|
Floyd Mayweather Jr. is American, black, and rich. He is the best boxer on the planet but you wouldn’t know that judging by the amount of hate he inspires in
America
, his own country. Last Saturday, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, who recently added the new nickname “money” to his name, scored an impressive knockout over Ricky Hatton of
Manchester
,
England
.
Even before Saturday’s fight, Mayweather was already universally recognized as the best pound for pound boxer in the world. The KO over Hatton solidified that status and ended a remarkable year in his career in which he defeated Oscar de la Hoya, boxing’s most marketable character, in the most lucrative fight in the history of the sport.
With such a roaring ring success, you’d think that Mayweather would get some love from his own countrymen. He didn’t last Saturday. He even pandered to their patriotic sensibilities by entering the ring to Bruce Springsteen’s patriotic anthem “Born in the
USA
.” Still no love for Mayweather.
Contrast this with his opponent. Tens of thousands of Hatton’s British fans invaded
Las Vegas
, venue of the fight, turning the arena into a mini
Manchester
stadium for the British challenger. Where were the American fans to match Hatton’s support and to cheer their fellow American to victory? They were conspicuously missing. Mayweather had to fly in a bunch of teenage boys that he supports through his charity foundation. They made up less than one percent of the crowd and were no match for the rabid Hatton crowd, which included hundreds, if not thousands, of Mayweather’s fellow Americans. Hatton got more love in defeat than Mayweather got in victory. American celebrities—some of them Mayweather supporters—attended the fight and gave it luster, but patriotic American fans willing to cheer for the champion were few.
Almost everyone had come to
Las Vegas
to see Mayweather lose. Before the fight American boxing blogs were awash with a steady outpouring of anti-Mayweather vitriol. Why is an undefeated boxing genius who is the first man to win championships in six weight classes without losing an object of such intense hate?
Several reasons have been advanced to explain Mayweather’s lack of public appeal. Mayweather is a trash-talking, money spraying, cocky personality who lives his life like a rap star. Mayweather likes to flaunt his wealth—his exotic cars, jewelry, and his
Las Vegas
nightclubbing lifestyle. He celebrates his friendship with brash, misogynistic rap stars like 50 Cent. In fact in a four-episode reality series leading to Saturday’s fight, Mayweather was cast as a foul-mouthed, cash-flaunting, arrogant and vain fighter. His opponent, Hatton, was by contrast cast as a “normal” person—homely, familial, down-to-earth.
In online boxing forums, where anonymity makes people more brazen and less subtle, some writers advanced Hatton as the next Great White Hope while pointing to Kelly Pavlik’s recent victory over Jermain Taylor as another White Hope moment.
But how does Mayweather differ from other successful athletes and celebrities who similarly push their fame and wealth in our faces? How is his display of wealth, self-absorption, and arrogance un-American? Are these attributes not as American as
Jamestown
? Mayweather is simply being a good American, a good disciple—and victim—of American capitalism. A popular American axiom is: if you’ve got it, flaunt it. Mayweather is doing exactly that. Conspicuous consumption is the American capitalist way, and Mayweather emblematizes it perfectly. He should be celebrated as an American hero.
I am not sure that Bill Cosby would regard Mayweather as a model of responsible black manhood. In addition to the champion’s well known character deficits, he has children with several women—out of wedlock. Perhaps this has cost Mayweather potential fans among Americans who naively look to celebrities for some transcendental moral example. But Mayweather’s situation is hardly unique. American male celebrities, black and white, have long normalized the art of siring children by different women out of wedlock.
Then there is the canard that Mayweather’s family is dysfunctional and unlikable. But this, too, is a lame excuse for hating the “Pretty Boy.” Where is the American family without a degree of dysfunction? Where is the American family that can pass the normalcy test of the ultra-conservative family activists of the American Right?
Let’s face it. Mayweather attracts so much hate partly because he is black. This is not a revelation. There has always been a racial undercurrent in sports where black athletes dominate. Boxing has always been a flashpoint of American racial tensions, a gauge of American racial tolerance. Once the most universally popular combat sport, boxing mirrored—metaphorically and physically—the race war that was being fought quietly in segregation era America and which seemed to loom all over the world.
At the turn of the 20th century, black boxers in
America
were not allowed to compete against white opponents, enabling white fighters to amass glorious records that are today touted in boxing history alongside the more legitimate ones of black fighters. Racism prevented Jack Johnson from fighting for the world heavy weight title until 1907 despite having earned a title shot many times over. Despite his subsequent seven year reign as the Heavy Weight Champion of the world, he remained unsung and his record was barely recognized.
When blacks were eventually allowed to fight white opponents, they fought for much less money, got the most unprofitable fights, and could hardly make a living as their white promoters shafted them of their ring earnings.
Starting in the 1930s, boxing became more racially democratized, bringing black champions into the mainstream of American sports and popular culture. But while this brought recognition to black boxers, it exposed them to white hate and ridicule for representing the threatening, if mythical, beastly brutality of black manhood. Black champions also became the object of intense hate because they destabilized the racist myths of white invincibility in Jim Crow America.
As black boxers piled up victories against formidable white opponents and dominated their weight classes, the notion of white hope crept into the sport. White challengers fighting black champions were no longer just out to win championships; they were out to restore white pride and supremacy. The highpoint of this racial appropriation of boxing came when Hitler and the Nazis used Max Schmeling’s victory over Joe Louis in 1936 to boost their doctrine of white Aryan supremacy.
Black champions like Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Fraser, Sonny Liston, and others were not insulated from the racism of
America
despite their fame and success in the ring. To receive American public acceptance a black champion had to essentially leave his boxing championship in the ring and become a docile black man in deference to the white establishment. It was a painful emasculation in exchange for acceptance. When Muhammad Ali rebelled against the white power structure, he was stripped of his championship, humiliated in the media, and exposed to more hate.
Mayweather’s plight is therefore not novel. In refusing to enjoy his wealth in quiet docility, Mayweather has offended a fundamental rule of black success in
America
: the successful black man must live his life by the standards of responsible black manhood articulated by the white power structure and by white racist holdouts. Wealthy blacks get points with the American public by displaying humility, gratitude, and by assimilating into American corporatist culture. Mayweather falls way short of these standards. The image of a cocky, brash, talkative black boxing champion that Muhammad Ali and Mayweather project has the same capacity to annoy white racists today as it did in Ali's era.
The build-up to Saturday’s fight exposed the depressing racial underbelly of American sports and celebrity culture. Mayweather was held to standards that white boxers are seldom held to. On blogs and on boxing messageboards, Mayweather only got love from black forum members and white boxing purists who appreciate talent and are able to uncouple Mayweather’s out-of-the-ring antics from his ring genius. Other black fighters who refuse to be held to alien standards of responsibility attract similar hostility. Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr. get more hate than love despite their exploits in the ring.
Mayweather could do nothing right in the eye of the American public in the build-up to the fight. He was routinely booed. Many Americans confessed on blogs and in boxing forums that they wanted to see him lose. Even after the vociferous British fans booed the singing of the Star Spangled Banner, only a few of these American Mayweather haters switched their support from Hatton to “Money” Mayweather. Try as he did, Mayweather could not arouse his compatriots’ patriotic fervor.
The fight itself was reminiscent of Joe Louis’ dominance over Max Schmeling in their rematch in 1938—except that it took Mayweather longer to knock Hatton out.
Did the impressive victory win Mayweather more white American fans or endear him to his fellow Americans who must have been angered by the British desecration of the U.S anthem? No. The British fans’ insult simply made them indifferent to the outcome of the fight.
The hate from the American boxing fans has not abated with Mayweather’s blowout victory; it has increased. Kevin Iole, Yahoo Sports boxing columnist, who is white, claims that he received many reader reaction emails after his write-up on Saturday’s fight putting down Mayweather with the “N” word. How despicable. Mr. Iole aptly titles his current blog “Bring the Hate,” a sarcastic retort to the racist Mayweather haters. Kevin Iole is an honest and courage man for acknowledging and lamenting the racial dimension of Mayweather’s bad public image.
The irony of this racist hate is that Mayweather tried recently to market his fistic fame to mainstream audiences by participating in the popular ABC reality series “Dancing with the Stars.” This decision to become corporately responsible in the tradition of self-interested but acceptable American capitalist self-promotion has apparently not altered public perception of him. It may have even backfired.
It is not only the out-of-the-ring conducts of black boxers that have been unfairly scrutinized. Mayweather’s ring performance has been devalued and/ or under appreciated. Other black pound-for-pound champions faced the same unfair ring scrutiny. For a long time, Roy Jones Jr. and Bernard Hopkins had their championship credentials routinely questioned. They were both accused of selecting easy opponents to pave their way to the top. Some of this criticism is legitimate, but the problem is that it is almost exclusively highlighted in regard to black champions. White champions are similarly guided strategically by commercially-minded promoters to the top, but pundits don’t devalue their championship for cherry-picking their path to the top.
A black boxer has to achieve twice as much ring success to get the same amount of validation and fan base as a white boxer. Saturday’s fight underlined this sad truth. In a fight that Mayweather dominated and in which the most generous ringside journalists and experts gave Hatton only two rounds prior to the tenth round KO, HBO’s commentary crew called several of the early rounds for Hatton and Harold Lederman, the HBO’s unofficial judge, had an even fight going into the seventh round. Only elite trainer, Emmanuel Steward, who is black, called the fight accurately, emphasizing above the Hatton love fest of his commentary colleagues that Mayweather was controlling the fight with his clean, effective punching.
To deny black boxers their credit, even time-tested axioms of boxing are being rewritten. It used to be that in boxing the operative axiom was “hit and don’t get hit,” which distinguished it from a brawl and from gory combat sports. This is why it is called the sweet science. Today, Mayweather, who is one of the greatest exponents of “hit and don’t get hit,” is called boring and uninspiring, as if the new axiom is “hit and get hit, but hit more.” White boxers are seldom held to this standard when they are at the top.
I concede that this shift in the sport from finesse and fistic aesthetics to bloodletting gore is partly a product of the growth and popularity of mixed martial arts. Some of it however came about as a racial backlash to detract from the ring exploits of great black fighters of the recent era—Hopkins, Jones, and Mayweather.
So desperate are the White Hopers for Mayweather to be dislodged from his perch at the top of the sport that they are ready to adopt Miguel Cotto, a Puerto Rican, into the role of the Great White Hope. They are now calling for a Mayweather-Cotto bout, which I would like to see but not for the same reason as the racial bigots.
If that fight happens in 2008, Mayweather’s skills will prevail. But he still wouldn’t get the recognition and acceptance he craves and deserves. There would be more White Hopes for him to supposedly prove himself against.
|
Authors 
Posted by Robot| 12.12.2007 18:05