Barber: No good guys to root for in Floyd Mayweather, Conor McGregor fight

Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Conor McGregor are geniuses. Forget about comparing either of these guys to Mike Tyson. We should be drawing parallels to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

For starters, they are drawing immense attention for a boxing match that features only one boxer. Mayweather, the actual pugilist, reportedly will earn at least $100 million for their Aug. 26 bout in Las Vegas, and McGregor, an MMA champion, at least $75 million. But both of those figures could skyrocket if the match hits its pay-per-view targets.

Then there is the outlandish tour they devised to publicize the fight. Money May and The Notorious visited Los Angeles, Toronto, Brooklyn and London in a four-day whirlwind of shouting, boasting, flexing and posturing. McGregor kicked it off in LA on July 11 by wearing a suit with the words “(BLEEP) YOU” stitched over and over in a pinstripe pattern.

Only a genius would realize that four fake almost-brawls are way better than the traditional one.

But Mayweather and McGregor really showed their brainpower when they borrowed a page from professional wrestling.

The WWE has always relied upon its heels. You know about wrestling heels, right? They’re the bad guys, the evildoers who glare into the camera with crazy eyes, taunt the booing crowd and smash a chair across the hero’s back just when it seems he’s about to win.

Ric Flair. CM Punk. The Progressive Liberal (at least until he leaves the Appalachian Mountain Wrestling circuit and does battle in Sebastopol). Wrestling couldn’t thrive without someone to hate.

And those smarties Mayweather and McGregor figured out it could work in boxing, too. They have recognized the promotional value of the heel. Just one complication: They can’t agree on who’s playing the part.

To be fair to Mayweather, he’s been building to this role for years.

He has a great record as a boxer (49-0) but a terrible record of violence against women.

Mayweather pleaded guilty to two counts of battery domestic violence in 2001 and 2002, receiving a sentence of 48 hours of community service and two days of house arrest. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2003. In 2004, Mayweather was convicted of misdemeanor battery and ordered to serve 100 hours of community service for fighting two women at a Vegas nightclub. And in December of 2011 he pleaded guilty to one count of misdemeanor battery violence and no contest to harassment counts for hitting the mother of three of his children; that one brought a sentence of 90 days in jail, though he was released after 60.

And those are just the adjudicated episodes. In 2014, Deadspin published a long account reporting that Mayweather has been accused of domestic violence seven times.

Now that’s a heel. Mayweather doesn’t need to utter a single threatening word at a press conference. He has already earned the right to be the scoundrel.

Not so fast, McGregor said. His ginger beard, 21-3 record in cage fights and infinite cockiness have made him sort of a national hero in Ireland. But he recognizes his potential to be the villain, too.

So McGregor set to work. If Mayweather had the misogyny angle sewn up, McGregor would play the race card. On the Toronto leg of their tour de gross, he urged Mayweather to “Dance for me, boy” as the crowd did the “Ole” chant. Black activist groups were not thrilled.

Hold up, though. McGregor’s supporters were quick to note that the term “boy” is tossed around casually in Ireland. It isn’t weighed down by a history of racial degradation, as it is here.

This could have been a real setback for McGregor’s heel turn. So he doubled down. The very next day, in New York, the Guillermo character from the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show asked McGregor if he could beat the fictional Rocky of “Rocky III.”

“Rocky III, that’s the one where he had that celebrity gym, isn’t it?” McGregor asked. “With the dancing monkeys in the gym and all.”

This quip left little room for interpretation. There were no dancing monkeys in that gym scene. It was filled with African-American men shadow boxing and jumping rope. Amazingly, McGregor had managed to wrest the black hat from Mayweather, or at least get a firm grip on it.

But as we should all know by now, no one fights off of the ropes better than Floyd Mayweather. He had one final press conference to play the heavy, and he used it expertly, tossing out a homophobic slur to belittle McGregor. You know, the six-letter slur that starts with F. The one that went out of fashion in about 1980, or in third grade.

And here’s the bad news (if you are in favor of human dignity), or the good news (if you like TMZ and “Real Housewives of Hades”): The two fighters have more than a month to compete for heel status.

It’s gonna be lit.

I expect McGregor to keep the ball rolling by offending Muslims or Sikhs in an effort to mock his opponent. Mayweather will fight back by hilariously imitating someone with ALS or cerebral palsy. Undaunted, McGregor will make an internment camp joke. Mayweather will counter with a concentration camp joke.

We’re witnessing two great modern-day practitioners of the art of jackassery, and we are certain to be amazed by the depths they plumb over the next five weeks.

Bad guys are important because they give us someone to root against, which is the flipside of giving us a hero to worship. Having two of them in one ring might seem like a problem. Whose side are we on? But Mayweather and McGregor offer the luxury of not picking a side at all. When they step into that ring on Aug. 26, we can root for them to beat one another to a pulp, and for the match to end in a draw.

Or maybe we just won’t watch. After all, not everything looks great in a pair of heels.

You can columnist writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.