The National's Sport cover for the Monday, May 4 issue, featuring Floyd Mayweather as he emerged victorious in the "Fight of the Century" against Manny Pacquiao.
Writing about the match, Osman Samiuddin notes:
“A big fight is a force.
“The great Norman Mailer once described a heavyweight championship as a vortex, ‘as charged as a magnetic field’.
“Mailer wrote those words in The Fight, his remarkable account of the legendary 1974 Muhammad Ali v George Foreman fight, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’.
“That fight, more than 40 years ago now, resonates still, even if it carries no great implications for our age.
“It exists in and of itself, a great monument of its time and an enduring point of cultural reference.”
Comparing that bout to Sunday’s Mayweather-Pacquiao extravaganza, Osman goes on:
“Immediacy prevents conferring any status to Floyd Mayweather Jr’s fight with Manny Pacquiao, but certainly, if one had a working pulse, it was impossible not to feel its force, to be drawn into that vortex.
“This fight was a reminder that one of the ways man wins a fight is by not getting beaten up, as opposed to beating the other man down.
“Mayweather’s masterful elusiveness stood out again and it holds appeal, but in a contrarian way.
“Its reactivity and subtlety can be appreciated, if not widely loved.
“There were stirring moments, but nothing prolonged.
“This really was science, feeling ultimately like walking into a movie theatre expecting to watch Interstellar and instead sitting through an actual lecture on theoretical physics.”
Also focussing on the big fight, John McAuley covered the Floyd Mayweather angle and Steve Luckings touched on what's next for Manny Pacquiao.
Writes McAuley:
“Mayweather will continue to do what he has done for the majority of an astounding career: duck and dive, pick his foes off at his leisure, transform a probable danger into a procession.
“He is right to retire at 49 and 0. Timing has always been his sweet spot in the sweet science. ‘Money’ is cashing out exactly when he should.”
As for Pac-Man, Luckings says of the superfight:
“The lasting memory is of Pacquiao’s head snapping back as a result of a stiff jab more often than Mayweather’s did.
“The Filipino fighter has done great things for the sport; it is time for him to do even greater things as a humanitarian or even a politician in his homeland.
“For the sake of Pacquiao’s legacy ... let us hope his cut of $300m is enough for him to walk away content.”
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