"I'm just an American dream," Floyd Mayweather said at some point deep into Saturday night, standing at a microphone with a pair of smiling ring girls in Tecate halter tops strategically posed behind him. He had just dismantled Manny Pacquiao in a fight that was disappointingly dull and utterly unsurprising on every level, and now he was discussing his favorite subject, which happens to be himself.
Mayweather is that rarest of public figures: A talented athlete who is the picture of oblivious villainy outside the ring, but is also inherently boring inside the ring. He's the worst of both worlds, in that there's nothing much to like about him in any sense, other than the fact that he's probably never going to lose a fight in his career. And this is not just a problem for his own legacy, which took a serious hit even as he did most of the hitting against Pacquiao; this is now a problem for boxing, which once again tried to wedge its way into the mainstream, and once again failed miserably.
This was a fight that never really had a chance of living up to the hype surrounding it, in part because Mayweather is not that kind of fighter and Pacquiao is no longer that kind of fighter, and in part because boxing is not that kind of sport anymore. It exists on the fringes, on the margins of popular culture, condemned for its barbarism and for the glorification of dubious characters like Mayweather. The only way to see this bout was to shell out an absurd chunk of change for a pay-per-view broadcast riddled with massive hiccups, and then to stay awake deep into the night hoping that something interesting might justify the purchase.
Is it a surprise, then, that people were disappointed? It's almost like that's what boxing does: It sets itself up, every few years or so, to allow us to remember why we forgot it in the first place.
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