Floyd Mayweather vs Manny Pacquiao: I've been to Vegas 53 times and I've never seen it so crazy....

Sin City is full of money, hype, panhandlers and fans and is more insane than ever as it prepares for ‘the biggest event in its history’

Floyd Mayweather Jr and Manny Pacquiao pose with a WBC championship belt (Getty Images)

It is true that they move mountains, replace oceans and have magicians that can fart a lion here in Las Vegas if the price is right and during this fight week the price is so high that nothing in the flimsy paradise is beyond shifting.

The biggest names ever in the Strip’s rich history are moving back for a new assault on the American people and under this breathtaking umbrella of acts is the greatest conjuring trick this glorious place has ever seen: Floyd Mayweather Jr v Manny Pacquiao for the soul of the city and the best part of half a billion dollars in revenue.

Far from the mad crowd that arrives for any fight – even a tiny outbreak of fisticuffs at one of the five and dime casinos attracts a crowd – the city is mourning the passing next Monday of the Riviera Hotel. The dirty old dame of Vegas is 60 years old and, oddly for Vegas, actually looks and smells 60 years old. Well, mourning might be a bit strong, but before one of the last of the old Strip’s attractions is blown to bits in public, a geriatric crowd gathered to remember the place. It was the home of the Rat Pack, Liberace was paid $50,000 per week in 1955 and an endless list of slim cads, all from the school of wannabe Sinatras, electrified well-dressed audiences with grown-up lounge acts. Mayweather and Pacquiao are a half-billion dollars away from the Riviera and it is more than just a long walk on a pleasant night.

Pacquiao fans hold images of their idol (Reuters)

It would be possible to camouflage the tiny Riviera with any of the giant awnings that are draped against Sin City’s behemoth hotels at the new end of the Las Vegas Strip – in Las Vegas you need to be on a building. The MGM Grand this week is hosting a gathering that even the far-sighted planners of the Vegas dream in the 1950s would have been unable to sketch without a sweet dabble at the surrounding desert’s infamous, mind-altering peyote. It is officially, this week, a different world in this strange place.

David Copperfield, a god in this city, is booked soon for the MGM and the master magician would surely like some of the magic from this fight on the end of his wand for his opening night; it is all very well being able to make a London bus vanish under a cloak, but can you generate the $180,000 that Mayweather will make per second in the fight? Copperfield’s tickets are available at 250 bucks, Mayweather’s were never available at the face value of $10,000 and those lucky tickets now drift into a complex system where the highest rollers, men who can take down sections of the house, get the best suites and a ringside seat for Mayweather and Pacquiao. It is not, strangely enough, these men and women you see in Las Vegas when you stroll through the casino floor or walk between properties.

Floyd Mayweather Jr is interviewed by rapper Doug E Fresh at MGM Grand Garden Arena (Getty Images)

In 25 years of professional visits I have never seen so many beggars and bag people so close to the doors of the big casinos. There was a bag woman kipping in the empty Sports Book gambling area at the MGM at about 1:30am and the walkway between New York, New York and the MGM was littered with the fallen, the falling and the foulest-mouthed panhandler I have ever met. The man, who parked his motorised wheelchair on the ramp next to him, greeted everybody with abuse and held up a sign that said: “Fuck cameltoe bitches”. He told me to “fuck off” when I tried to take a picture. As I said, you never see the truly big spenders in Las Vegas until they file in for the first bell.

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The giant awnings advertising tomorrow’s fight are wrapped around so many buildings that it makes the whole city look like it has taken to camouflage to get the message across that the Mayweather Jr and Pacquiao fight is in town. “It’s under siege,” is how Hells Angel leader, stuntman and felon Chuck Zito explained it late on Thursday night. Zito is a fighting man and he was throwing punches, going over outcomes for Saturday’s fight for a small crowd at 2am outside Beachers Madhouse Revue in the MGM. I think the Revue is where three or four rare white lions lived for about a decade. Hey, things change. As I watched Zito, I stopped walking and stood in the middle of all the machines and tables and separated dollars, and as a I turned 360 degrees I counted 11 groups throwing imaginary big-fight punches.

It is normal for the MGM to be transformed, normal for its dimly lit access routes to be clogged with Vegas people tottering in on six-inch heels with two-inch eyelashes or the old gambling folk, alternating between lungfuls of cigarette smoke and oxygen from portable tanks.

I have seen in 53 visits to this nocturnal city so many different fighting hordes, so many different tribes, if you like. Ricky Hatton’s army drank the place dry – that is not a joke –and they were hearing echoes of their relentless chanting for months and months. The Mike Tyson years were often a bit scary with too many gang members from Los Angeles in ugly stand-offs with security guards at long-forgotten bars like the Betty Boop, which was situated next to all the MGM’s dozens of lifts. It was a late-night interchange, a paradise for dealing and poor Betty went not long after Tupac Shakur was shot one night in September 1996 after watching Tyson beat Bruce Seldon in 100 seconds from ringside. I was there that night, close to the scuffle which was meant to have led directly to his death in a hail of bullets – six in total – just a few blocks from the MGM’s exit.

The nights when Julio Cesar Chavez, Oscar De La Hoya or any one of a dozen Mexican idols delivered colour to the MGM’s perpetual twilight were full of passion and some of the meanest-looking men and women in the world. The Mexican cartel bosses arrived at the MGM, so they say, with their own mariachi bands – Hatton travelled with the England drummers, who went up and down in the lifts sending their sound pounding down 30 floors of rooms – and flunkies that make Mayweather’s entourage look like a doughnut appreciation society.

This fight is an event and that is why more than 20,000 people will pay as much as $350 to watch on a closed-circuit screen at one of the other MGM properties and why, even as I write this, not one member of the accepted and accredited press has any idea if they will be anywhere near ringside. In the MGM late at night this week, it was like being at an Olympics, everywhere I turned I saw media from all over the world with their temporary passes round their necks and the devoted fans of both boxers in their official merchandise. It looked like Nagano after the ice dance, not Las Vegas before Mayweather Jr.

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This fight is not just about the fight and it is not just about the vast amounts of money and hype. “This will be the biggest event in the history of Las Vegas,” said Bob Arum, who promotes Pacquiao, once promoted Mayweather Jr and has delivered most of the greatest fights in Las Vegas, involving Sugar Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler and Muhammad Ali. He is Mr Vegas, a six-decade veteran. It is a major financial event, a reminder to Macau, the tiny gambling island that is now the world’s most profitable gambling destination, that there still some fresh life in the desert beast.

The official gate, that is revenue generated on the face value of tickets printed, has been announced as $72 million, but most of the 16,800 tickets are selling for between two and 10 times their value. There was bold talk of the fight generating half a billion dollars, but the early indications of pay-per-view figures in America, which can cost over $100 with local taxes, are rumoured to be breathtaking for a fight that was long, long gone for years. It is a fluke that it is even happening and 12 weeks ago nobody was seriously considering this May as the date; Mayweather met Pacquiao at a basketball game, looked at the Filipino’s tiny features and decided to make it happen. Well, that is my theory, and little Floyd does not disagree. “I met Manny at the game and said to him: ‘Let’s fight’.” Later that night they reconvened at Pacquiao’s hotel and the deal was done.

“This is my normal,” Mayweather said when asked about the carnival that he is at the very heart of. He is right, the man lights cigars with hundred dollar notes and has somebody starch his stacks of bills that add up to 10 grand. “The money must be fresh.” I have omitted the chants that accompany his every mundane observation, delivered in frenzied regularity by his cohorts. However, this week there has been a humbling effort to remind people that Mayweather was not always the Money Man and did not always appear in public looking like a wax model.

There is early film of baby Floyd throwing startling combinations of punches, wearing a giant pair of gold gloves, and beyond the blur of his fists the home he lives in is a pit. Mayweather’s rough edges have been clipped like his immaculate nails but his problems with the law, and keeping his fists in his pockets when arguing with the mothers’ of his kids, remain awkward blots. There is a neglected interview of an emotional Mayweather talking about the altercation that landed him in jail back in 2012. His former partner was, he claims, high on drugs and he was trying to restrain her; I hate to think how many times that ugly little scene played out live in front of little Floyd during the wreck of a childhood that he was forced to abandon way before he was a man.

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Mayweather’s days in poverty, his truly awful years as the son of two crack addicts, has been bartered Las Vegas style against Pacquiao’s life sleeping on cardboard boxes in a Manila gym after he left home. It has been a fresh game, a version of the Monty Python sketch where retired men compete for hardship, and no matter how many cards Mayweather has up his sleeve – he was once in his father’s arms when a relation fired at the pair in a drug den – little Manny can always throw his ace down on the table: Pacquiao, you see, left home at about 13 when he weighed six stone because his father killed and ate the tiny boy’s dog. Pacquiao, by the way, now has a Jack Russell called Pacman with him at all training events.

The minutes are ticking and the floors at the casino properties are filling to capacity. Elvis came back in Las Vegas, Muhammad Ali came close to the end in this city and Tyson chomped on Evander Holyfield’s ear in this very ring. It is a city of acts, packed with a history of being the entertainment capital of the world and as the first bell approaches the place will, as they say in theatre land, go dark to wait for the fight and the result. Copperfield’s new show at the MGM is called “Alter Your Reality”. Too late, Dave, Mayweather and Pacquiao have done it.