It was in late 2016 when retired boxer king Floyd Mayweather first uttered the challenging statement that he’d come the biggest name in all of MMA.

To Mayweather’s credit, there was so important buzz and hype girding the idea of him coming out of withdrawal to box defending UFC champion Conor McGregor, in a 2017 megafight that would go on to break multitudinous fiscal records and come to a pop culture event, that the statement could be distributed as incompletely true.

Each time Mayweather spoke McGregor’s name, whether, in a positive or negative light, it came frontal- runner news across both combat sports.

The problem is, that was seven years ago, long before the current crossover trend of circus boxing events came played out. And, yes, indeed though there still exists in 2023 a serviceably feasible request for YouTube influencer boxing, one-off magnet fights like August’s Jake Paulvs. Nate Diaz pay-per-view, or indeed former UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou’s quest for a licit boxing challenge against an active heavyweight with a name, suckers are not inescapably clamoring for similar events to actually take place.

Boxing Strategies

Stars like Mayweather- McGregor worked because of timing and the unique star factor at play. It also presented the appeal of a potentially competitive fight given that Mayweather was 40 and two times removed from active competition when he took on a high McGregor.

still, meant to serve as trim for the real blockbuster boxing events that have come decreasingly harder to make in the ultramodern period, it has only lasted because of the epidemic and the marketing chops of impersonators like Jake and Logan Paul, If the fight launched the possibility of a bubble for freak fights. There were also big-time fiscal investors like Triller, who came and went, and indeed grim magnet immolations like Mike Tyson and Roy Jones Jr. coming out of withdrawal in 2020 to take a competitive palm stage in a safe-ish exhibition.

Those days appear to be over, still, at least from the viewpoint of attracting licit fights suckers to watch or indeed intimately crusade for further. Ever, that hasn’t stopped current active boxing stars from allowing their names to come bogged in endless chatter for fights that will noway take place nor have any business doing so.

Sports Journalism and its effects on Boxers

It’s a sad, extravagant memory of this period of combat sports journalism, where throwaway commentary on social media continues to dominate the lazily added-up captions in ways in which Mayweather formerly did strategically but has now come to the dereliction norm in an echo chamber of superficial gibberish.

Freak fights have always had a place in combat sports, dating back to seminal events like the peculiar Muhammad Ali- Antonio Inoki exhibition in 1976, which may or may not have served as a design for the launch of mixed martial trades nearly 20 times latterly. Ali, like numerous heavyweight titleholders before him, was no foreigner to similar events, whether it be against pro wrestlers or NFL stars, yet they all came at a time when it appeared Ali was in the twilight– both commercially and competitively– of his great career in his late 30s.

So it came with important moaning this week when Canelo Alvarez, still boxing’s undisputed super middleweight king who, at 32, isn’t far removed from also being the sport’s best fighter, saw himself bogged in a public war of words for a boxing match against McGregor, which wouldn’t be nearly as competitive as his Mayweather fight and is not indeed possible given his current UFC contract status.

Tyson Fury and Canelo Alvarez

To Alvarez’s credit, he largely dismissed the callout– just like he did when former UFC champion Kamaru Usman tried the same thing in recent times– by saying he’d master McGregor with one hand. But the same, unfortunately, can not be said for unbeaten WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury.

Alvarez( 59-2-2, 39 KOs), still the biggest single star in the sport, simply has too numerous licit big-fight options within boxing to need to entertain any kind of superficial event that no bone is actually asking for. Assigned with the hefty decision of who to return against in September, Alvarez must decide whether to seek an ambitious rematch of his 2022 loss to light heavyweight winner Dmitry Bivol or to defend within his own weight class, where rising stars like David Benavidez live within the eventuality of a can’t- miss fight.

Fury, 34, has spent the important of 2023 spinning his bus despite the fact that nothing appeared to stand in his way of making an undisputed title fight against fellow unbeaten Oleksandr Usyk, who owns three of four honored titles and is fresh off a brace of high- profile wins over Anthony Joshua. Fury( 33-0-1, 24 KOs), who took a gratuitous stay-busy last December in a trio palm over a faded Derek Chisora, intimately criticized Usyk for ducking him despite it being clear to educated suckers that it simply was not true.

A Comeback

Now, with Usyk (20- 0, 13 KOs) headed toward a forthcoming obligatory title defense against Daniel Dubois, Fury suddenly appears to want back in on the super fight, if his recent social media vids are any suggestion. He also appears to be interested in a fight with Joshua, just the same. On any given day, that focus can also shift towards withdrawal, or at least the trouble of, or reconsidering addresses with Ngannou, who Fury brought into the ring with him for a sweepstake after knocking out Dillian Whyte last time, although the tourney noway came to consummation.

The most distressing part of Fury’s flip-flopping public persona, still, is his recent trouble of wasting caption space by clapping back to statements preliminarily made by UFC judge Joe Rogan and playing up the idea of an MMA fight against Jon Jones, which is a notion just as disingenuous as the bones Mayweather formerly made in 2016 about fighting McGregor in an Octagon, which was no way part of his plans and only employed to churn captions.

Fury continued the tired act days latterly by stating an MMA fight is out of the question but that he’d be further than happy to box Jones, despite there being nothing real at each about the idea.