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HBO's shameless marketing ploy: It works on me!
05/04/07
by Clay

Perhaps because the HBO programming staff is so devious, I've gotten sucked into the Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. boxing match that's set for this Saturday.

In case you don't have HBO, each fighter has allowed a film crew to follow him as he trains for the bout, and each week there has been new footage airing. So far we've seen a few episodes, Mayweather training in Las Vegas and De La Hoya's camp in the suburbs of San Juan, Puerto Rico. The show has featured not only the fighters themselves but their families, their support staffs and their homes.

If you haven't been watching, come along for this column ride and let me tell you why I care more about this boxing match than any other in the last seven or eight years.

First of all, HBO's to be commended for setting up this series immediately after an hour-and-a-half of television featuring The Sopranos and Entourage. After these two shows I'd probably watch a reality series on ant farms if HBO put it on. But as I've watched more episodes leading up this fight, I've come to see an eerie similarity between both men and the shows that precede them.

Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s family, for instance, is emblematic of The Sopranos. Two brothers, Floyd Mayweather Sr. and Roger Mayweather, competing for the influence of the prodigal offspring who has brought great riches to the family. Despite his boxing successes (37-0 as a professional fighter), Mayweather Jr. strikes me, to a certain degree, as sharing many similarities with Anthony Jr. on The Sopranos. Both men seem to recoil from the overarching dark shadows of their fathers and the family and seem haunted by professions, boxing and the mob, that stalk their families.

Similarly, Entourage offers easy analogies to the masculine relationships that define both boxers in their jobs and training. Hardly ever is either man alone. Each man's every desire is catered to by a coterie of men, and like Vince, each man seems uncomfortable without a familiar entourage surrounding him at all times. Even in success, each man is, in a sense, eternally a child.

In addition to the congruencies De La Hoya/Mayweather 24/7 shares with the television shows that air before it, 24/7 also adds a completely new wrinkle to sports reality television as new episodes have featured footage of the fighters watching themselves on the television show. Unlike previous reality television featuring sporting outcomes, we're moving along in real time. The fighters not only are the stars of the show, they're watching the show play out at the same time as the viewers. Big Brother meets boxing. Each trainer dissects tape and attempts to throw off the opposing fighter by allowing the cameras a calculated view of the training regimen. Within 10 minutes of this show beginning, I cared more about the outcome of this fight than any since Mike Tyson fought Lennox Lewis or Evander Holyfield.

And in the process the show has provided a window into the soul of both fighters. Of course this is a doubtlessly manipulative and simplified view (with fighters, you never know what edge exactly each man is attempting to gain by his portrayal) but it has managed to draw me into the bout in a way that no fight really has since Tyson entered the ring as a carnival act. However, I'm intrigued by this show not because of the fighters' outlandish personalities, but because each man has given us a picture of his unique attributes. And I care even though, I suspect, both fighters are smart enough to know that the more people who love or hate them, the better chance they have of garnering the largest pay-per-view boxing crowd in history.

Mayweather Jr. is a study in opposites alternately glaring and welcoming, boastful and seeking; an erratic canvas of conflicting emotions and colors. At times you feel as if he's a misguided child. At others, his dark eyes seem to hide the remorseless glare of a killer. Then Mayweather smiles and it's as if we're all supposed to be in on the joke. Only Mayweather's portrayal as a boastful and sociopathic assassin is so compelling that, at times, it seems even Mayweather himself is uncertain when he's playing to the camera and when he's being himself. Ultimately, Mayweather doesn't seem opposed to playing the villain. Not if the villainy pays well, at least.

On the show, De La Hoya is the studied opposite. He's a boxing mogul who has brought in nearly half a billion dollars in ring revenue and founded his own production company. You don't become the Golden Boy by forgetting to remove and replace your wedding ring after each sparring session. You don't become the Golden Boy by forgetting your wife's birthday or neglecting to bring a cake home for her. You don't become the Golden Boy by cursing your opponent and talking about how badly you're going to beat him, as Mayweather does all the time. You become the Golden Boy by rejecting much of the flair, dramatics and histrionics of modern day boxing and using this rejection to pad your public image and cash the checks that a willing and grateful public thrusts in your direction.

Of course these are just rough character sketches. Despite his role as the good guy in this fight, De La Hoya also fathered three children out of wedlock, including one with Shanna Moakler and another with a Las Vegas showgirl. But if good vs. evil pays the bills, well then, it's good vs. evil we're going to see. And at the very least it's going to be entertaining. As such here are eight striking things about this show and the upcoming bout:

1. Floyd Mayweather, Jr. carries around stacks of cash, which he then obsessively counts out over and over again. In this behavior he is exactly like my nephew Chase. Who, by the way, stopped doing this when he was 6 years old.

2. De La Hoya trains in Puerto Rico, in the suburbs of San Juan. For this reason alone I'm rooting for him. San Juan is one of the best cities that most people have never visited. Go some time. It's spectacular.

3. At least once, Mayweather Jr. is shown watching a playoff game featuring Allen Iverson and we learn that Floyd has legally wagered 35K on the outcome, which he then proceeds to count out and place in a stack on the counter in front of him. This is after, of course, he instructs his 4-year-old son that he can never go wrong by betting on A.I. But by carrying around his cash all the time, it also points to a more glaring and apparent fear for a boxer who claims to fear nothing; that if Mayweather Jr. can't see his money with his own eyes, it might not be there.

4. At one point my wife pointed out that De La Hoya was running laps by del Morro, a 16th century fort that was designed to protect San Juan from invaders. "Look, it's your fort," my wife said, because I had been so impressed by del Morro during our visits to Old San Juan. My wife and I spent a great day checking out this fort a couple of years ago. Scratch that, I did. My wife got to the circular driveway of the fort and decided to take a cab to the local mall instead. True story.

5. 50 Cent hangs out with Mayweather Jr. and in the first episode, for some reason, makes an appearance on a Segway. Evidently nothing says street cred like a several-thousand-dollar rolling walker. Then 50 proceeds to rap while looking ridiculous on the Segway. Of course not as ridiculous as he'll look if he loses the $1 million bet he has placed on Mayweather.

6. Playing up the immediacy of the show, in the last episode, Oscar De La Hoya's wife, chef and trainer all appear in the De La Hoya home riding their own Segways and making fun of 50 Cent. Just classic. For his sake, I hope the De La Hoya chef doesn't end up in an elevator alone with 50 in Las Vegas.

7. Oscar De La Hoya's celebrity friends? Michael J. Fox, George Lopez, and Matthew McConaughey. I'm not going to lie, I was holding out hope for James Van Der Beek until the last possible moment.

8. In perhaps the most perverse scene on the show, a sadistic Mayweather Jr. makes his sparring partner bleed and then dances around in a blood-stained shirt while pretending to be arrested for committing a murder. High comedy indeed. Whatever pays the bills, yo.

To succeed in garnering a broad audience, boxing realizes (at least these two fighters do) it needs to provide characters that people care about. All too often what has been lacking in modern boxing (aside from some faith in the fairness of the outcomes) is a reason to care who wins.

I'm too young to remember the days when who you rooted for in boxing identified you ethnically. And I know this is still the case for segments of the Hispanic population (ergo De La Hoya's brilliant business decision to fight on Cinco de Mayo), but for the non-Hispanic public at large this ethnic identification with boxers has mostly passed. I'm glad those days have passed, but what boxing shared then was the illusion of a particular connection to a fighter. Sure it was an extremely tenuous connection rooted in stereotypes and ethnic pride, but it was a connection of sorts. In other words, it gave you a reason to root for someone and against another person.

As ethnic identification has fallen to the wayside in our sports culture, boxing has been unable to come up with a motivating force in the past 20 years to consistently draw in viewers aside from Tyson's outsized personality. I'm not saying that boxing hasn't been entertaining or there haven't been great fighters or fights, just that mainstream audiences haven't come along for the ride.

If boxing can't provide larger-than-life figures, what it can provide is stories that people can respond to. Especially if those stories are timeless and feature the eternal struggle between good and evil, cockiness and modesty, truth and lies. Even if in reality these fighters are much more than the sum of their reality television personas, they've made the public care with at least the illusion of immediacy.

No matter where we're from, we've all played roles ourselves. We're all fathers, sons, husbands, wives, daughters or friends. By entering the fighter's world (even a circumscribed world where reality carries its own version of the truth) Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather Jr. have hit upon the right formula to sell boxing to the masses in the 21st century.

What we see might not be real, but in a world where what's real and what's not is often hidden, there's no doubting that this bout's characterization of the fighters has reawakened a rooting interest in large segments of society. As my wife said after watching the third episode, "There's no doubt I want De La Hoya to win, but I think Mayweather's going to win."

This bout has created a current of caring, we're all rooting now, and that's why, I predict, by the end of May 5, De La Hoya-Mayweather is going to be the most lucrative boxing match in American pay-per-view history. I know I'll be watching. But, ultimately, once our exaggerated versions of good (De La Hoya) and evil (Mayweather) complete their bout, they're both going to make so much money even an obsessive counter like Mayweather will never have the time to count every single bill.

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