his boxing career. After 3 minutes against Dempsey he would have his jaw and several ribs broken, lose a mouthful of teeth and get knocked down 7 times. The impact of Dempseyâs punches was less surprising to his manager Doc Kearns who had bet $10,000 on Jack to win in the first round at 10x1 odds. Had Dempsey pulled it off Kearns would have won nearly $2 million in 2015 terms.
Kearns knew Dempsey could punch. He also knew heâd loaded Jackâs gloves with plaster of Paris before the fight; a long-held rumor the trainer confirmed for Sports Illustrated years later.
It says much about the radical changes in social views during the 20s that the public forgot/ ignored/ didnât care that Dempsey spent the years of WWI as a real-life hobo, married to a hooker and fighting drunks for cash. In a spectacularly bad effort at damage control Dempseyâs promoter Tex Rickard initially claimed his client had been working for the troops by doing manual labor on the docks during the war years. Rickard even had pictures to prove it! That worked out fine until someone noticed that in the lower portion of the picture you can see that Jack is fine leather loafers; an unusual choice for a patriot spending his days hitting an anvil.
Unencumbered by shame, the exposed Rickard exploited the publicâs hatred. He booked Dempsey to fight a bonafide French war hero Georges Carpentier. Carpentier was handsome, urbane, debonair and not a particularly talented pugilist. The anti-Dempsey in every way. To fund Jackâs heel turn Rickard talked the civic leaders of Jersey City, New Jersey into paying him (reportedly) $80,000 under the table and building a literally rickety disposable stadium to hold the fight in their town. âIn the best seats the match would be watched without fear of life or limb; but the wooden arena shook frightfully from any commotion initiated by the holders of the expensive seats. It was a truly democratic arrangementâ wrote the Hudson Dispatch.
The fight lasted less than 12 minutes. Irritated at the loud applause for Carpentier, Dempsey briefly tortured the Orchid Man knocking him cold in the 4th round.
Ali - Frazier 1: America beats the 60s out of its system
Event: Heavyweight Championship and Biggest Fight in History
Purse: Â $14.5 million (Already adjusted for inflation. Ali and Frazier were paid $2.5 million apiece. In 1971 it seemed like al the money on earth.
Revenues: >$115 million ($20 million 1972)
Gate: Â $1.5 million. Ali vs Frazier marked the beginning of the end of paid attendance as the acid test for a fightâs drawing power. The fight only brought in a live gate of $1.5 million but overall revenues were about $20 million.
Closed Circuit and TV rights: $100 million (~$18.5-$19 million in 1972).
Ali-Frazier was more meaningful in every way except the size of the haul, but even in that way it was ground breaking. Promoter Jerry Perenchio decided he could bring in color screens and raise the price theater prices from $5 or $6 to $30. It worked. Closed Circuit revenues fueled boxing for the next 20 years, hugely expanding the size of the total pie for boxing promoters and increasing the high-end earnings for champions.
Cultural Stakes: Class warfare in tassels
Ali was raised middle class in Louisville. At 12 and then going by the name Cassius Clay had his brand new Schwinn bicycle stolen. He was sent to a local recreation center where a cop named Joe Martin would help him fill out a report. Clay tearfully vowed to Martin that he would whip the thief if Martin could find him.
âYou better learn to fight before you start fightingâ replied Martin. Within weeks Ali was running everywhere he went like a black Forrest Gump. Bike? Long forgotten. 10 years before he would win the title, join the Black Muslims and change his name to Muhammed Ali young Cassius was already proclaiming himself a future heavyweight champ to anyone who would listen and most likely a few who expressed no interest at all.
Whatever the catalyst, it worked. In his mid-20s Ali was 6'3" of the quickest person anyone had ever seen in a ring. In his second to last fight before he was forced out of the sport Aliâs skills were arguably at their peak against a badly faded opponent named Cleveland Williams. Ali could be cruel in the ring but he respected Williams who had never fully recovered from being shot by a police officer. Aliâs goal was to knock The Big Cat out quickly. The results were stunning:
Joe Frazierâs boxing origin story was less Norman Rockwell, more Danteâs Inferno. The son of a sharecropper with no left arm, the right-handed Frazier supposedly developed his unworldly left hook acting as his fatherâs missing hand. When the family moved north for better prospects, the chunky Joe began boxing.
Both tales have more than a whiff of apocryphal bunk. Life seldom offers such easy narratives but the facts arenât in question. By all accounts, Ali grew up relatively sheltered, at least by the horrifying standards of Black America in Louisville during the 1950s. Joe Frazier grew up in hell.
Ali did more to both advance and undermine civil rights than any other figure of his time. It is woven into the fabric of canonical Ali legend that he was the first black American to openly proclaim himself beautiful or, as he more often put it, âprettyâ. As if to balance out the scales of his societal contribution Ali also leveled some of the most openly racist and hostile attacks imaginable on opponents, especially when it came to âignorantâ, âuglyâ Joe Frazier.
âHeâs the wrong kind of negroâ said Ali of Frazier, âHeâs not like me because heâs an Uncle Tom. He works of the enemy.â The beat went on throughout Aliâs exile, even while he was at times borrowing money from Frazier. It intensified in the days before the fight. âNixon will call (Frazier) if he wins but 99% of my people are for me. They identify with my struggle. If I win, they win. If I lose, they lose.â
In 1967 Ali had avoided the Vietnam draft first by failing the IQ test. When intelligence standards were lowered and Ali became I-A he filed for conscientious objector status, citing his Black Muslim faith. Aliâs application was rejected. He was convicted of draft evasion, stripped of his championship and forced into a 4 year exile that robbed him of his once unearthly physical skill.
A lot changed while Ali was gone. According to Gallup few than 1/3 of Americans felt sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake. In early 1971 that number had nearly doubled. But this was still America. Despite any collective personal growth the country had experienced in the prior 4 years ethnic wars always sell here, especially in boxing.
Into the fight people who should have known better fell into Aliâs race-baiting game. Among them Bryant Gumbel, then the editor of Black Sports Magazine and author of the essay âIs Joe Frazier a White Champion in a Black Skin?â for Boxing Illustrated. Jet called Frazier an âunheralded white-created championâ. Ebony magazine wrote that a win by Frazier âwould be especially appreciated by the conservative blacks and⊠many Caucasians who see him, ironically, as some kind of Great White Hope. They want to see Frazier whip âthat uppity loud nigger Clay!â.
Frazier carried his rage into the fight and with him for the last 40 years of his life. His pre-fight prayer was âLord, help me kill this man because he is not righteous.â The prayer exposed Frazierâs youth that night. Trainers of all faith, even atheists, know that when it comes to boxing God doesnât play favorites. What He usually does, or at least what He did to Ali and Frazier was let them kill large chunks of one another every two years from 1971 to 1975.
The star power at Madison Square Garden for the first Ali-Frazier fight will never, ever be matched. Justin Bieber may ring walk with Mayweather Saturday. For Ali-Frazier Frank Sinatra, a superstar in his 50s, took pictures of the fight for Life magazine just so he could get a good seat. Everyone was dressed like prom night held during the AVN Awards. Hef was there but no one noticed since he was with girlfriend Barbi Benton who was reportedly wearing a see-through blouse covered (slightly) by a monkey fur vest.
Those were less sensitive times but most of those at ringside would have traded places with that monkey in an instant.
And the scene in that Denzel movie is true. The FBI did âdiscoverâ Harlemâs heroin kingpin when agents decided to investigate the guy in the fur hat who had better seats than two Vice Presidents, 14 governors, Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, Barbi Bentonâs vest and Clyde âNo Relationâ Frazier who must have spent 4 years worth of salary dressing for the occasion.
As for the fight itself, it pretty much had everything. It was sad, scary, awesome and always intense. For 15 rounds Ali showed flashes of brilliance, like this sequence of 3 left hooks and a right cross in round 9:
But the version of Ali who could have finished Frazier never made it out of the 60s. The Ali of 1971 just didnât have the gas to sustain such attacks anymore. Still in the early stages of working with the concept of physical limitation, Ali was reduced to inexplicable and generally disastrous moves like lying on the ropes tapping Frazier with exaggerated tenderness or mugging for the crowd. Check out this round 11 sequence. Ali waves Frazier in and is promptly hit with three lightning bolts. The body shot in the middle sounds like a bat hitting a watermelon.
Over the last 44 years the simplistic Ali-Frazier narrative became more balanced. Apologies were made all around, though Frazier never accepted any of them. America grew up just a little bit about race. Very little but still weâre better than we were in 1971. In the immediate wake of the fight Gumbel and other anti-establishment types were despondent. They indeed felt as though theyâd lost everything.
All himself took a more practical approach. Perenchio visited a somber Ali dressing room after the fight. The singer Diana Ross was alone with with the now undisputed ex-champ. She was sobbing. âDianaâ Ali mumbled cheerfully, âmeet the man who paid me $2.5 million to get my ass whipped.â
His slight redemption in the eyes of the public still decades ahead of him, the Frazier of the 70s exacerbated his image as a lucky Uncle Tom. After beating Ali he spent the better part of a month in a hospital then outdid Aliâs prediction of a phone call by actually going to the White House to visit with President Nixon.
Same as it ever was.
The more things change the fewer cliches we need. The best that can be said for Mayweather-Pacquiao is that its narrative fits into a nicely traditional package of Good vs. Evil. Gifted with a fast tongue but no wit Floyd has absolutely done fresh stuff with his role as designated bad guy. He beats women (plural) both physically and emotionally and blames them for it in public. (âDid I restrain a woman that was on drugs? Yes I did. If thatâs domestic violence then Iâm guiltyâ was how he explained his horrifying record of domestic abuse)
Thankfully Mayweather draws the line when it comes to race baiting society. He sticks to thinking everyone in Asia is Japanese and thus worthy only of serving him.
Hereâs Mayweather discussing a Pacquiao in 2010: âWeâre going to cook that little yellow chump. You better all get on the bandwagon now⊠Iâll make that mother f*cker make me a sushi roll and some rice.â
As the Good Guy PacMan simply has to ignore his own past and cite God a lot. Done and done. In March Pacquiao, a confessed boozing, gambling, womanizing (allegedly) tax dodging lapsed-Catholic until becoming Born Again in 2012 expressed a sentiment Joe Frazier could relate to when he described his biggest advantage this weekend. âThe Lord will deliver (Mayweather) into my hands.â
Time is a flat circle. Regardless of how itâs monetized, boxing itself never changes. Itâs our crudest, most basic sport. About one night ever generation boxing achieves something higher either through athletic accomplishment or market disruption.
Saturday wonât be one of those nights.
Other Reading:
Here are the fights that made the cut on my spread sheet: Johnson-Jeffries 1910, Tunney-Dempsey II 1927, Louis-Schmeling 1938, Ali-Frazier 1971, Leonard-Hearns 1981, Cooney-Holmes 1982, Lewis-Tyson 2002, De La Hoya - Mayweather 2007. Fights not making the cut were Duran-Leonard, Foreman vs anyone or Tyson in his prime. Evander Holyfield should be in there somewhere but for despite his remarkable fights none made the cut as Super Fights. I also much of anything from the end of World War II to about 1965 because of organized crime making things too complicated. That period is akin to boxingâs steroid era.
Floyd and Manny came thisclose to fighting for 1/3 as much:
War Stats
Mayweather âcook me some riceâ http://sports.espn.go.com/sports/boxing/news/story?id=5527403