


Sunday’s fight is an exhibition, too, not an official match. After all, he is a legendary boxer, and Paul’s official boxing record is 0–1, which understates his experience only slightly: along with that official loss, he has an unofficial draw, from an exhibition fight against the same opponent, a YouTuber and rapper known as KSI. In this case, many of the paying customers will doubtless be expecting and hoping to see Mayweather do the shutting up.
#Spectacle fighter series
In Mayweather’s prime, he was the sport’s most reliable pay-per-view attraction, largely because he was so good and so polarizing: fans were eager to watch a series of opponents try-and, invariably, fail-to shut him up. So why is Mayweather getting into the ring with Paul? Because people, perhaps a substantial number of them, are willing to pay $49.99 to watch the outcome. I’m not even fuckin’ kidding!”) Logan Paul is a blond jock who projects bro-ish self-confidence that persona, combined with the tasteless video, turned him into an international pariah, a symbol of everything that everyone hated about YouTubers and other online influencers. (Paul, wearing a lime-green hat with an antenna and three eyeballs, based on the aliens from “Toy Story,” says, “I think there’s someone hanging, right there. He dropped out of college to make prankish online videos alongside his younger brother, Jake Paul, and he achieved viral infamy on New Year’s Eve, 2017, when he released a video in which he visited a forest in Japan known as a site of suicides, and encountered the body of a man who had apparently hanged himself.
#Spectacle fighter professional
Unlike them, he is not really a professional fighter of any sort-in fact, part of the reason some people like him, and that many more do not, is that he does not seem to be a professional anything. Paul, like Mayweather’s two previous opponents, is not really a professional boxer. And on Sunday night, in Miami, he is scheduled to box eight rounds against Logan Paul. Mayweather has been happy to discover that, having conquered the world of professional boxing, he can now get paid to box people who are not professionals. (He reportedly earned more than two hundred million dollars for a single fight, against Manny Pacquiao.) Since then, Mayweather has unretired for a series of novelty fights: he wore down and stopped the mixed-martial-arts star Conor McGregor in 2017, and he quickly dispatched a kickboxer named Tenshin Nasukawa the next year. He ran his record to 49–0 and then, in 2015, he retired, having absorbed a relatively small amount of punishment, and an absolutely large amount of cash. Floyd Mayweather, Jr., is one of the great boxers of the contemporary era, a slick and evasive virtuoso. “Why is Floyd Mayweather getting in the ring with me?” That was the question Logan Paul asked in a recent promotional video, and he wasn’t the only one wondering.
