I had promised myself I wasn’t going to spend money to see
the Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor fight. McGregor is a great mixed
martial arts fighter and proud Irishman but a perpetual shit-talker who took
the low road in promoting this fight. Floyd Mayweather is one of the best
boxers the sport has ever produced but is a wife-beating jerk no sane person wants
to make richer.
But some friends invited me to meet them for the fight and I
enjoyed seeing Conor McGregor’s last fight with them, so I met up with them at
Hooters of Farmingdale on Long Island.
There is no charming way you can tell your wife you are
going to Hooters. I have disliked Hooters because I think if you want to go to
a strip club you should man up and go to a strip club. Hooters wants to treat
its waitresses like strippers but not pay them like strippers. But I wasn’t
going to argue against a night out.
The great racial divide in America was easy to divine
looking at the dining room of Hooters, which is a better place to take the
pulse of the nation than The Palm Court at the Plaza. I think I saw two tables
that were not racially homogenous. There was no bad blood that I saw. No one
had any harsh words for anyone else, but the essential tribal nature of human
life was on full display. Some of the white customers had t-shirts that read
‘Fook Mayweather,’ poking fun at McGregor’s Irish brogue while insulting the
experienced boxer. When Mayweather won the fight, a black customer at a
neighboring table stood on his chair to gloat.
America’s house is definitely divided, even the Hooters on
Long Island. I was expecting there to be more quality fights in the parking lot
than on the pay-per-view screen; likewise with the crowd at the fight in Las
Vegas. It didn’t play out that way. There was no violence at the Hooters at the
end of the night, just people settling their bills and going their separate
ways.
We all like to think that we’re the open-minded exception to
the pervasive divides of our time, but we all have an intrinsic need to draw
our lines and take an accounting of our allies and enemies. You are forced to
choose sides in life once fists start to fly, even if you are disgusted with
the whole sham.
I certainly wanted McGregor to win. No self-respecting
Irishman would root against him, no matter how obnoxious his pre-fight conduct
was. But wanting him to win and expecting him to win are two different things,
and the odds were such that I would happy if he lasted more than a few rounds.
After a long undercard and several helpings of wings and
appetizers, it was time for the fight. McGregor went 10 rounds in his first
ever professional boxing match with a fighter who is arguably one of the best
ever. Mayweather came out of years of retirement to fight one of the best
combat sports starts of today who is more than a decade younger. They both
walked out of the ring with their heads held high, and rightfully so.
After the bout, both fighters were gracious and respectful.
It was heartening to see these men be civil after spending months insulting one
another. Then again, they had exploited America’s great racial divide to make
millions of dollars on a fight that had no business taking place.
The crowd dispersed to either curse or celebrate the
fortunes of their proxy combatants, but those fighters came away the big
winners. And therein lies the more telling divide: the millionaires in that fight
have more in common with each other than they do with anyone who shelled out
for the pay-per-view. A foreigner who was on welfare five years ago and a black
man who can barely read rode this race-baiting shit show all the way to the
bank and had the last laugh on the rest of us. That’s the American way.
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