| Date: 03/26 | 6:00 PM |
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From now until WrestleMania XXIV we will count down to "The Grandest Stage of Them All" with a series of editorials taking a look at the show in Orlando. This week long series culminates on Saturday, March 29th - the last day before 24th annual WrestleMania takes places. In our fourth entry we take a look at the biggest drawing match for the casual fans - Floyd Mayweather v. The Big Show.
Ever since No Way Out we've heard an incessant stream of hype about this fight. Anywhere you care to look you'll find Floyd Mayweather and Paul 'The Big Show' Wight. ESPN, late night talk shows, periodicals, and of course three times a week on WWE programming (four if you count AM Raw). To the hardcore wrestling fans this is overkill to the umpteenth degree, but for WrestleMania 24 to break one million buys on pay-per-view this is exactly what WWE needs to do. The rest of us may come to see Ric Flair have one last match with Shawn Michaels, or Edge take on Undertaker et cetera but it's this match more than any other which captures the public's imagination. It's not hard to understand why when the battle has been billed as wrestler who is "the largest athlete in the world" facing a boxer who is "the best pound for pound athlete" in the world. While the story on paper would seem to be a David vs. Goliath situation, with Mayweather playing the David role, WWE had to learn on the fly that for both the wrestling fans AND the casual fans that just wouldn't fly.
Undoubtedly at the start of this feud it would have been easy to book Big Show as the heel if things had gone the way they planned. WWE wanted to create a tag match where Big Show and Rey Mysterio each teamed with a boxer, which ideally would have resulted in Mysterio & Mayweather taking on Big Show & Oscar De La Hoya. This went awry from the very start, as De La Hoya had no interest in participating in this spectacle, and to make matters worse Mysterio suffered a serious bicep tear which he would be unable to continue working through at WrestleMania. Big Show kickstarted the booking by making a surprise return to WWE at No Way Out, attacking the already injured Mysterio and threatening to chokeslam him. This caused Mysterio's friend Mayweather to jump the railing and get into Big Show's face, which Show laughed off thinking the diminutive boxer was no more a challenge for him than Mysterio was as a wrestler. Dropping to one knee he dared Floyd to take a shot at him, and Mayweather proceded to clean his clock with a rapid series of punches. Whether the entire thing was staged or Mayweather legit broke his nose, it was real ENOUGH to have people buzzing about what took place on PPV.
WWE undoubtedly assumed that by having Mayweather be Mysterio's savior that he would be the face in this feud, a fact magnified by the tremendous size difference between the boxer and the wrestler. THEY THOUGHT WRONG. As anybody who saw the HBO 24/7 specials leading up to the big Mayweather v. De La Hoya fight knows, Floyd Mayweather is a NATURAL heel. He's an unapologetically cocky son of a bitch, and to some degree deservedly so given his incredible boxing skill - in 39 fights he has NEVER been defeated, and 25 fights were ended by knockout. I don't care if you're 5'5" or 6'10", that's way fucking legit. His success in the ring has earned him a vast fortune, and he's not afraid to show it off to everyone. He spends money like water, and is so hard-pressed to spend it he has a whole entourage there to sop up the greenback flow and make sure he wastes more dough. Big house, big cars, big chains with big diamonds around his neck, big stacks of cash taller than he is made out of hundred dollar bills. Floyd Mayweather is wealthy, arrogant and not afraid to show it - he's the Montgomery Burns of professional boxing. The amount of people who admire him is almost equal in proportion to the amount of people who can't stand him.
The key thing to recognize is that Mayweather has used that to his advantage from the start - he WANTS people to hate him. Everybody wants to see the arrogant son of a bitch put in his place, and boxing promoters love that about him. The more shit he talks, the more millions they see lining their pockets, and the more cash he makes too. Boxing is considered to be a shoot (though it has at times been worked) but Mayweather works the marks like the best pro wrestling heel there's ever been. Whatever brain trust in WWE thought that the public would buy him as a babyface just because he was friends with Mysterio or smaller than Big Show need to have their heads examined. Far from being perceived as a big bully, Show was wildly popular upon his return after a long absence from WWE. They took one look at Big Show, the man standing up for pro wrestling against the cocky loudmouthed boxer, and they instantly sided with the wrestler. After a couple of weeks of misguided attempts to get Mayweather over as a face, WWE finally caught on and let him do what he does naturally - talk mo' shit. Show's status as a face overall may still be somewhat ambiguous, depending on whether or not you favor him trying to punch Chris Jericho's lights out, but facing Mayweather he's not only WWE's hero but the public's hero as well. Everyone wants Big Show to SHUT MAYWEATHER UP.
And so, come Sunday night, the fight that both the marks and the public alike have wanted to see will finally take place. With no disrespect to Larry Barnes and Sweet 'n Sour Larry Sweeney, this is THE boxer vs. wrestler match going on right now - the one that already has everybody talking. In fact this gimmick has been so successful I won't be surprised if a dozen different indie promotions try to book it over the next year, each with increasingly diminished returns compared to the first one. The surprising thing is that Big Show is likely to lose this match. In a shoot fight Paul Wight could probably just sit on him until he begged for mercy, but given that it's a work and there's "Money" in Mayweather it's probably in WWE's best interest for him to go over no matter what we all want. Will they rematch down the road? Probably not. Will they interview him about it and show the footage of it over and over again? Probably so. Will this enrage Big Show in the storyline and make him an unstoppable wrecking machine in WWE? You bet! Even if Mayweather does lose, WWE wins either way. He's not getting a legit $20 million for this fight, but in the long run he may prove to be worth all that and then some between the live gate, buyrate, merchandise and DVD buys. Since WrestleMania 24 will be WWE's first ever release on Blu Ray, I suspect a lot of people will pick it up just to see this fight in HD again. I know I will!