“I think we gave the fans what they wanted to see,” Floyd Mayweather said after his ten-round technical knockout of Conor McGregor Saturday night. Indeed the fight, pitting an undefeated boxer with 49 wins going into the bout, against a mixed martial artist who’d never boxed professionally, exceeded expectations. Even Mayweather was a bit surprised. “He’s a lot better than I thought he’d be,” he said of McGregor. “He’s a tough competitor, but I was the better man tonight.”
As many fight fans predicted, McGregor, at 29 a decade younger than Mayweather, came out aggressively in the opening rounds. His footwork was better than expected, and he touched Mayweather frequently, especially with a surprisingly sharp jab. Mayweather spent the early part of the fight sitting back and sizing up his opponent—he threw only six punches in the first round, 10 in the second, 12 in the third. The peculiar paradox is that for all McGregor’s activity—34, 42, 39 punches in the first three rounds—it only showed Floyd that he didn’t have to fear the Irishman’s power. After the third round, it was only a matter of time before Mayweather picked him apart.
Mayweather was never in danger, even when McGregor scored with his best shot of the night, to the body, in the eighth. Yes, McGregor landed more punches, in 10 rounds with Mayweather, than several likely future hall of famers—Manny Pacquiao, Miguel Cotto, and Shane Mosley—who went the distance with Floyd. But out of 430 punches thrown, McGregor still scored at a rate of only 26 percent. Mayweather was twice as efficient, landing 170 punches out of 320, at 53 percent.
By the eighth round, Mayweather was tearing McGregor up. Another fighter might have been stopped before the 10th, but a better boxer wouldn’t have eaten so many right hands. It’s not clear if Mayweather’s conditioning was that much better than that of the MMA fighter, or if the 40-year-old boxer simply wore down his younger and bigger opponent with blows to the head and body. Even early in the fight McGregor was a relatively easy target—his hands were at his chest, his chin was up, and he didn’t move his head enough—but as McGregor tired in the later rounds, he was virtually stationary.
McGregor said after the fight that the referee shouldn’t have stopped it. “I’ve been strangled on live TV and came back,” he said. I would have liked him to just let it go.” No way, said Floyd. “I hear him talk about ‘Oh, you should let me go out on my back,'” Mayweather said in his postfight press conference. “No, the referee saved you. He’s thinking about your future. You’re still young, and we want you to be able to fight again.”
He sure doesn’t need to. As Adrien Broner and Danny Garcia, both one-time world champions, explained, somewhat grudgingly, postfight, McGregor now has a 0-1 record as a professional—and still landed a bigger payday than most established professionals, like Broner and Garcia, could ever dream of. Will McGregor, who briefly flirted with retirement last year, go back to MMA or is there more boxing in his future? Two or three years, say, five or six fights under his belt, and who knows if he wouldn’t be ready to compete for a belt? Maybe middleweight. Or maybe he’s proved he’s as much of a draw as Mayweather already and he wants the winner of the Canelo Alvarez v. Gennady Golovkin fight next month.
And what’s in Floyd’s future? Ring commentators couldn’t help but wonder if he was rusty after a two-year layoff, or if the 40-year-old champ was just getting too old. After all, where was the defensive wizard who barely gets touched by his opponent? Here was Mayweather getting hit by an amateur. I haven’t watched the replay yet, but I don’t remember Floyd much using the shoulder roll, a defensive technique that, as Mayweather expertly deploys it, makes him virtually impossible to hit. Instead, he spent much of the night with both gloves tucked at his ears as he came forward.
Why the different approach? As Floyd explained after the fight, “I had to come straight ahead and give the fans a show.” With Showtime charging $100 a pop on pay-per-view, Mayweather wanted to make sure the enormous worldwide audience got its money’s worth—especially since they’ve felt cheated before by the man known as “Money.” “I owed them,” said Mayweather, “for the Pacquiao fight.”
Whether Mayweather shuts down his opponent entirely, like he did with Pacquiao, or trades blows, some fight fans just aren’t going to be satisfied. But McGregor understood very well what happened. “He’s not that fast, he’s not that powerful,” McGregor said of Mayweather, “but boy, is he composed in there … He was just a lot more composed with his shots. I have to give it to him, that’s what 50 pro fights will do for you.”
But there’s something else going on, besides the experience of 50 professional fights, or Floyd’s storied amateur career, or being raised by a father and uncle who were also professional fighters. As Andre Berto, the last man Mayweather fought before McGregor put it, Floyd “just slows it all the way down.”
This is how athletes in any professional sport describe those colleagues who are at the top of the profession. The regular pros—i.e., people who are, compared to the normal run of humanity, extraordinarily gifted athletes—understand it because they get a glimpse of what it’s like to be great every once in a while.
When you’re on a 15-game hitting streak, for instance, the ball just seems to slow down, and you can see the ball coming out of the pitcher’s hand, the rotation, the seams, and you know if it’s a slider or a cutter, because you can see everything. And then the magic is gone, your genius has abandoned you, and it’s all back to normal, it’s faster again. That’s what it’s like for most professional athletes most of the time. The really great ones can’t describe how things get slow because it’s the only reality they know. They’re special—like Floyd Mayweather, one of the greatest boxers of all time.
