12 must-read stories on the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight

Floyd Mayweather is fighting Conor McGregor so we can talk about it. Born out of that comes every other reason that the two fighters — a 49-0 boxer known as one of the greatest ever, and a MMA fighter whose grandiose facade may come crashing down over 12 rounds — are inflicting bodily harm upon each other, for sport, in front of an audience of millions, on Saturday. Without us talking about it, there would be no fight. They don’t care about this unless we did first.

Talk about it we have, in bars and on radio shows and to friends and with strangers. There’s so much to talk about! The actual substance of the fight and whether there’s actually anything to it. The morality of these two objectively bad people. The reasons why they’re fighting. Why we should or should not care. Where they came from. We’ve even talked about the people talking about them, and why they did or didn’t talk about them in the right way, and how the act of talking about them is bad, or maybe it’s fine.

Saturday night, we can finally stop talking them. They’ll fight, one will win, and we’ll move on. Until then, with so many people talking about it, you should consume the very best of it.

We curated 12 rounds of stories — boxing term! — and tacked a few equally worthy ones to the end. If you read anything between now and Saturday night, and you haven’t read any of these, allow this to be your one-stop Mayweather vs. McGregor guide.

Boxing is American sports’ prized zombie. When it shows up, everyone freaks the hell out and pays attention. It’s horrifying, arresting, contagious, and probably a bad thing for anyone concerned with human life. Hang out around it too much, and it will eventually eat you. Boxing, as a major sport, isn’t exactly alive—but it’s certainly not dead, and when there’s an outbreak people can’t pay attention to anything else.

It’s also one of those sports that can easily break quarantine as a discipline. They can crash all the way over into something else entirely. That something ends up being less like a sport, and more like pure, horrific, and inevitably absurd spectacle.

This is where things get silly.

Both Mayweather and McGregor post fake flyers for the fight, which puts gas on the fire. From here the two jab back-and-forth over the possibility of the fight, with the impasse routinely being how much money they would both be paid.

McGregor kept contending that he deserved more money than the fight as offering, while Mayweather poked fun at Conor’s net worth — saying he didn’t deserve being paid more than $2.5 million.

And so even though Floyd Mayweather Jr. sucks, and even though he has signed up to spar against horrible people for the two most recent fights of his anyone cares about—Manny Pacquiao, then Conor McGregor—the urge remains. One of them has to be good, right? Or at least less bad? Someone has to be worth rooting for?

No. Not even close. In this case, like before, they both suck.

Some would wonder if hanging out in a gentlemen’s club into the wee hours of the morning is the best way to prepare for a fast approaching fight, but Mayweather laughs that off. He is, as a matter of point, 49-0 in his career heading into Saturday’s bout with Conor McGregor.

There is no one else on earth who knows more about not just what it takes to win, but to never lose.

“Nobody can beat me,” Mayweather says over the din of the club. “Nobody can beat me.”

Once, before he had a driver’s license, (McGregor) persuaded Egan to let him take the wheel of Egan’s parents’ car. He drove in perfect circles around an industrial park. He flashed his blinker at the optimal time and turned with precision. As long as he was in motion, he was in control. When it came time to park, McGregor hit the gas and made a beeline toward the spot. The car crashed into the wall and smoke billowed into the sky. He had forgotten to hit the brakes.

Why does Mayweather remain such a compelling figure despite his repeated and documented instances of domestic abuse? Let us count the ways: There are no publicly available photos showing the evidence of his crimes; there’s no central organization to hold Mayweather and other abusive boxers to account; and there’s an understanding, however contentious, that some boxers are inherently violent, their rage uncontrollable. Furthermore, there’s a long-standing pattern of victims, especially black women, holding their tongues to protect the black men who hit them.

All of those factors leave some fans torn, some indifferent and some completely disgusted. Despite the moral split decision, many boxing fans remain reliable spectators who continue to reward Mayweather with cultural cachet, fame and money, money, money.

McGregor hit the throttle and roared down the street. Drug dealers scrambled to whatever safety they could find as he sped through the intersection. A wise move in practice for a Crumlin native, but McGregor had underestimated the mania sweeping the projects and the lower-class quarters of Dublin. The dealers didn’t want to confront him.

They all had a phone in their hands.

They wanted to take his picture.

Owen Roddy shakes his head. This feels like a dream, he says, like none of this is real. He may be the superstar’s striking coach now — or rather, his boxing coach; these are strange times — but that was never the plan. Because when he started, none of this was possible in Ireland. The dream didn’t exist. Mixed martial arts in the country was fiction and the notion of an Irishman vying for the world’s respect was ludicrous. The Irish hadn’t won a single fight in the UFC, much less achieved any measure of genuine success.

But Roddy was the one. He was always the one. He was the one who was going to break through.

McGregor isn’t the first superstar to move from the octagon to the boxing ring. One of MMA’s greatest fighters, Anderson “The Spider” Silva, tried the same thing back in 1998. He faced the not-exactly-household-name Osmar “Animal” Luiz Teixeira and after all of six minutes, Teixeira’s pugilistic skills proved too much for fellow Brazilian Silva. To protect him, Silva’s corner threw in the towel in the second round. Silva’s unparalleled genius in the octagon translated into his losing to someone even charitably described as a journeyman boxer; if this is any litmus test of what to expect from McGregor squaring off against Mayweather — one of boxing’s all-time greatest fighters— the current +400 money line somehow doesn’t reflect it.

Mayweather-McGregor is often compared to Muhammad Ali’s bout with Japanese pro wrestler Antonio Inoki. In terms of horrible watchability, a better analogue is the 1982 title bout between Larry Holmes and Gerry Cooney, which was peddled in the crudest racial terms imaginable. Time magazine paired Cooney and Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky on the cover as boxing’s great white hopes; Cooney spoke of his fondness for the movie Death Wish, in which a white vigilante rubs out the black bad guys. When Holmes, who was the reigning heavyweight champ, complained he was getting the same purse as the challenger, he was called a racist.

Mayweather-McGregor hasn’t yet scraped bottom in quite the same way. But the months of hype have felt equally dismal. George Vecsey’s 1982 column about Holmes-Cooney could run this week with only minor edits. The column was titled “Get It Over With.”

With no great white American hope in the ring, and no promising contender on the horizon, boxing is still without what it needs to capture the attention of the coveted white male fan base. McGregor, far more the mixed martial artist than boxer, offers what the sport has long fantasized about: a brash, charismatic showman outside of the ring who not only talks a good game, but delivers by way of victories and the brutal knockouts fans crave. Especially the legions of white male fans who have come to adore him and flock to the UFC en masse to see his fights.

Maybe most importantly, the advantage McGregor has in using movement training in MMA fights is a psychological one — both for his own psyche and to use against his opponent. Fighters all train, but not all of them have a good handle on tuning their psychological wiring to the exact right frequency before a fight. Some rely on superstition, some rely on habit and routine, but all of them — at least those who aren’t complete head cases in the ring — have something they lean on to tolerate the absurd pressure of what is an inherently absurd situation.