ARLINGTON, Texas—On the day of Manny Pacquiao’s expected Saturday night victory over Joshua Clottey, which Pacquiao eventually did win, in the massive marvel called Cowboys Stadium that was built for both football and fascination, boxing kept strutting like a peacock.

It is a sport with the ultimate swagger. Outsiders immediately see attitude. Boxing doesn’t see that at all. It thinks that’s how all of life is, or should be.

Prime example is the bigger-than-life stadium where promoter Bob Arum brought the fight.

The place is made for football, can seat nearly 100,000—or more if they sell what they call “Party Passes,” Texas talk for standing-room only. They sold some of those for the fight, at $35 each (not including the going rate for parking lots at anywhere up to $60), meaning that all 45,000 seats promoters had deemed as the capacity for boxing had been sold.

This sort of success will bring Arum and Top Rank Promotions back, probably in midsummer, as Arum extends his campaign to take his sport out and about to bigger arenas and away from the “same old” Las Vegas casinos. Arum has said he will have a card that features Cesar Chavez Jr., and the image-rehabbing Antonio Margarito in separate fights. That’s assuming somebody will still give Margarito a license to fight in this country.

“There is more than enough of a Hispanic market to support that kind of show,” Arum says.

Jerry Jones’s new stadium defies description. Ostentatious doesn’t quite cut it. The only phrase that really captures it is REALLY, REALLY BIG. In many ways, it is the ultimate statement of how much technology has taken over our lives. Everything is so far away that people now pay lots of money to watch on a massive TV screen.

A reporter asked two couples, seated 50 yards away, in row one of the first raised section, what they paid for their tickets. They said $700 apiece. Just another $2,800 night out with the wives. Who said the economy was bad?

As the fights went on, they followed the action by leaning back in their chairs and watching the giant TV screen.

Boxing loves noise and color and promotes access to it.

Other sports surround their stars with security muscle. They create an appetite to see their heroes by never letting you.

Up-close and personal in other sports is a visit to Oprah. In boxing, you sit down at lunch and they sit down with you. The teams are always there—the trainers, promoters, handlers. Often, the stars themselves.

At lunch on Saturday, a group of writers sat at a table in a hotel courtyard. Suddenly, on a balcony above, Pacquiao emerged, with a half-dozen of his guys, whoever they are, just hanging out, waving to the luncheon crowd. Just hours away from performing in a pressure-packed and dangerous sport before millions worldwide, Pacquiao smiled the big smile of a guy with nothing more on his mind than shooting billiards with his friends.

That is probably where he was going.

Think you’d catch Peyton Manning on the day of the Super Bowl, or Kobe Bryant on the day of Game Seven of the National Basketball Association Finals, out hanging with the crowd?

Pacquiao’s day-of-fight appearance wasn’t unprecedented.

George Foreman, in his second boxing career—when he had gone from scary George to nice-guy George—was known to wander over to the media room the afternoon of the fight, help himself to some of the food and sit down at whatever table was open, chatting with whichever writer had the seat open next to him.

Boxing is many things, many of them not nice. But perhaps its most endearing quality is its ability to do the unusual, often outrageous, and not care what anybody else thinks. You want manners, play bridge.

Saturday morning, they held a news conference for the Kelly Pavlik-Sergio Martinez fight. Pavlik is from Youngstown, Ohio, Martinez from Argentina, and the fight scheduled for April 17 in Atlantic City, New Jersey.  There was no local angle, no reason to have this in Dallas.

Except one. Lots of media gathered here.

So boxing brought the show to them. It is a sport that has never met a headline it didn’t like, no matter how tiny or negative. While most other pro sports corral the media into corners, like animals at a zoo, and toss it occasional scraps of player access, boxing brings the show directly to the public’s messengers.

Then it makes sure to put on a good one.

During Saturday morning’s session, Martinez said he hoped to beat Pavlik and be considered in the same sentence as Argentine boxing legend Carlos Monzon.

Soon, Pavlik’s trainer, Jack Loew, took the microphone and told the crowd, and Martinez, “You’re no Carlos Monzon.”

Martinez’s promoter, Lou DiBella, got up and sold his fighter. Pavlik’s promoter, Arum, sold his. HBO sold its telecast. A guy from the Atlantic City hotel where the fight will be held made his pitch. Boxing is constantly selling, but there is little bait-and-switch. Most pro sports have their hand in your pocket. Boxing tells you so before it reaches.

At 78, Arum has become part Donald Trump and part Henny Youngman. He closed the session by saying he had one last special announcement.

“When this fight ends,” he said, “we have arranged for a special appearance by Madonna, who will sing  ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.’“

Writers hissed, accusing him of rehearsing his ad-libs.

He pretended to be hurt.