Las Vegas, Nevada. Saturday. 10:13 PM, PST. Media Tent. MGM Grand. Casino employees enter with trolleys of biscuits and cans of soda, tin barrels piled with bags of Sun Chips. Everyone is mostly quiet, calm, writing, charging their phones, considering walking over to the Sun Chips.
Behind them, at a low volume on a half-dozen televisions, Floyd Mayweather is saying dull and insincere things about boxing, pay-per-view, gratitude, God, Manny Pacquiao, money, loyalty, legacies. Eventually, you will remember little about the fight except that it happened at all. You came for an execution and barely got an arraignment. You came for an assassination and saw a man handed a severance check. You will feel duped, but only briefly, because you realise this is the only way this fight was ever going to end.
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You will remember Floyd Mayweather, who has been convicted multiple times for domestic violence, building an empire selling the hope of vengeance to righteous people. A man who never loses, because he is not a loser, because no loser could be this rich. A man whose entire existence is cackling in your face. A man who will be survived only by his millions, the creepy adoration from the sort of people who run beer pong leagues in their thirties, and an apathetic celebration of his “mechanistic efficiency.” You know what else is efficient? Toyotas. Boxing against Floyd Mayweather is like boxing a bark collar. It is like someone rubbing a pencil eraser on the side of your neck until you decide to kill yourself.
He is a villain but only by default, not because he is any good at it. He is excessive but without the gluttonous, belly-slapping charm. He owns three Bugattis. He wears hats with dollar signs on them. He tweets about the financial appreciations of his Ferraris. He is a man who seems so incapable of feeling actual joy that he builds a castle of Joyous Things to live inside. Because when the whole world is listening to you and you have nothing interesting to say, you can always at least count to a higher number. He is all setup and no punch line. Videos of him counting money are captioned with literally “help me out with a caption.” Money only matters to him because it matters to us. He is only rich because he believes that we feel poor. He is the real-life manifestation of Tony Montana: palaces, sycophants, and at the center of it all a lonely man whose most intimate moments with women are when he beats them or has them give him baths.
There is noise but no rage; menace but no anger; speed but no fury. There is no thumping heartbeat, just the drone of a plugged-in machine. You will remember him as a man who would register additional phone lines simply to text himself pictures of his own dick.
Related: Watch our documentary about the Las Vegas International Lingerie show.
You will remember how Las Vegas and boxing are really about the same things. Pipe dreams and comebacks, being profoundly alone, at a blackjack table or in an empty gym, coming up from nothing, from nowhere. They both represent a sort of sanctioned hedonism, a rampant, dirty machismo. Doubling-down, back-foot haymakers, spitting blood and screaming to the sky, girls with big fake tits who can be yours, really sweetie, for tonight, for forever, for never in a million years. It doesn’t matter. The point is that everything seems possible. Knockouts and jackpots, bombastic entrance music, faint cheers from craps tables, people in the Philippines shouting your name deep into the night.
In this desert, everyone can be a hero. You are Guns N’ Roses riding a Pegasus chariot through the asteroid belt. It is a land of reputations, of memories, of hazy neon extravagance. But it is also where you can in an instant disappear, where you don’t even have to exist at all if you don’t want. You are at a $10 blackjack table, going broke before she even gets back with your shitty drink, leaving and never coming back again. The waitress never looks for you, the dealers don’t give you a eulogy, and back in your room, the curtains hide any trace of sun, time, or chaos. It is a land where everything is simultaneously chillingly real and artificial. Where from most angles you can see mountains, earth, sand between the building edifices that look like scuffed plastic. There is money everywhere, but none of it ever feels real, none of it is ever feels like yours, not till the flight home, and by then it is not yours anymore.
You will remember guys with frozen drinks with indestructible straws in big stupid plastic goblets. Guys stopping girls going the opposite way on pedestrian bridges. “Baby what you all alone for?” Girls in dark clubs with strategically concealed erogenous zones. Girls on trading cards trying to sell you their erogenous zones. Not-rich people behind smudgy windows at Denny’s. Rich-rich people stalling kiwi-green Lamborghinis. Slices of pizza so horrid your unborn children start biting their fingernails. Reckless men carefully tanning. A guy at the Yves Saint Laurent store trying to act casual when the sales associate tells him the broach costs $6,000. A guy at the Yves Saint Laurent store who is just particular about his broaches. A guy at the Yves Saint Laurent store who is getting the fuck out of there. Skinny blonde women with expensive noses hammered to a fragile tip, like if she coughed too hard it’d flutter off her face like a dandelion spore. The guy standing next to her, who’s standing outside Omnia, who’s positive his name is on the list, just check one more time, how were you spelling that?
In Vegas, if you try hard enough to be important, eventually you sort of are. Or at least the world will give up and pretend it believes you.
You remember every enclosed space in Las Vegas feeling air-conditioned to the point of refrigeration, and yet Saturday night, inside the Cosmopolitan, at the entrance of the Marquee—a mob of people surging, throbbing, horny, angry, sweating until wet spots are shining in the bends in their elbows—the atmosphere feeling humid and warm, like it has just rained.
A man claiming to be the younger brother of Les Moonves, trying to get into the Jay-Z after-party, but really just trying to get someone to surrender, to play ball, to tell him, “OK fine come in you are an equally important Moonves please forgive us.” The bouncer is looking at Equally Important Moonves like he is a potted plant. Equally Important Moonves is perspiring like his entire body is made of armpit. He says to the bouncer, “Look let’s just say I can bring some girls in here. I’m not saying it like I’m bragging, I just mean I can be good for you guys.” In Vegas, if you try hard enough to be important, eventually you sort of are. Or at least the world will give up and pretend it believes you.
The magic of Las Vegas, and boxing, is their ability to sell answers without ever answering anything. Two men in coloured shorts Fight for Everything, but neither one bleeds; they hug each other afterward and will both be back in the fall. You come to Vegas seeking wealth and pussy and meaning; you leave penniless and alone and forgotten. It’s all there, it’s all yours, and then it isn’t.
Sunday. 10:34 PM, PST. Altitude: 35,663 feet. Beneath you: Las Vegas, Nevada. Land so flat it’s as if the mountains were levelled and sanded down by giant robot carpenters. Yellow-white lights, sharp little dots all over, hundreds of near-parallel strips of them stretching into the distance. Then, abruptly, beyond that, nothing. Darkness forever. Darkness like a place deep in the ocean where only algae can survive. A darkness that makes a city look like just a blip. It is right there, civilization at its filthiest concentration, hookers and buffets and travel-size deodorants, miles of it that from the inside feels endless. And then it breaks off perfectly from infinity like it had a perforated edge.
Here, another thing you will remember: monumental showdowns, Floyd Mayweather, Las Vegas itself and everything in it—even the biggest things are actually very small.
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