After two months of hype, UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor and boxing legend Floyd Mayweather will square off Saturday, August 26th, in Las Vegas, NV, in a boxing match.
The final hurdle: a weigh-in on Friday at 6 PM ET. The magic number for both men to hit is 154 pounds, the junior welterweight limit.
This will be McGregor’s first foray into boxing after a successful UFC run that brought him to prominence in the combat sports world. Mayweather (49-0) will be looking for his 50th professional victory, one that, if accomplished, will be sneered at by boxing media who see this fight as a farce. The fight is expected to set a gate record and compete for the all-time PPV sale record.
McGregor last competed in November 2016 by downing Eddie Alvarez for the UFC lightweight title in Madison Square Garden.
The particpants in the undercard will also weigh in Saturday.
When Jon Jones recreated his new superstar speech, the humble, funny, super talented guy who reached the top and was expected to start a dynasty, the one thing clear was that, in time, the truth, whatever it was, would likely come out.
The fact is the spotlight would be on Jones, and after telling people he’s older and more mature, a fall from grace would label him as a phony. This time it would be difficult, not impossible, but difficult for time to heal that wound.
As it turned out, Jones failed a drug test taken on 7/28 in Anaheim, after weigh-ins the day before his fight where he won the UFC light heavyweight title back from Daniel Cormier.
Unless someone gets hit with a lead pipe or slips on a wet floor, Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor are set to box this Saturday night in what promises to be one of the biggest single-night financial windfalls in sports.
After a memorable set of media events during a four-city tour in July, the two will meet outside the ring for the final time at a press conference in Las Vegas at 4 PM EST.
The two made news last week when the Nevada State Athletic Commission approved the use of 8 oz. gloves for the fight, a one-time exception for a rule in place that allows for 10 oz. gloves to be used in fights contested at 147 pounds or more.
As is well known, this will be McGregor’s first foray into boxing while the heavily favored Mayweather will be looking for his 50th pro victory against 0 defeats.
Leading into the 76th episode of Josh Nason’s Punch-Out, I was planning on talking to Jack Encarnacao (Sherdog, The Lapsed Fan, Boston Herald) primarily about Saturday’s Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor McGregor fight and a little bit of Brock Lesnar.
Then, Tuesday night happened and all hell broke loose. Lucky for you, that means an even bigger show.
– For the first 20 minutes, Jack and I talked about the recently wrapped SummerSlam four-day weekend and some of the key talking points coming out of it including the SmackDown debut of Bobby Roode.
– I asked Jack whether we can only truly appreciate the greatness of Lesnar after he’s gone and the key to his staying power and success in 2017.
– We then finished up with discussion on the big fight of the year: McGregor vs. Mayweather. This isn’t a technical deep dive by any means, but we both have different views on the fight and we unpacked the best case/worst case scenarios for both the UFC and McGregor.
As if the spectacle around Floyd Mayweather vs. Conor Mcgregor wasn’t enough on its own, Wednesday brought an unprecedented new wrinkle into the equation and one that could change things drastically when a punch connects.
At the request of both camps, the Nevada State Athletic Commission approved the use of 8 oz. gloves for the Mayweather-Mcgregor August 26th boxing match instead of 10 oz. gloves that are supposed to be in use for fights contested at 147 pounds or above. The commission said this will be a one-time exception and will study the results post-fight.
The biggest fight of the summer — financially, anyway — is just a few weeks away and while things have been relatively quiet in August, Conor McGregor hopes to stoke the promotional fire Friday afternoon with a media day/workout session.
The session, held at the UFC’s Performance Center in Las Vegas, NV, starts at 6 PM EST/3 PM PST and can be seen here:
For those just out of a coma, Mayweather is coming out of retirement to face McGregor in a boxing match at the T-Mobile Arena in Vegas on August 26th. Mayweather will be looking for his 50th win against zero losses while McGregor will be competing in his first ever boxing fight.
The fight is expected to do record business, both at the gate and on PPV.
It’s been a little quiet over the past few weeks when it came to promoting the August 26th boxing match between all-time great Floyd Mayweather and UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor.
That ends starting Tuesday.
The two men expected to generate $500 million in business for their super welterweight fight at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena began their tour de force press conferences this week, starting on Tuesday in Los Angeles, Wednesday in Toronto, Thursday in New York, and Friday in London.
Courtesy of Showtime, we’ll stream all four pressers here. Just bookmark and you’ll be good to go:
TUESDAY, JULY 11 – Los Angeles 5 p.m. ET/ 2 p.m. PT from Staples Center
WEDNESDAY, JULY 12 – Toronto 5:30 p.m. ET / 2:30 p.m. PT from Budweiser Stage
THURSDAY, JULY 13 – New York 6:30 p.m. ET/ 3:30 p.m. PT from Barclays Center In Brooklyn
FRIDAY, JULY 14 – London 7 p.m. BST / 2 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. PT from The SSE Arena, Wembley
The major kickoff for the promotion of the Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather boxing match started this past week with a series of major press conferences.
It is now official as was reported here last week that the PPV price will be $89.95 for SD and $99.95 for HD, the same as for the Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao fight. While at first when this fight was being broached, people were talking about 2.4 million buys as a conservative estimate, now there is an expectation of being the all-time record setting biggest total revenue haul for a combat sports event. You can get great odds if you want to gamble that the show will do less than 5 million buys in the U.S.
For what this is worth, the promotion, in selling sponsorships, is telling potential sponsors that the show will do 7 million PPV buys in the U.S. alone and another 1.4 million in the U.K. Keep in mind that’s far more than what WWE did during the height of the Steve Austin era for an entire year and more than even UFC did last year when it set the single company record for most buys in a calendar year.
It has been a newsworthy week in the combat sports game, so much so that yours truly had to recruit not just one, but two guests in order to get to it all.
First up on Josh Nason’s Punch-Out is Yahoo’s Kevin Iole. As someone that has covered boxing and MMA for decades, Kevin was the perfect person to talk to regarding Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather and some of the questions that aren’t being asked.
Some of what we talked about: is it a bad look for the UFC that McGregor had to go to boxing to get his big payday? What question has Kevin been asked most frequently this week? What should MMA fans understand about how a boxing event like this is promoted different than a big UFC show?
We then switch gears to talk about Saturday’s UFC Singapore event, headlined by Holly Holm vs. Bethe Correia with returning guest Patrick Wyman of Deadspin and the Washington Post. We talked about Holm badly needing a win, the future prospects of Andrei Arlovski, and former lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos’ big move up to welterweight.
Former New Japan Pro Wrestling and SmackDown announcer Mauro Ranallo was announced officially today by Showtime as the lead play-by-play announcer for the August 26th Conor McGregor vs. Floyd Mayweather Jr. fight.
Showtime officials told The Sporting News that they would go with their usual boxing crew, and that the event would also include guest commentators, which are believed to be appearances by members of the UFC broadcast team.
Brian Custer was announced as the host of the show, while Ranallo will handle play-by-play.
Ranallo did the play-by-play for Showtime for the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight and most recently did the Joshua-Klitschko fight from Wembley Stadium in London. Besides his stint on SmackDown, which ended abruptly and in controversy in March, he’s done pro wrestling and every combat sport, from the heyday of Pride, to Glory kickboxing, to a number of MMA
promotions including Strikeforce, Elite XC, and Invicta, as well as the biggest matches over several years from New Japan Pro Wrestling on AXS.
Ranallo started his career as a heel manager for All-Star Wrestling in British Columbia and later became the television announcer for the local promotion, and also had a stint as the lead voice of a remake of Stampede Wrestling.
Boxing Hall of Famer Al Bernstein will handle the color with former champion Paulie Malignaggi.
Also on the crew will be Jim Gray handling the interviews and Steve Farhood doing the scoring. Farhood, who was just inducted last week into the International Boxing Hall of Fame, also has a pro wrestling background as one of the so-called Apter mag writers early in his career.
I feel like I have to preface this column with a bold statement: one way or another, I will watch Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather box in late-August.
I know, what a hot take. Call me Stephen A. Nason or Josh Bayless.
I could try to tell you that this affair is a complete atrocity, that it’s terrible for MMA, and that I can’t support it, but that would be completely disingenious. Like many of you, I will find a way to watch and will be entrenched in the build leading up to this “fight”.
But after taking in everything after the announcement and listening to that first conference call discussing how the deal was made, there’s a lot of reality checks that all of us that are heavily invested in MMA need to come to grips with before this thing happens in late-August.
So far, the ‘MMA’ and ‘UFC’ might as well be curse words
According to all parties, the day itself will feature no MMA whatsover and will be, as Dana White said, “a boxing day”. In the intro for the call, McGregor was referred to as an “Irish superstar” and there was no mention of his being a UFC lightweight champion, two division champion, etc. In a promotional tweet Mayweather sent, the UFC logo was absent. Even, the Showtime tweet about the promo poster even used #UFC and not @UFC while properly tagging the fighers’ handles.
It’s only been a few days, but considering McGregor came to prominence in the UFC and in MMA, it’s surprising and, likely negotiated, how little that seems to matter now.
The UFC isn’t promotionally riding shotgun, but is sitting in the back middle seat
The most disheartening aspect of the Wednesday night call was hearing White cite Showtime as “kind” for allowing them to do promotional content like UFC Embedded leading up to the show. It’s as if White and the UFC are bowing down and paying a penance instead of standing side-by-side in promoting this whole thing.
While I understand that Mayweather is a PPV superstar, the UFC built a $4 billion brand that has a foothold in the sporting conscious, even if just in name value alone. The day shouldn’t just be “a boxing day”. What about the MMA fans that don’t care about boxing and need to be sold on why they should spend $100 for a one-fight show in which that one fight will be probably pretty bad?
To see a fight brand and promoter that has openly swatted aside notions of co-promotion (M1 and Fedor Emelianenko, anyone?) now have to play second-class citizen to a network they used to despise and a retired boxer they’ve never done business with before is jarring.
Boxing isn’t dead
Like many MMA writers, I did once pen the obligatory ‘boxing is dead’ column years ago after another frustrating night watching two heavyweights slog it out while two UFC heavyweights were doing their thing. While it may never return to its previous heights, I was definitely wrong with your latest example being the crowd and overall buzz for the recent Joshua/Klitschko fight in England’s Wembley Stadium.
It definitely isn’t dead when you consider that a retired 40-year-old boxer is going to face a boxing newbie and give that newbie the biggest payday of his life even though he’s the UFC’s biggest star and arguably their biggest financial draw of all time. It also definitely isn’t dead when you consider this fight will do bigger business and will get more mainstream media attention than any MMA fight ever.
It proves that no matter how far we think MMA has come, there’s still so, so far to go.
This will cost us a quality McGregor UFC title fight
White seemed confident that McGregor will fight in the UFC once this year, using that as a bully pulpit to bash his own fighters for not taking fights against anyone at anytime. (Who could he be talking about, I wonder?) I hope that’s the case as there’s no shortage of quality fights waiting for the lighweight champ…if he decides he even wants to return, a talking point given the Brinks truck that’s about to back up at 1 McGregor Way.
Even with the birth of his first child, you’d expect him to be fighting this summer if this Mayweather business wasn’t going on, probably against the likes of Tony Ferguson or Khabib Nurmagomedov. Yeah, they’re not the marquee names like Mayweather but for those who follow the sport, those are the guys we want McGregor to test himself against. That’s our idea of a $100 PPV, so to speak.
And let’s not forget this fun fact: McGregor has yet to defend any UFC title he’s won.
The promotion will be the best part
Impending hyperbole and talking heads blathering aside, McGregor’s chance of beating Mayweather are slim even if Mayweather hasn’t fought in two years. What’s going to sell this fight for the mainstream is both guys talking and they have a concentrated time to do it in: two and a half months. Going into this, we all knew the real draw was going to be everything before the fight anyway.
With all that said, it’s going to be a dizzying sprint focused on an event featuring the UFC’s top draw in a fight that isn’t in the UFC nor in the sport that brought him fame. Plus, there’s that other bit of business for White and company: the eight scheduled UFC shows between now and then starting with this weekend’s overlooked event in Singapore.
Whether you’re going into this kicking and screaming or are primed at the pump for it, your seat aboard the McGregor-Mayweather train is reserved. Let’s all just hope there’s no delays on the track ahead.
What is likely to be one of the biggest PPV events of all-time appears to be a reality.
Kevin Iole of Yahoo! reported on 6/14 that the negotiations for the Floyd Mayweather Jr. vs. Conor McGregor fight have been completed.
Dana White on Sports Center said the fight would take place at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas on 8/26, and the fight would be at 154 pounds, which is a concession to McGregor, who would have the harder time making 147. Both men have agreed to 10-ounce gloves.
Mayweather Promotions was approved for a boxing event at the MGM Grand Garden Arena for that date earlier that day, but Iole reported it could be moved to the larger T-Mobile Arena.
Three of the key parties — UFC president Dana White, Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe, and Showtime Sports’ executive VP and GM Stephen Espinoza — conducted a 40-minute media call Wednesday night to answer a bevy of questions.
While you can listen for yourself below, here’s a few key highlights to listen for:
– Despite having issues with him in the past, White was all Team McGregor on the call. He doesn’t think a loss would hurt McGregor or the UFC brand at all, and that the experience will only elevate the UFC lightweight champion.
– Speaking of that, during the intro, there was no mention of McGregor as a UFC fighter but rather an ‘Irish superstar’.
– When asked, Ellerbe didn’t shy away from the night clearing $500 million in revenue.
– No PPV price point has been set yet, but White didn’t shy away from the $100 tag that Mayweather vs. Pacquaio had.
– White was amazingly complimentary of Showtime, calling them “kind” for letting them do some content creation like UFC Embedded.
– White thinks McGregor will fight in the UFC again this year. He did bash his own talent several times for having the ‘fight anywhere, fight anyone’ mentality that McGregor has.
– There will be no UFC that day, even on an earlier card. The day “will be a boxing day” according to White.
– When asked, Espinoza wouldn’t commit to Mauro Ranallo calling the action which is curious considering he’s the voice of Showtime boxing. That would indicate that perhaps UFC might have some say in that.
One of the biggest pay-per-view events of all time is actually happening.
Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports reported today that Floyd Mayweather and Conor McGregor will meet in their much-discussed boxing superfight on August 26th in Las Vegas. The report came after the Nevada Athletic Commission approved the date at a meeting earlier today, though Mayweather and McGregor’s names were not officially attached to it then.
Both Mayweather and McGregor have since confirmed the news on social media. The boxing match will take place at the T-Mobile Arena.
What once seemed like only hype has inched closer to reality over the last year. A significant step came when Dana White and McGregor reached an agreement on personal terms for the fight. Negotiations with the Mayweather camp then began.
Mayweather and McGregor still need to apply for their boxing licenses for the fight. NAC executive director Bob Bennett previously called it “approvable.”
Mayweather’s record improved to 49-0 with a win against Andre Berto in September 2015 before announcing his retirement, but he has been training for a comeback against McGregor. The last time that McGregor fought was when he won the lightweight championship from Eddie Alvarez at UFC 205 in November 2016.
UPDATE: Dana White confirmed to TMZ that Mayweather vs. McGregor will be a 12-round boxing match and that they will use 10 ounce gloves. The undercard will only feature boxing and will be handled by Mayweather Promotions.
White also said that he expects McGregor to make around $100 million for the fight and that McGregor genuinely believes that he will knock Mayweather out.
ESPN boxing writer Dan Rafael reported Monday night that boxing megastar and pay-per-view king Floyd Mayweather will request August 26th as the date for his fight with UFC lightweight champion Conor McGregor.
Mayweather’s Mayweather Promotions was originally going to request the date for an unspecified event from the Nevada State Athletic Commission this Wednesday, but that item has been pulled off the agenda.
A formal agreement has not been made public yet, despite UFC president Dana White and McGregor coming to terms near a month ago.
While Rafael made no mention of a venue, Ariel Helwani added that both sides would like to run the larger T-Mobile Arena as opposed to the smaller MGM Grand. As of now, there are no events for that day at T-Mobile.
McGregor and Mayweather have been attempting to work at making this fight happen for quite some time and with each passing week, the bout looks closer and closer to being made.
