T GAMBLE: Paul/Mayweather bout … the art of the con

One of the biggest con jobs in sporting history occurred Monday when Logan Paul and Floyd Mayweather fought an exhibition boxing match on Showtime. It cost $50 per person to have the spectacle streamed online to your TV. Logan Paul is a YouTube sensation. I have no idea what you have to do to become a YouTube sensation, but I’d like to find out as he made about $20 million for boxing Mayweather, who reportedly earned $100 million.

For $20 million, I’d box King Kong naked. I doubt anyone would pay $50 to see it, but I’d sure do it.

Now, Mayweather is one of the greatest fighters ever to box. Paul has fought only a few exhibition matches and might not last two rounds against the No. 100 boxer in the world. He earns his living doing stupid stuff on YouTube; he is not a boxer or fighter by training. Early on, it was apparent the fight would only consist of the combatants holding each other and no one getting hurt. It was painfully boring. I’m told that folks who hacked into the broadcast, thus paying no money, are now demanding a refund from Showtime. It was that bad.

My son got swept up in the mania, only to be disappointed with the joke of a fight that occurred. He’s 16 and ripe for just such a con. I was about that same age, 15 actually, when Evel Knievel announced he would jump the Snake River Canyon. Evil had tried to jump just about everything else so why not a river almost a mile wide?

Back then you could not get pay-per-view streamed into your home. You had to go to a movie theatre venue and pay for closed-circuit television there. And so I paid my $30 in Columbus, which is about like $200 now, and waited for him to get on his motorcycle and leap over it like he did at Caesars Palace. Only problem was, he finally came out after I’d watched about two hours of Bigfoot films and other such stuff, and there was a motorcycle rocket ship on one side of the canyon. Nobody told me he would not be riding his Harley over the river.

Well, what the heck, it still offered good entertainment, I thought, as the rocket rose in the air about 40 feet. But then the parachute opened prematurely and the rocket drifted down into the bottom of the canyon, landing a few feet over the river. The rest of the broadcast consisted of the commentator trying to act like he was afraid Evel might be hurt from slowly descending into the canyon. Of course, Evel was fine. The show was a bust. And Evel was millions richer, while I needed to walk home having spent all my gas money on the closed circuit.

Evel never did jump the canyon, but in 2016 Eddie Braun had the same group that made the original rocket make a replica of the rocket ship Evel tried to jump the canyon in, and low and behold he made it. So maybe Evel wasn’t a con. But as for Logan Paul, I want my money back and I didn’t even see it all.