Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather have given us some ribald and riveting television viewing this week, as the Irish mixed martial arts fighter prepares to be annihilated in Las Vegas next month.
The UFC rent-a-mouth has been on top of his game, firing off insults machine gun style, as the promoters stoke up the publicity machine for a mismatch of epic proportions.
With both fighters picking up around 75 million dollars each for pulling the gloves on, it is a massive earner. The transatlantic trash-talk in Toronto, New York, and London, is of course, a massive promotional propaganda campaign, to part a gullible public from its cash for the pay per view farce.
While McGregor flounced around in a polar bear coat, much to the fury of the animal rights lobby, Mayweather was throwing wads of dollar bills skywards, as the publicity machine cranked up several gears.
McGregor is very good at what he does, which is mixed martial arts, and he has done for his sport what the Beatles did for pop music, taken it to a huge worldwide audience.
If this was being staged as a roundhouse scrap in a cage, then the Irishman would certainly be in with a shout. He is a hardy lad and as tough as old boots, with a heart of a lion.
It’s not though. It’s a showdown, a circus, with Marquis of Queensbury rules, against an opponent, who was the best pound for pound fighter on the planet until he retired. Even at the age of 40, Mayweather will still have the tools to put his opponent on the palms of his posterior, and probably spark out, within three rounds.
For Mayweather, the years are unlikely to have done more than fractionally diminish the kind of hand speed, and punch connection rate, which will make McGregor feel like he is facing a combination of Jesse James and Wyatt Earp.
It’s a massively unequal contest between a mouthy brawler who has no boxing ring craft, and a man who was the master of all he surveyed between the ropes.
Mayweather has a flawless record, winning all of his 49 fights: 26 by knock out, and has been on the seat of his pants only once in a 19-year career. That is a record equalled only by the legendary Rocky Marciano, whom he will surpass with victory in this Showtime sham of a contest.
McGregor has exuded a confidence which might spark a doubt in lesser men, but Mayweather has bobbed and weaved, and ducked and dived, with the quickest hands and toughest chins in boxing, and emerged undefeated and unscathed.
Against a novice, albeit with courage to spare, and 12 years his junior, he’s unlikely to meet anything which he’s not faced and conquered before.
Admittedly, McGregor only has to land the one lucky punch, but I suspect the luck of the Irish has already been fully used up, in netting him a payday which will make him a wealthy man, but ultimately still just another notch on the Floyd Mayweather belt.