About 300 people showed up on Tuesday afternoon hoping to be yelled at by Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather for an hour.
It wasn't much of a showing for what the emcee kept telling everyone is "the biggest fight in combat sports history." He said that over and over again, as if saying it made it so. Muhammad Ali might have demurred.
The event – hopefully titled the Grand Arrival – was held in a concrete courtyard wrapped around a parking complex tucked behind the New York-New York casino. In keeping with the slapdash feel of this encounter, workers continued schlepping building material around the site with forklifts while it went on.
They brought out the fighters on the undercard first. It was clear from the confused cheers that no one in the crowd knew who they were. Or maybe they had all been stupefied by long exposure to a crushing sun.
"I like to talk in the ring," journeyman Steve Cunningham said to crickets. He must not have got the memo.
That's all this is about – talking outside the ring. This is Frost-Nixon, minus the wit.
Mayweather-McGregor is an almost too perfect metaphor for where we are as a culture right now. There are many sides to this thing, too.
If you were one of the few there, you did get to see an honest-to-God miracle – Mayweather was only 45 minutes late. In FloydLand, that's like being a day early. Despite 36-degree heat, he was wearing a long-sleeve shirt buttoned to the neck.
He was also wearing a porkpie hat pulled down to his eyes and grandma spectacles. He looked like Steve Urkel after ten years of CrossFit.
"If it wasn't for the fans, I wouldn't be here," Mayweather said. "I'm a lot older now, and when you're older the body needs a lot of rest."
Then he took some pictures and left. As he walked out, one of his publicists said, "In and out. Good job." Tell that to the people who waited three hours for it.
Well then, the ugly stuff would have to be left to McGregor. That's his purpose here – turning every TV hit into something that can't be aired on basic cable.
The Irishman is a very particular Dublin type – the jackeen. He's a coarse loudmouth who believes he can scream you into agreeing with him. The longer you hold out, the louder he gets.
The bar for his taunting is set so low, you'd need to dig a hole to reach under it. There's no art to McGregor's approach. He's not painting you a picture. He's pouring a bucket of it over your head. His signal rhetorical ability is constructing entire sentences using the F-word as noun, verb, adjective, adverb and, occasionally, a preposition.
How disappointing then that he has suddenly decided to go the statesman route.
"I believe [Mayweather] will be unconscious in one round," McGregor said, like he'd given the matter a lot of thought and had come to an important realization.
Given the chance to go deeper – maybe something about Mayweather's virility or lifestyle choices or "high-heeled" shoes – McGregor steered clear.
So now we know where we're at – this thing is already so big, it no longer needs an R-rated hype machine.
What a change a month (and a whole lot of preselling) makes. On a cartoonish global press tour in July, McGregor spent most of his time hanging over Mayweather with a microphone in his hand, shrieking a series of crude sexual allusions at him.
We'd print a few here, but with all the letters dashed out it would read like several paragraphs of Morse code.
People pretended to be shocked – shocked! – that someone who beats people up for a living does not hold progressive social views. They'll all watch the fight anyway. They want to see the bad guy (whichever one you prefer) get his.
With McGregor sucking up all the oxygen, Mayweather has been freed to adopt his most comfortable posture – one of world-weary ennui.
No fighter in history has ever looked so bored so much of the time. All of his reflections have a glib, scripted quality. Even Mayweather's bragging – "I say having one [woman] is too close to having none, so I had about four of my girls with me" – sounds as if it's being read off cue cards.
He is not a natural salesman. You can see that having to convince people of anything annoys him. Why tell when you've proven that you can show?
The last time he featured in something this big – a May, 2015, title bout against Manny Pacquiao – Mayweather was pushed into the role of verbal aggressor. It didn't suit him.
Pacquiao had neither the English nor the inclination to trade insults. Mostly, he wanted to talk about the good news – as in, the imminent arrival of our Lord and saviour, Jesus Christ.
Stood up against an impish holy roller, Mayweather lost his bearings. The usual taunts about money and manliness boomeranged. The hometown crowd turned on him. He was booed at the weigh-in and seemed genuinely stunned. He was jeered again after the fight.
It was hard to tell if people were angry with Mayweather for winning, or upset that he'd done it with so little flair. A bit of both, perhaps.
That's why a boor like McGregor is so perfect for Mayweather – he makes one of the least charming athletes in the world look like Dean Martin holding court at the lobby bar of the Stardust. All Mayweather has to do is sit there and allow his opponent to drag the tone down.
A lesson has been learned here. The focus of the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight was squarely on boxing – one encounter to settle for all time which of these two was the best of his generation. It was a referendum on the sport and where it was headed. All of its vectors led back to the ring.
The point of Mayweather-McGregor is proving that boxing does not need to be the main attraction at a boxing match. This is about turning sport into a circus, and creating outrage for its own sake. The goal here is convincing millions of people to pay for something they don't need and may not even want being contested by two people they don't like.
That low road has high margins.
Organizers – given the way this thing has been thrown together, that may be too precious a word – are predicting Saturday's event will draw the largest pay-per-view audience in history. It should be something in the neighbourhood of 4.9 million buys. That would earn nearly half-a-billion dollars.
Mayweather is slated to get about $100-million (U.S.) of that; McGregor's take will be in the $75-million range. It's not too shabby for a guy who was an underemployed plumber collecting government assistance four years ago.
No one can reasonably expect that this tilt – between the craftiest pugilist of this century and a guy who has never before boxed professionally – will measure up to something worth paying nine figures for. That's not the attraction. It's already been bulletproofed against the disappointment of expectations.
It doesn't matter how small they make the gloves or how far McGregor moves up his knockout prediction. (It's already been as short as ten seconds after the bell. By Friday, he's going to guarantee that it ends an hour before they open the arena doors.) People aren't paying for an evenly matched contest.
What they're paying for is the rare opportunity to watch real villains do each other harm. They want to see someone embarrassed, maybe even hurt.
They're hoping for an unhappy ending.
Cathal Kelly