De La Hoya says Mayweather-McGregor will hurt boxing

Boxingnews24.com

By Allan Fox: Floyd Mayweather Jr’s circus fight against UFC star Conor McGregor has Golden Boy Promotions boss Oscar De La Hoya concerned that the fight could do irreparable harm to boxing by driving fans away from the sport due to the match being such a horrible one. De La Hoya points out that boxing is only now starting to recover from the fiasco of the 2015 Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao mega-fight, which turned out to be a badly overpriced fight that cost the boxing fans plenty and failed to deliver action despite the build-up and hype surrounding the fight.

Mayweather, 40, retired shortly after the Pacquiao fight in walking away with huge money from that match. Mayweather is now about to come out of retirement not to fight a boxer like Keith Thurman or Errol Spence Jr., but instead to fight an MMA fighter with no boxing experience in McGregor. Sadly, it’s a fight that will count as a real professional fight and not as exhibition, which is what it probably should be. The World Boxing Association is reportedly not going to sanction the Mayweather-McGregor fight. Just like De La Hoya, WBA president Gilberto Jesus Mendoza sees the Mayweather-McGregor fight as being bad for boxing. He views it as an exhibition bout only.

“I believe that this would only be an exhibition match,” said Mendoza via Fight News. ”I don’t think that it’s good for boxing for this to be endorsed as an official fight. I think both are great athletes, but Floyd is retired and if he wants to return there are great boxers he can face to give a good show.”

Unfortunately, one of the other sanctioning bodies will surely endorse the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight. It wouldn’t be surprising if one of them creates a special made up belt for Mayweather and McGregor to fight over in order to validate the fight with the casual boxing fans. You can argue that the Nevada State Athletic Commission should step in and fail to sanction the Mayweather-McGregor fight because it pits a novice with a 0-0 record in McGregor against the best fighter in out era in Mayweather.

How does the Nevada Commission sanction such a bad fight? There’s a potential for McGregor to get hurt because he’s not trained in boxing. MMA is different sport. The fighters in the UFC have just the basics of stand-up fighting. You can take one of them and shove him into the ring with a championship level boxer like Mayweather and expect them to do well. Mayweather and McGregor is a massacre waiting to happen. All the boxing fans that foolishly think that this is going to be a competitive fight are going to be irate when it turns out to be a mismatch with Mayweather obliterating McGregor.

Here’s what De La Hoya had to say on his Facebook about the Mayweather-McGregor fight:

To my fellow boxing fans: I write in the hopes that together we can protect the sport of boxing. With each passing day, it looks more and more likely that the circus known as Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor will be coming to town in the near future. We, the fans, who are the lifeblood of our sport. Boxing is starting to dig out of the hole that Floyd and Manny Pacquiao shoveled by waiting seven years to put on a fight that ended up being as dull as it was anti-climactic,” said De La Hoya.

De La Hoya is 100% right in calling Mayweather vs. McGregor a “circus” fight, because that’s exactly what it is. This isn’t a boxing match. It’s a farce in my opinion, and I think it’s going to badly hurt the sport by not only angering the casual fans to drive them away from ever purchasing another boxing fight on PPV, but also it will siphon off fans to start following MMA. For all intents and purposes, Mayweather-McGregor amounts to be a huge advertisement for UFC, because it pits their biggest attraction in McGregor against Mayweather. The casual fans that have never seen McGregor’s act before will find him interesting outside of the ring, because he’s theatrical and has comedic skills along a ton of charisma.

The thing that makes McGregor interesting to watch isn’t his fighting. It’s his personality and the things he says. McGregor is to capture a lot of fans from the Mayweather fight, and that’s going to help the UFC. You wonder why the UFC is willing to let McGregor fight Mayweather in a boxing match. It’s easy to understand. It’s going to give McGregor a ton of visibility from boxing fans both casual and hardcore. McGregor and the UFC are going to be the winner of the Mayweather fight and boxing the loser.

Like I’ve said before, the reason why the Mayweather vs. McGregor fight won’t help boxing is because Mayweather will go back into retirement with the loot that he gets from beating up McGregor. The MMA fans won’t have Mayweather to follow after he beats McGregor because he’s going to retire again. Mayweather isn’t interested in risking his health and unbeaten record fighting a top boxer like Spence or Keith Thurman, considering that those fights bring lots of risk.

Thurman is very fast, and he would surely catch Mayweather with his power shots. Spence is a ferocious body puncher, who gave Mayweather all kinds of problems in their sparring session 5 years ago. Spence is now nearing his prime and he would be a nightmare for Mayweather to deal with, because he wouldn’t waste time head-hunting like most of Mayweather’s opponents. He would attack Mayweather’s body and take the air out of his tires.

”2017 has started off as a banner year for boxing,” said De La Hoya. ”Joshua vs. Klitschko; Thurman vs. Garcia; Golovkin vs. Jacobs; Canelo vs. Chavez. All four of these fights — and many more — have brought the fight game back and reinvigorated interest from the ever-elusive casual fan. But if you thought Mayweather/Pacquiao was a black eye for our sport — a matchup between two of the best pound-for-pound fighters that simply didn’t deliver — just wait until the best boxer of a generation dismantles someone who has never boxed competitively at any level — amateur or professional. Our sport might not ever recover,” said De La Hoya.

I do think that boxing will recover from Mayweather’s fight with McGregor, but I believe it might take a couple of years for it to come back. That’s if Mayweather doesn’t decide on returning to the ring to fight another MMA fighter in another mismatch. You would think that the boxing and MMA fans would be wiser from the experience and wouldn’t purchase another mismatch involving Mayweather against another MMA fighter, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the fans purchase additional fights involving him.

Hopefully this doesn’t have a cascading effect where other boxers see how much money Mayweather makes off the McGregor and try and duplicate his efforts by fighting someone else from the UFC. If that kind of thing runs out of control, we could see the sport of boxing becoming a mockery of itself. How do you take boxing seriously as a sport if the top fighters are going to be fighting MMA fighters instead of guys from their own sport?

Mayweather’s fight with McGregor is going to very likely result in a massive amount of angry fans that feel that they were ripped off by the fight. If Mayweather totally clowns McGregor inside the ring the way that some people think he will, boxing and MMA fans are going to hopping mad for the money that they wasted in the fight. As of now, there has been no news about how much the Mayweather-McGregor fight will be going for on PPV, but given Mayweather’s huge asking price of $100 million minimum for the fight, it’s pretty much a certainty that the price for the Mayweather-McGregor fight will be between $100-$110 on PPV, as well as hiked prices for tickets like we saw for the Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight in 2015. The fans that purchase Mayweather’s circus fight against McGregor are likely going to have an expensive cable bill after they purchase the fight.

”I fully understand the initial attraction from any fan of combat sports. McGregor is almost certainly the best pound-for-pound MMA fighter. Floyd is Floyd — the most dominant boxer of his time,” said De La Hoya. ”But success in one sport does not guarantee success in another. Far from it. And let’s be clear, these are two different sports — from the size of the gloves fighters wear, to the size and shape of the ring, to the fact the one sport allows combatants to use their legs to strike. It’s not like McGregor would be fighting a good fighter, let alone a mediocre one. He would be fighting the best,” said De La Hoya.

There’s video of McGregor sparring boxer Chris Van Heerden on Youtube. McGregor looked terrible. Van Heerden, a fighter that Errol Spence Jr. destroyed in 8 rounds in 2015, was toying with McGregor. Van Heerden was having his way with McGregor with ease, which is totally understandable given the experience gap between the two fighters in boxing. McGregor looked like someone who had put on a pair of gloves for the first time. The sparring wasn’t that long ago. McGregor likely learned very little since then about how to fight in the boxing ring.
It would be nice if McGregor fought a few lower level boxers to show the world that he can compete in boxing. At least it would make the fight with Mayweather seem more genuine and not a glorified sparring match with a high price tag.

Now, I know critics will say that I’m only writing this letter because my company is promoting what will be the culmination of an outstanding boxing year when Canelo Alvarez takes on Gennady “GGG” Golovkin in September, and I don’t want anything to distract attention away from that fight,” said De La Hoya. . ”But my interest is in the health of boxing as a whole. It always has been. And if Floyd were to come out of retirement to take on someone like Keith “One-time” Thurman, Errol Spence or some other top welterweight, not only would I applaud the fight, I’d be the first one on line for a ticket. That kind of fight is what the fans — and I am a fan first — deserve. Which brings me back to the circus. Floyd’s and Conor’s motivation is clear. It’s money. In fact, they don’t even pretend it’s not. But it’s also a lack of consequences for when the fight ends up being the disaster that is predicted. After this fight, neither of them will need us anymore. Floyd will go back to retirement — presumably for good this time with another nine-figure paycheck — and Conor will go back to the UFC,” said De La Hoya.

Mayweather and McGregor’s fight is all about money. Mayweather is saying that he’s only interested in coming back to boxing for the McGregor fight because it’s one that the fans are asking him for. I don’t know that the fans are asking for him to fight McGregor. I think it’s more of a case of Mayweather seeing an opportunity for a big payday in an easy fight against a guy with no experience or ability in boxing. Mayweather wants the payday that comes from the McGregor fight.

Mayweather clearly doesn’t want the work involved with fighting Spence, Thurman, Gennady Golovkin or even Canelo. That’s hard work for Mayweather to fight any of those guys now. Canelo is too big to be melting down to fight Mayweather at 152 like he did in 2013. A rematch between would be a different situation completely with Mayweather dealing with a full grown Canelo, who is no longer the boy that Mayweather beat in 2013.

”It’s a win-win for them. It’s a lose-lose for us,” said De L Hoya about Mayweather and McGregor. ”We’ll be $100 lighter and we will have squandered another opportunity to bring boxing back to its rightful place as the sport of kings. At this point, only we can shut the circus down by making it clear that we won’t pay to see a joke of a fight and telling our casual-fan friends that they shouldn’t either.”