Sportsnet: Mayweather vs. McGregor isn’t your typical mega-fight

LAS VEGAS — Come to enough of these and the rhythm gets in your bones, the ritualistic build to the big event, as predictable as a mass. No, there weren’t “grand entrances” back in the day, and Joe Louis never heckled an opponent at a press conference, but in the last half century at least, a fight of any magnitude has been preceded by open work-outs, by interviews and a weigh-in, by confident predictions and expert prognostication and the arrival of the fancy, all building to that ecstatic moment when the seconds clear the ring and the bell sounds.

But this, Floyd Mayweather Jr. versus Conor McGregor, despite all of the familiar signposts this week, feels very different.

It’s August for starters, the deadest month on the Las Vegas calendar, a time of year when only bargain hunters and degenerate gamblers make their way to the scorching Nevada dessert. Usually, these events happen in the spring or the fall, when the fight crowd compounds the bustling multitudes. Not so now. Having rushed to put this promotion together so the bout could take place before Canelo Alvarez meets Gennady Golovkin in the same T-Mobile Arena next month and before the Golden Knights start filling dates in their inaugural season, they’re starting from near zero, and it shows.

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Only a few hundred fans and gawkers greeted the fighters at their public arrival on Tuesday, and only a handful hung around outside the casino showroom where they held the final pre-fight press conference on Wednesday.

Presumably that will change by the weekend, when, if nothing else, McGregor’s legions of Irish supporters will descend on the town, making merry and risking fatal sunburns. And even if the traditional boxing crowd turns up its nose at the prospect of the greatest fighter of his generation taking on a guy who has never entered the ring as a professional, there figures to be a surge of MMA fans who despite the long odds against their hero, will savour the opportunity to take the big stage and just maybe make the experts eat crow.

There’s the unique historical dynamic. Normally, a significant championship fight is automatically slotted into the sport’s long and glorious legacy, with comparisons made back through the decades. This, by contrast, is a one-off, a novelty act, not quite as farcical as Muhammad Ali versus Antonio Inoki (though go back and look at that one – Inoki, in his own strange fashion, was certainly trying to win…), but insignificant when it comes to placing Mayweather’s career in a larger context. If he does indeed get the win to go 50-0, surpassing Rocky Marciano’s iconic record, most everyone will attach an asterisk.

But there is a real sense that this is a battle between the establishment and the usurper (albeit on the establishment’s turf and terms), the manifestation of something that’s been simmering since the Fertitta brothers bought the UFC, cleaned it up, legitimized it, marketed it brilliantly, and stole an entire generation out from under the noses of boxing promoters.

You can like both and appreciate both, but for the most part combat sport has remained divided between those two solitudes. If McGregor could somehow beat a boxer who is regarded by purists as a master technician, as a defensive and tactical genius, you’d never hear the end of it.

That’s the dream of the MMA crowd, and that’s probably the dream of a whole lot of other people as well, given that Mayweather is without argument a great athlete but a terrible human being. But it’s a possibility that boxing fans have barely even considered, so confident are they in Mayweather’s abilities. If he could handle everyone put in front of him during a 21-year-professional career, if he could handle power punchers and skilled boxers, fighters naturally bigger than him, younger than him, how can someone as apparently crude as McGregor make him break a sweat? Even the most die-hard of MMA devotees would agree that their man is at a significant disadvantage, that he will be far outside of his comfort zone while facing a massive challenge on Saturday night.

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