@AdrienBroner Will Never "Run" Boxing, And Floyd Mayweather knows it!!

 

Power isn’t complicated, but it is to those who will never come close to achieving it. If it is “given”, it’s counterfeit and can easily be stripped from you-which are why men who really want it see the “giver” as an impediment to be eliminated. Kobe Bryant is powerful because he vanquished Shaq, if he hadn’t he’d never be perceived as he is now; as a Don. Our laws are written by the powerful, and many of these people made the hard decision to take what some told them to wait for- if you can’t make that decision then you weren’t meant to be powerful in the first place.

In music the most talented step away from lifelong friends and family members to take power, ever heard of a dude named Michael Jackson? Powerful people look at their watches and the same time is always displayed 24/7 and that time is now- it’s a timezone unshared with the powerless. Floyd Mayweathers watch is always on now, and when you operate in that reality there’s a good chance there is no tomorrow for the likes of Adrien Broner.

In this buildup to a fight Broner should be applauded for taking the Cincinnati native did everything in his “power” to let you know he will be handed something from Mayweather. Something nobody else inherited, something many have had to hurt idols and friends to achieve. Muhammad Ali had the power despite his former sparring partner being heavyweight champion of the world, and even though Holmes felt deeply for the champ he had to take what was his or forever take crumbs. Rocky Marciano’s handlers knew it best, they knew he’d never be “that guy” unless he mugged Joe Louis and with that crime came financial power.

Boxing is the roughest business in sports and entertainment so it baffles me that Adrien Broner, normally an objectionable personality would be so soft in this of all matters. Did he not do his dirt on the streets like he claims? Did anyone ever “pass down” a slab of concrete to him and his crew? Especially if that concrete was the only place to get money?. What are the chances Floyd Mayweather retires and Adrien Broner collects even a 20 million dollar payday in his next fight?, only powerful people know someone of much greater financial stature has to be destroyed for this to happen.
John Gotti knew it, in fact so do most Monarchs.  

Being the best pound for pound fighter in the world is fluid and everyone is eligible, but being the money man is something contingent on lowering the financial viability of other money men. In organized crime “bosses” are routinely murdered and the wisdom from law enforcement went as such; if you want to know who killed the boss all you have to do is find out who the new boss is. Oscar De La Hoya was the boss, and Floyd Mayweather (already the superior fighter) knew then that his financial future rested on beating him on a huge stage. Adrien Broner is talented (like Floyd) and may be as obnoxious but how will he convey that on a bigger stage when he believes it will be handed to him? At this rate Floyd will leave with the stage and Adrien will remain a bitter facsimile of his mentor wondering why things aren’t unfolding as Floyd said they would. What if Keith Thurman and Danny Garcia don’t become big enough foils to reach the kind of financial solvency he believes he deserves?

Being associated with powerful people is healthy, and trying to mimic their formula (like Broner clearly does) is intelligent but believing they can bestow power upon you is what welfare recipients do. Broner pointedly tells us nobody ever gave him nothing but in the same breath believes Floyd and a volatile, unpredictable marketplace will. Having a shoulder roll and a shitty demeanor isn’t the formula for PPV success, the power will have to come from defeating a handful of recognizable names starting with Floyd himself. Zab Judah was Floyd’s best friend at one time and now he’s a footnote in Mayweathers quest for power, because the path to power isn’t easy and it is littered with broken relationships and friends. Adrien Broner is still young, still surrounded by people he feels he owes and relationships mean a lot to the young- until it’s time to pull your pants up and be a man. Young black men are often cursed with this over-emotionality in spades and sometimes they never grow out of it enough to become pragmatic, powerful people. It’s not in Floyd’s nature to share power let alone “pass it on”, because he knows that betrayal on all levels lay behind every substantial fortune.

Will it take a jail cell to make this young man see that rich and powerful are two totally different things? He says he’s “just being young and having fun” but Broner is a “live dog” to get himself in something that Mayweather the powerful could easily get himself out of. Mayweather is a proven stimulus program for Nevada so if he goes to jail there his power is a factor in the legal proceedings. Broner isn’t valuable to any local economies, at this time he’s an addendum to the Mayweather deal, a protégé or “spin off” act like Tha Dogg Pound or G-Unit -whether he can flourish outside of Mayweathers brand is yet to be seen. Real stars aren’t content with being called anyone’s “little brother” no matter how talented the older star is, and I’ve never seen a real star contented being with a cheap knock off. The only time someone is content with this distinction is if deep down they know they aren’t of the big brothers caliber, so they’ll gladly take whatever they can get from the association. If there is any hope of Broner being the face of boxing there must be underlining tension and ambition, because he’ll never reach his destination under Floyd Mayweather.

The only way to get there is over Floyd’s prone body.

 

 

Boxing: Where the Customer is Always Wrong



On Monday the WBC did something that Alphabet Organizations always do, they ranked Manny Pacquiao as Floyd Mayweather #1 challenger and mandatory defense. Now In the old days (Pre Twitter) there would be an outcry about the organization itself, their ranking practices and the arbitrary, political way they go about their business-back then the makers of the trinkets were uniformly challenged by fans at every turn. But today, if you are an alphabet crew life must be good because there’s a new villain in town that nobody ever counted on arriving-the boxing fan. Yep, the fan aka “the customer” have shown themselves to be undeserving of an organized coherent fight game because they’ve broken every cardinal rule in the book when it comes to being a paying customer.  They’ve started to identify with the very people who ask them for premium costs in exchange for a defective service.

For one, paying customers don’t personalize the people behind a given service especially if those people are committed to providing “pieces” of a service. When you pay a PPV price in 2013 it is complicity understood that you are only watching ½ of what the promoter can offer you in a particular weight class, and yet they demand inflationary prices when most of your salaries have flat lined. If you pay a cable subscription fee and buy PPV’s from both premium networks you are not out of your sorts to demand these entities work in conjunction (with one another) to provide the customer the best Boxing has to offer-YOU’RE THE CUSTOMER.

The NFL is a conglomerate of megalomaniacs who agree to a schedule and provide packages of content to several networks for billions of dollars but none of it would work if the customers weren’t provided competitive conclusions. You can see any team on one of 4 different networks throughout the season and everybody makes sure these megalomaniacs profit equally from providing a product that consumers trust. This is why a football ref makes a bad call and has to consider relocating while Steve Smoger can sleep like a baby after almost letting Glen Tapia get his career shortened on live television.

Boxing fans allow two programmers and two promotional teams to pick sides and refuse to do business with one another- this refusal is akin to colluding together in order to put promotional interests ahead of providing financially vested consumers a reliable product. Not only will these two firms refuse to enter into negotiations to provide the best programming to the customers who pay at the gate and through PPV they work in monopoly to assure no outside promoters try to answer the demand of the marketplace. The sad part is boxing fans now work in conjunction with these firms, pitting sides amongst themselves and defending the destructive polarization and the players who provide the limited services they receive.

Even the Mafia understood war was bad for business, and they often killed one another for the right to take your union dues to build casinos. Union members didn’t bicker with one another over which Mobster had the most swag or deserved to exploit them-the ones who knew what was happening to their dues didn’t glamorize the likes of Bugsy Segal.

Boxing fans piggyback the juvenile stances and statements of warring factions as if they are paid to do so, because (now) the argument over who deserves to fight whom is more rewarding than the actual fight. The players have worn the fan down, and through Stockholm syndrome the fan now identifies with the business entities who blatantly tell them “YOU WILL NOT GET THE PRODUCT YOU PAY FOR”. Customers should never allow themselves to be treated as oppressed victims unable to do something about current conditions, boxing isn’t the NFL folks-it’s a poorly built house of cards, and it would be catastrophic to any PPV to come up 500.000 buys short of projections. These are numbers the NFL picks its teeth with and yet they care about what you think, because they know if they give you “your” football it’s like a license to print money. Unlike the “old boy” network in boxing who can only feast on short sighted bank robberies. If people can use Twitter for Global Protest they can certainly use it to #OccupyBoxing. Twitter tricked fans into thinking these people “know” them and thus they’ve become fantasy managers, fake assed Al Haymons and spokespersons for entities who do nothing but fleece them- and if you point this out to them in the most objective terms they regurgitate worn out slogans (Courtesy TMT) and call you a “hater” – another term that should be stricken from adult discourse. It is a disturbing trend when “men” are willing to blindly give their money to a polarized system and accept a false Cold War scenario as a reason fights can’t be made- and nobody blinked when Big Bad Bernard Hopkins used the “term” to rationalize calling out a man 25 lbs. lighter than him. In a just system he wouldn’t be viable, in a just system he’d have to prove he’s an “Alien” by facing a “Superman”…. or go home.

When a man spends his money for something empathy for the seller should be a non-factor, do you have sympathy for the poor schmuck who served you cold French fries yesterday? Hell no you don’t.  Then you shouldn’t have feelings one way or another about men who are supposed to bring you a damned sport- stop advocating for Floyd Mayweathers “business” and handle your own finances with discriminating taste. Twitter has revealed fight fans who are more fans of the cold war than of boxing, grown men who think it’s cool that Mayweather ( after 4 years!) can say “Pacquiao who?” while telling you Amir “Chinny” Khan is up next for your 75$. Men don’t allow someone to tell them “I don’t want to make Bob Arum any money” because MEN know that ultimately before it becomes Floyds or Bobs “money” it was theirs!. The answer to Manny who? Is Manny “Better than Amir Khan” Pacquiao that’s who, men don’t sit around gossiping over the fucking details if they have no direct involvement in them- men say “work it out” or you get nothing. Since when did guys feel it was their job to play school yard insult games over two guys they’ll never meet? Since when did men think gossiping over another guys finances and who deserves what in a fight was even manly? There are websites devoted to keeping these ridiculous "divisions within divisions" going, actual propaganda jackals who parrot men who don’t want to provide unified champions in every weight class in exchange for your dollars.

And you visit them every day looking for the silly next put down you can retweet to your friends.

Manny Pacquiao is a boxer, a fine one who I’d rather see fight Floyd Mayweather on May 3^rd 2014 than anyone else- I’m too busy as an adult worrying about filling out my own tax forms than to worry about his. In fact, I don’t care about Vegas getting the fight nor who “needs” whom- like any smart consumer I know that all parties involved need me not the other way around. If you ever noticed Boxing is the one sport that mirrors our two party political system where palms are greased and nothing ever gets done. Sports are supposed to deliver us from that, which is why mainstream sports fans will always choose the socialism of the NFL over the corporate fascist dictatorship of boxing. Sport is supposed to deliver you into a purely merit driven matrix where Champions are people who have defeated all capable challengers through direct confrontation- Boxing used to be the purest expression of this principle. Being the paying customer can either be an empowering experience or one of manipulation and subjugation and it’s clear which path fight fans have chosen. We are more informed than ever, but now we’ve developed a habitualized taste for minutiae and bullshit, we’ve replaced the great addiction to action fights with a “jones” for press releases and company warfare.

Smart men of Arum and Schaefer’s ilk have often known the true path to domination is by subjecting less smart people to a chaotic environment. Through sleight of hand we’ve all lost track of the ball (the truth) and now focus only on the shell game played by a mere handful of people. Middle Class fighters have no choice but to sign on to this paradigm because they know the market will not fund nor facilitate a competing model to what we have now. The misguided will sign up for this farce the same way obscure, unsigned rap groups enlisted to shoot at one another back in 1996 on the behalf of two millionaires. I was there, and I saw people get hurt that were never afforded the dignity of a documentary of compilation CD. I am a conscientious objector to the “Cold War” in Boxing, I am not an apologist for Mayweather or Pacquiao- I am a customer and I refuse to say a foul word about either man via social media.  I deserve to see the best fighters in each division face one another (within a reasonable period of time) no matter the network or Promotional Firm In exchange for my (monthly) subscription dollars. I don’t care about any of the ancillary issues surrounding the promoter’s “job” to create a PPV star; if those issues interfere with providing the customer with a valuable product then customers should divest themselves until said party does. Instead of defending the self-interest of Floyd Mayweather fans should try imitating it, your budget will look a lot better and you just may exude a little more self-respect in other parts of your life.

And if you choose to do nothing at all, at least have the decency to stop rooting for people who mean you no good.