You’re never going to beat the bully if you just hand over your lunch money.
Boxing is the bully. And MMA, for all its brutal skill and strength and toughness and posture—and the head tattoos, it’s critical I remember those—is the victim. But enough! It’s time for MMA to do the toilet head-flushing, even on the back of a defeat.
Most of boxing’s competitors and pundits were hurting each other in a desperate scramble to mount the high horse after Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s 10th-round TKO of UFC champ Conor McGregor on Saturday. The bout went largely to expectations: McGregor was the aggressor early and tired down the stretch, when Mayweather made his move and had his way.
The boxing media was delighted, feeling vindicated against the brash upstart embodied by McGregor.
Eamon Lynch of Newsweek declared that “by the eighth round, the most feared man in the UFC was scuffling with all the ferocity and accuracy of a middle manager arguing with a colleague at after-work cocktails.”
There was a backhanded compliment from Michael Rosenthal of The Ring: “I thought it would be easier for this generation’s greatest boxer but ultimately he executed an intelligent game plan with only a few minor hitches, which resulted in a beatdown. I don’t think anyone would argue otherwise.”
Albert Burneko of Deadspin, a steadfast MMA and UFC critic, threw no such roses:
“Holy moly, Conor McGregor is a fucking stiff. An amateur fighter with the very least willingness to take some actual chances could have knocked him over with a sneeze by the third round. Off the top of my head, he is the single most incompetent puncher I’ve ever seen in a PPV boxing promotion in my whole life, and his punching wasn’t even the worst of it.”
Even the venerable New York Times seemed to get into the race, breathlessly declaring McGregor’s face bloodied by Mayweather when no such thing happened (it subsequently corrected the article):
It wasn’t all haughty or mean-spirited, but a lot of it was. And as fun as that stuff is to write and read, it looks right past the finger on the scale. This was essentially an exhibition match—big-money, sure, but an exhibition nonetheless. So you can judge that on its own merits, as well as the ridiculous spectacle it all created. You can evaluate Mayweather’s ability to take and win a fight against someone with no experience akin to his.
But you can’t say boxing “beat” MMA, or even an MMA fighter, or shuck off the MMA fighter’s pro boxing abilities. It will never be apples to apples, even more so because no boxer this side of open homelessness will ever step into an MMA cage, where they’d be churned into hamburger.
They tried, though. And in trying they ignored some facts. The fact is, McGregor did better than his critics suggested. He had strong jabs early and did some good countering, even slipping a punch or two in a way that evoked Mayweather himself. McGregor ultimately landed more punches (111) than Manny Pacquiao (81) and only seven fewer than Canelo Alvarez (118). That’s not the work of a stiff, is it?
See? It’s just something fun to say. But the fun ignores the uneven athletic playing field at work. By extension, that downgrades MMA athletes and the high level at which those professionals practice their own trade. Many MMA fighters were proud of McGregor Saturday because of the way he handled himself, even if he is brash and crazy and not as good of a boxer as the best boxer of his generation.
Unfortunately, that’s not the norm in the MMA community. People act like George McFly: “Oh, boxing, you got us again! Boy, I hope I can come back to your house someday and let you give me that atomic wedgie you wanted. I’m sorry again that my undies weren’t stretchy enough.”
MMA people just aren’t proud of their own, at least not as often as those in other sports, when it comes to outsiders or rivals, in this case boxing. It’s not “cool” to stand up and defend the sport. Maybe it’s the dysfunctional manner in which the UFC is run. Maybe it’s the shocking lack of money the athletes receive, particularly in relation to boxing.
Maybe it’s because of its exploding popularity—it’s not so underground anymore that fans feel that they’re plugged into something special, but not big enough so that its TV ratings outpace the average PGA tournament. Or maybe it’s just because they’re tired of watching people look askance and crinkle up their noses.
We’ll never actually know whether MMA is better than boxing. But boxing can do a better job of not being threatened by MMA, and MMA can do a better job of standing its ground in this debate, particularly at times like this when it becomes national. That was well spelled-out by MMA Fighting writer Mike Chiappetta today on Twitter.
There is room for both. But fans of boxing—the old sport, the sweet science—now with more cache than MMA, seems unlikely to cede any ground. Maybe MMA fans just have to get out of the tattoo chair and take some.
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