On Saturday night, a man with a disgusting history of violence against women will make $150 million precisely because of his skill at punching other people. When Floyd Mayweather steps into the ring at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas for his much-anticipated bout with Manny Pacquaio, he will do so as an undefeated champion with two incredible records. One is his 47–0 record as a professional fighter. The other, his record of beating women, which has led twice to guilty pleas in domestic battery cases, once to a conviction that was later overturned, and once to a 90-day prison sentence. According to Deadspin’s Daniel Roberts, who last summer gave us the most definitive account of this particular record, at least seven total accusations of domestic violence in the last 13 years alone.
To look at the ledger this weekend, it will seem as if only one of those records means much at all. Mayweather-Pacquiao, already billed as the “Fight of the Century,” may become the highest-grossing boxing match of all-time. Mayweather’s payout, the most lucrative ever for a single bout, will eclipse the total that made him last year’s highest paid athlete in the world. Even at $100 a pop, the fight could shatter boxing’s record for pay-per-view orders. The price of tickets is in the quadruple digits. The world can’t get enough of Floyd in the ring, no matter what he does outside of it.
But that other record, the attention it has and hasn’t gotten, and how it has influenced this fight (even if only just a little) matters too. Because in the end The Trouble With Floyd Mayweather, to borrow Roberts’ headline, is really the trouble with us. How sports treat domestic violence is a reflection of how larger society does too, and so calls for boycotts aside, it is too late to stop Mayweather from earning millions from this fight. The question now is, what do we — sports fans, the sports media, the sports world — do next?
The details of Mayweather’s domestic violence cases, much like those in the cases of Ray Rice and Greg Hardy, are monstrous. One police statement written in the handwriting of his then-10-year-old son should be enough to turn any reasonable human against this man. Given that we’ve seen what his fists can do to another trained fighter, the briefest consideration of the pain they have inflicted on any of his victims should be enough to turn us away for good. But the larger details, grisly as they might be, are also not unique.
That Mayweather has subjected his children to his violence; that his victims have changed their stories or decided not to show up in court to testify against him; that, as Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz reported this week, the boxer has benefited from certain protections from law enforcement and the justice system; these are all common features of domestic violence cases that don’t involve Floyd Mayweather.
The systemic efforts to cover up evidence of Mayweather’s brutality that Moskovitz found in Las Vegas, and the shortcomings that allow boxing, the boxing press, and boxing fans to prioritize Mayweather’s appeal as an athlete over his record of abusing women, should not shock us. They are present in other cases that do not involve celebrities or boxers who wrongly deem themselves The Greatest Ever. Mayweather is merely a reflection of these problems, his success and our ignoring of his violence merely a window into the treatment domestic violence gets writ large.
“The fact is, violence against women is not seen as a priority by many, many, many, many people in our society,” said Dawn Dalton, the executive director of the Domestic Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project in Washington. “And that is why you can have great laws on the books but complete failure at implementation. Because the folks that are charged with implementing the law don’t always do it. They have their own lens that they’re looking through about what is violence against women. It’s this fog that is keeping people from doing their job the way the statutes require them to do it.”
“We are working on cases where we’re not dealing with celebrities,” she continued. “We’re dealing with moms and kids who are not believed in the court system. They’re not believed that the threats and the violence that have occurred are going to continue to occur. This is impacting people who are not celebrities. It’s happening in jurisdictions and courtrooms across the country.”
If Mayweather and his sport are just reflective of the society in which they exist, it is hardly a surprise that boxing has done little other than enable its champion. That is only compounded because of boxing’s own systemic issues, which put it in a uniquely difficult position to deal with the issue, assuming it wants to at all. There is no central body, no equivalent to the National Football League, to hand down punishment; instead, boxing is governed by state commissions. If the Nevada Athletic Commission were to punish Mayweather, he and Pacquiao could hold this bout somewhere else, and all Nevada’s principle would have gotten it was less money (the commission takes a cut of ticket and event-related taxes).
The sport itself, meanwhile, isn’t exactly thriving, and Mayweather remains its most valuable meal ticket. Neither boxing nor the state commission that has repeatedly granted him permission to fight — with a wink, nod, and a thumbs up — have any real incentive to turn him away.
But that is meant for understanding, not excuse. Money alone does not forgive Nevada or any state commission from saying enough is enough.
Of course, if fans and the rest of the sports world haven’t turned our backs on Mayweather, it is naive to expect the commission to do it for us. After all, the NFL for years had no incentive to take domestic violence seriously, and it did not begin doing so out of its own sense of altruism. Rather, it was forced by a public and media outcry against commissioner Roger Goodell’s own “fog” about domestic violence, and the “meager” punishment of Rice that resulted, to treat it with a new-found gravity. That has resulted in a months-long conversation both inside and outside the league about the issue, with the NFL bringing together experts in the field in an attempt to improve its efforts.
That has already had an effect. Pending cases and those that followed Rice were met with a more intense treatment from the league and the media that covers it even without video evidence. In the weeks after the Rice tape became public, the NBA handed down one of its strongest domestic violence-related punishments ever, and the league and its players’ union began talks about a new policy. Major League Baseball, which admits now that it had all but ignored the issue before the Rice incident, began talks with its union shortly thereafter; now the league, in a partnership with domestic violence organizations that have worked with its individual teams, is in the process of working out its own new policy for addressing and preventing violence against women.
In the same way that the Rice incident led to changes in other leagues, it could continue to affect boxing and other sports without such centralized governing bodies or regular appearances in the public consciousness. In a way, perhaps it already has. It is certainly possible that the attention granted to domestic violence in the NFL has spilled over to Mayweather, that eight months of talking about Rice, Hardy, and the history of sports doing little of import on such a prevalent problem is a primary reason why we are devoting at least a little attention to Floyd The Person instead of Floyd The Fighter now.
“Even though boxing is sort of this outlier in terms of how they’re structured, if other sports leagues are beginning to take this issue seriously, and if they do hold their players accountable, that can start to create a different view,” Dalton said. “If there is a shift that begins to occur in the accountability level for athletes, how will the public (react)? How does that shift the way that they’re thinking about other athletes and their responsibility?”
The issue of precisely how to address athletes’ violence against women is difficult — it invites questions about history and labor and accountability that have no easy answers. This too makes sports a reflection of the broader fight. But it is also an especially important reflection, a powerful lens on the problem that those on the ground level of the fight to “change the reality” around domestic violence, as Dalton put it, welcome.
“Because sports is such a large aspect of the American entertainment industry, sports institutions have a responsibility. They’re playing a role in the public view around violence against women in a way not many other professions or institutions have in this society,” Dalton said. “That has a ripple effect into the larger public, if (fans) are seeing their leaders truly adhering to what they’re saying on television in trying to ensure that their players aren’t being abusers. There are a lot of sports figures that have celebrity status. If those folks are saying violence against women is wrong, and here’s why…that absolutely has a huge impact.”
But again, this requires media and fans who force sports to do better. That the NFL formed its panel and started a public relations campaign does not mean its fight is finished. That baseball is pushing forward on a new policy does not mean it has accomplished anything. If history is any guide, if Mayweather and boxing are any indication, answers — or simply just a sports world that treats this problem with the import it deserves — will only come with the level of attention and meddling from outside interests, fans, and the media that invited the questions and the outcries in the first place.
In that sense, sad a statement as it may well be, that we are talking at all about Mayweather’s past outside the ring before the most anticipated fight in two decades is a sign of progress. The money the fight is generating, and that a majority of the focus remains, sometimes crassly and shamefully, on the fight itself, is a reminder of how much progress remains.