By Ivan G. Goldman
Misreporting on the supposed super-fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao is getting so ridiculous that writers may now be deriving information from visions that come to them in the night.
They not only report false rumors as news but can’t even summarize the false rumors without making significant mistakes. Allow me to explain.
This morning USA Today Sports misreported a clearly false article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph on the supposed welterweight showdown. That’s how ridiculous this is getting.
The writers can’t even quote each other correctly when they repeat rumors based on hogwash.
Amazingly, when an article in The Telegraph on Saturday from Gareth A. Davies reported that the fight was a done deal for May 2, no one seemed to notice that the writer relied on unnamed sources in Pacquiao’s camp – sources that have been almost totally unreliable thus far.
Pacquiao’s people want the fight so badly they seem to think that if they say something is a fact, maybe it will become one. Kind of like wishing on a star. The sources, though they noted that Floyd hadn’t yet signed, said he would do so shortly. Hmm. Manny, they claimed, had already signed.
Déjà vu.
And everyone seemed to think that if it’s reported in The Telegraph, it must be true. Ha!
A long list of supposedly serious newspapers and fly-by-night websites jumped all over this report, and in many cases the newspapers behaved even more stupidly than the fly-by-nighters.
This morning Nick Schwartz of USA Today, reporting on the status of the fight that never gets fought, revived and quoted the Telegraph story and said it had been based on “sources close to Mayweather,” when in fact the story relied on no such sources. So I’m assuming that maybe these sources came to USA Today in a vision because they sure didn’t come to Davies.
USA Today also noted that comments by Mayweather at the NBA All Star Game in New York Sunday were a “huge disappointment.” A TNT reporter found Mayweather at ringside, but the champ, responding to “reports” that the fight was set, said, “That’s not true. I haven’t signed yet, and he hasn’t signed yet. It’s just been speculation and rumors, but hopefully we can make the fight happen.”
Lots of poor saps thought the fight might be announced during the game. There had been similar speculation earlier that we’d hear the fight announced at the Super Bowl.
Stephen Espinoza, sports chieftain at Showtime, has been denying all along that anything is set and asked why, if negotiators really want a deal, would they think that leaking false reports could help juice the deal. Mayweather is contracted to Showtime, and Pacquiao to HBO.
Not sure what anyone is signing since no agreement has been finalized yet. #MayweatherPacquiao #boxing
— Stephen Espinoza (@StephenEspinoza) February 15, 2015
I won’t repeat any of the other so-called established facts about the purse split or anything else, but I would like to draw attention to the circulation of a surreptitious video taken by the Mayweather camp when Floyd met with Manny after they ran into each other at a Miami Heat home game on Jan. 27.
In a snippet that lasted only a few seconds, Mayweather, playing for the camera like Brando, told sitting-duck Pacquiao that the two fighters had to make the fight happen for the fans.
I agree with Espinoza that leaking false information is no way to make the fight. But even worse is sneaking out footage of what were supposed to be serious negotiations in order to buttress your claim that it’s the other guys who are preventing the fight.
This indicates you’re more interested in establishing excuses than fighting for the biggest purse in history.
New York Times best-selling author Ivan G. Goldman’s Sick Justice: Inside the American Gulag was released in 2013 by Potomac Books. Watch for The Debtor Class: A Novel from Permanent Press in spring, 2015. More information here.