As the fight of the century between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao quickly approaches, the talking heads of sports are all over Mayweather’s previous history of violence against women — and some, including ESPN personality Keith Olbermann, are calling for fans to boycott the fight entirely. Sadly, even as people call for others to avoid watching the fight, the vast majority of fans will be completely oblivious to Mayweather’s past and continue to buy tickets to his fights.
Morality, it appears, doesn’t have a place in sports today.
I have watched a lot of sports programming lately discussing the upcoming fight, and witnessed countless media personalities fumble over the question around whether they will boycott the Mayweather fight because of his terrible history of violence toward women. And, predictably, they have ended up at the same place: They don’t like his past, agree he is a terrible role model, yet will still tune in to the fight. What does this say about sports today? Or maybe a better question is what does this say about us? We regularly verbalize our disdain for issues like violence against women, yet when it comes to putting our money where our mouth is we almost always sit back and enjoy the game rather than take a stand.
What standards are we using when judging athletes?
I am not judging those who will watch the fight, nor am I judging those who will protest. My interest in this discussion stems from a sport psychology/sociology perspective, and is much more broad than Floyd Mayweather’s past history against women. I am fascinated why some athletes get a free pass when it comes to their behavior, while others who have done things remarkably similar are judged far more harshly. For example, read the following excerpt from USA Today this week:
Mayweather has gotten a pass. If he played in the NFL, he’d be everything that’s wrong with the league. Why? Because the NFL is king and boxing is a back-page sport for 358 days per year. It’s because nothing makes sense. Chris Brown still works with the top talent in the music industry, but R. Kelly can’t get a gig. Michael Jackson was beloved and given a king’s burial. Mel Gibson is a pariah. Mike Tyson is now hilarious because he was in The Hangover and does one-man shows about pigeons, but Adrian Peterson is ostracized. Charles Barkley can say anything he wants, but if the same sentence was uttered by any other sports commentator, they’d be suspended.
So what are the variables in play when we, the fans, cast judgement on our sports heroes? Is there any consistency at all? I could dedicate an entire sport sociology graduate course to this question — even assign a dissertation to a student — and still not have any better understanding why some athletes can get away with being bad guys, while others are written off forever.
In the case of Floyd Mayweather, is there anything he could have done in the past that would have prompted most fans to protest? Sadly, I don’t think so.
The ugly truth
Is the movement to protest against Floyd Mayweather going to provide a “watershed moment,” but for the wrong reasons? Rather than seeing fans ignore the big fight, it will likely be a stark example of just how uncaring fans are when it comes to “looking behind the curtain” at what some famous athlete’s have done in their past. There’s probably never been as much protest media discussion for a sporting event as we are seeing right now for Mayweather, but we might want to prepare ourselves for the night of the fight when it will reveal that most folks simply don’t care enough to not watch him perform. Nice try, Olbermann, but your pleas will fall on deaf ears for the vast majority of sport fans who seemingly are only interested in good entertainment — not taking a stand for morality.
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