Earlier this year, when people started talking about a possible boxing
match between Floyd Mayweather, Jr., and Conor McGregor, experts agreed
that McGregor had virtually no chance. After all, Mayweather is a boxing
virtuoso; McGregor is a mixed-martial-arts champion but a boxing novice.
One oddsmaker
installed Mayweather as a -2500 favorite and McGregor as a +1100 underdog. In
other words, a bettor hoping to win a measly hundred dollars on
Mayweather would have had to risk twenty-five hundred dollars, while a
bettor willing to risk a hundred dollars on McGregor would have stood
to win eleven hundred dollars. With those odds, betting on Mayweather
would be rational only if you thought his chances of winning exceeded
ninety-six per cent. And many experts thought precisely that—he was,
after all, one of the world’s best boxers, facing an amateur. How could
he lose?

The fight will finally take place on Saturday, in Las Vegas, and the
odds have narrowed considerably. By fight
week,
Mayweather’s odds had dropped to -400, while McGregor’s had increased to
+300, a price that only makes sense if you think that McGregor’s chances
of pulling the greatest upset in combat-sports history are greater than
one in four. By comparison, Buster Douglas was a +4200
underdog on the night, in 1990, when he knocked out Mike Tyson—and Douglas was,
let’s remember, a skilled and experienced boxer.

Wild odds swings like this are unusual, partly because they present
opportunities for arbitrage. (A sophisticated and risk-averse bettor,
who had previously laid a thousand dollars on McGregor, at +1100, could
then have laid ninety-five hundred dollars on Mayweather, at -400; on
Saturday night, those combined bets would earn about fifteen hundred
dollars, no matter which guy wins.) The changes to the odds reflect not
some sudden change of heart among the nation’s boxing experts but,
rather, the stubborn optimism of McGregor’s fans, who have bidded up his
price in the months since the fight was announced. By narrowing the
odds, bookmakers are effectively raising McGregor’s price, and yet his
fans keep buying. Perhaps that is reason enough to consider earnestly
the question at the heart of those bets: How, exactly, could Floyd
Mayweather lose?

McGregor, naturally, has expressed confidence from the outset, and he
has done what he can to put across the farfetched idea that, through
some magical combination of attitude and freakish athletic talent, he
has suddenly transformed himself into an élite boxer. His warmup routine
seems to include a “shoulder-loosening exercise,” which has become a running joke. But footage of McGregor sparring
Paulie Malignaggi,
a retired boxer, made it easier to imagine McGregor looking something
besides ridiculous in a boxing ring. Mayweather, by contrast, has been
trying to convince fans that, although he is known for meticulous
preparation, he has suddenly grown lazy and reckless. Last weekend,
Mayweather tweeted that, for the next ten days, fans could find him at
Girl Collection, his new “upscale gentleman’s
club,” in Las Vegas. He
wrote,
“I’m Partying The Entire Week Before My Fight All The Way Through To
Next Monday Following My Fight ONLY AT GIRL COLLECTION!!!!” (The idea of
Mayweather “partying” before his fight may seem less shocking when you
consider that he famously abstains from drugs and alcohol.)

One bystander who now claims to be more bullish on McGregor is his boss:
Dana White, the president of Ultimate Fighting Championship, the
mixed-martial-arts company that built McGregor into a global celebrity.
Soon after the match was announced, White
admitted that McGregor was not “at the level of a Floyd Mayweather, as far as
boxing standards go,” and wondered, “Is Conor McGregor, in a
twelve-round fight, going to be able to touch Floyd Mayweather?” Since
then, White has grown bolder, and this week he has been offering his own
prediction. “Conor is the bigger, stronger man who will apply pressure,
hit him with hard punches,” White
said,
at a media event on Wednesday. “He will eventually catch him, and he
will knock him out.”

Perhaps it is unfair to call McGregor a boxing novice. He is, after all,
a mixed-martial-arts champion, though not an untouchable one—just last
year, he was choked into submission by Nate Diaz. (McGregor won the
rematch, a few months later, by majority decision.) M.M.A. fighters
do a lot of punching, although they also kick and throw knees and
elbows; these tactics are known, collectively, as “striking” or
“standup,” to distinguish them from the tactics that are employed when
the fighters are on the mat, grappling for position. Mayweather-McGregor
would be much more interesting, and more competitive, if it were a
hybrid—say, a kickboxing match, with punches and kicks allowed, but no
grappling. Instead, it is a boxing match, although there is one
infinitesimal concession to McGregor. In M.M.A., the fighters wear
small, four-ounce fingerless gloves, to help them grapple. And while the
state of Nevada would usually require Mayweather and McGregor to wear
ten-ounce boxing gloves, the state’s Athletic Commission has decided,
for no good
reason,
to allow them to wear eight-ounce gloves instead. Suffice it to say that
those two ounces are unlikely to prove decisive.

If this fight is a grudge match, the grudge is not between Mayweather
and
McGregor but between boxing and M.M.A.: a stubbornly old-fashioned sport, hoping
to embarrass its younger, more broad-minded rival. People who say that
McGregor has no chance are saying, with some justification, that the
M.M.A. version of boxing is scarcely comparable to the real thing.
Accomplished M.M.A. strikers can certainly punch—and, likewise, the
N.F.L.’s fastest wide receivers can certainly run, but that doesn’t mean
that, with enough self-belief, they could find a way to outrace Usain
Bolt. Boxing is single-minded: the combatants spend every minute of
every round trying to punch while not getting punched; Mayweather, in
particular, loves to frustrate his opponents by standing at what looks
like a punchable distance and then suddenly darting or twisting out of
range.

The most persuasive argument for McGregor is more or less the one that
Dana White advanced: that he will be able to harass Mayweather, fight
rough, and eventually wear him down. Virtually every boxer who has ever
fought Mayweather has had this plan, and it has never worked. Four years
ago, Saúl (Canelo) Álvarez was big and rough, too, with forty-two wins
and no losses; Mayweather spent twelve rounds making him look like a
lumbering
novice.
Mayweather is known as a light puncher, and his low-impact style seems
calculated to protect his fists, which are
injury-prone.
Although both fighters are promising knockouts on Saturday night, it seems likelier that the
encounter will resemble most recent Mayweather fights: he will largely
avoiding taking punches, while delivering just enough to remind
McGregor, the judges, and everyone watching that he could, if he felt
like it, deliver many more. Fans typically leave a Mayweather fight
wishing there had been more fighting.

That means that Mayweather, especially at -400, is a great deal—but not
quite a sure thing. It seems clear that he would win a purely athletic
contest, but boxing matches are not always purely athletic contests:
strange things have been known to happen, especially in big fights.
Think of Fan Man, paragliding into the ring during the second Riddick
Bowe-Evander Holyfield fight, in 1993, interrupting the action and
giving Holyfield a crucial unscheduled timeout. Think of Tyson, dining
out on Holyfield’s ear; think of Manny Pacquiao comprehensively
outboxing Timothy Bradley and then, somehow, being declared the loser.
It’s hard to picture McGregor’s strategy, whatever it is, being
successful, unless Mayweather, who is forty, suddenly begins to act his
age. It is markedly easier to picture McGregor clobbering Mayweather
after the bell, without being penalized; or causing a fight-stopping cut
with an illegal head butt, which the referee somehow doesn’t see; or
raising his hands in victory after Mayweather suffers a suspicious
injury; or lasting twelve rounds and then, for no reason anyone can
understand, being declared the winner. These are all good reasons not to
bet your life savings on Mayweather, even at -400. And perhaps they are
good-enough reasons, too, to watch the fight: the buildup has been an
absurd but entertaining farce, and there is a chance—and, among some of
us who will be watching, a perverse hope—that whatever happens on
Saturday night will be pretty farcical, too.