DALLAS -- It's Friday morning, and on my way to the nation's capital, I'm going to Van-Hoy HBO's upcoming Mayweather/Marquez 24/7 series. That is, by the time you read this, you'll have seen the first episode. And I won't. Hence the verb Van-Hoy.
The verb is transitive -- it requires a direct object -- and was created a few Saturdays ago in a tweet by fight writer Kevin Iole. Its etymology returns to Gale Van Hoy, the Texas judge whose scorecard for the Diaz-Malignaggi fight appeared more like a prediction than a tally.
If it works for a Texas fight judge, why can't it work for a fight writer in a Texas airport?
It looks like tickets are moving briskly for the upcoming welterweight-lite match between Floyd "Money" Mayweather and Juan Manuel Marquez. I jest. No credible source reports tickets are moving. However many movie theaters screen the event, however many sponsors offset costs, really, HBO needs to hit a homerun with its 24/7 tetralogy to make this fight a success.
Trouble is, they have to do it using Mayweather as the A-side.
Why, that shouldn't be a problem. After all, he's "Money May," inventor of HBO's Emmy-winning show.
"A black man from the ghetto invented 24/7," Money helpfully informs us in the preview show for the preview show. "Believe that. Just like that. You dig?"
I do, I do. But is Mayweather an original enough character to carry a super-fight promotion? There's not one substantive thing you've ever heard him say that you haven't heard someone else say first, and better. His fortune has been made playing the bad guy to beloved men's good guys. And this time he hasn't that luxury.
Oh, Marquez is a good guy. A consummate professional, too. But he's not beloved by more than a few English speakers. And Mayweather's act would lose its modicum of charm in translation to Spanish, if Mexicans were charmed by loud children.
They're not. Neither are we. Which means Mayweather needs to do something more original this time than last. That's a problem.
"Me?" Mayweather asks. "I'm like, [expletive] it. It is what it is."
And what it is, is wholly unoriginal. It's also the danger that arises when we take a decent thing like egalitarianism and turn it into lowest-common-denominator-ism. When we celebrate public figures with tiny vocabularies, we do ourselves no favors for an important if esoteric reason.
Ideas are made of words. In a very real sense, words are the buoys with which we raise our deepest emotions from the abyss to a surface where they can be understood. The fewer the buoys, the fewer the original ideas -- no matter the profundity of emotions lurking beneath.
No big deal. Professional athletes traffic in clichés, and life goes on. Yes, but most do it to avoid originality, not court it. Most professional athletes are idiot savants and know as much. They have a genius for one specific field and remain 14-year-old boys in other of life's facets. They fill the air with banal noise, carefully selected by their handlers not to mean much of anything, and this satisfies the PR types that obsess over brands.
I thought about this Thursday while talking to former cruiserweight world champion Vassiliy Jirov -- who actually breaks type and gives a fun and insightful interview, with a graceful wife who chides him to answer honestly. "Why not Vassiliy?" I thought. "He was a much better amateur than Mayweather, he merited prominence much quicker, and he did something Mayweather never will: Make a Fight of the Year."
The answer might be that Jirov never wanted to be more famous than he had to be to attain the highest level of his craft. He likely viewed being famous as a burden.
Mayweather doesn't because he isn't. He is a dull practitioner of a niche sport. He made eyes at genuine superstars like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, but after a half hour both had seen enough.
Now the renovation project begins anew. The Money character has run its course. We need something different. The Mayweather brain trust sensed this and visited their originality vault. What did they come up with?
Floyd Mayweather was poor as a child.
Imagine that. An American prizefighter from humble origins. Where have we heard that story 91,909 times before? Juan Manuel Marquez is also from humble origins. And rumor is, they do poverty a bit differently in Mexico City.
But why stop there? Not only is Mayweather from an impoverished upbringing, he's actually a noted philanthropist whose uplifting story the media won't cover. That Money character? Ah, he's just an act to make, well, money.
OK, let's follow that reasoning and set aside those domestic-abuse allegations of yore and pretend Mayweather is a good guy. We come to another problem.
In a twist of unintentional irony -- the sort that leads to quotes like, "When I'm at the top, I'm not trying to look at who's behind!" -- Mayweather's Money character has been all about being "real." The other folks in the fight game? They're fakes. Money tells the truth. Until we learn Money keeps it about as real as a guy on a used-car lot.
On the subject of reality, though, here's a bit more. If Mayweather-Marquez had been held last Friday it might not have done 300,000 pay-per-view buys. Its buzz is but a mumble. Any purchases this fight generates above that number on Sept. 19 should be attributed to HBO's documentary and editorial excellence.
But we know how this story's going to end, don't we? HBO will bring all its powers to bear on the promotion of the event, improving Mayweather-Marquez's financial prospects about two fold. And in return, Mayweather will call its employees racists.
Ingratitude. It's one more original idea from Money May.
Source: cbssports.com
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