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King of bling
Brian Doogan in Las Vegas
Floyd Mayweather has talent in abundance, but making friends outside the ring does not seem to be high on his list of priorities
Floyd Mayweather Jr was a little way off the Strip but the performance was boxing Broadway. A dozen homeboys from the ’hood gathered around the ring, a couple of trainers and a sparring partner who looked like he had taken the wrong way out of Palookaville provided a strong supporting cast. The music inside the gym was gangsta rap. Gloved up and protected by headgear, Mayweather went to work, transforming the sparring session into a recital.
“Call that a jab?” he demanded contemptuously of his beleaguered opponent, slipping and shrugging off a succession of light left-hand punches. “That’s a jab,” he added cruelly, whipping out a fast, powerful left to his sparring partner’s nose and seemingly following a script that might have been written by Martin Scorsese. “You ain’t nothing but a pussy and all you’re gonna get yourself is an ass-whupping.” For four rounds his display was brutal but breathtaking.
“Sometimes he comes down here in the middle of the night, wearing his pyjamas, puts on the gloves and boxes just like this,” said Leonard Ellerbe, one of Mayweather’s trainers, but primarily his conditioning coach. “Floyd trains at odd hours, sometimes calling me up at three or four o’clock in the morning and saying, ‘It’s time to go’, so you have to be flexible. I think working in the middle of the night gives him a psychological advantage because he knows when we’re training other fighters are sleeping.”
The world’s best boxer is a virtuoso who dances to his own tune. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton or Sugar Shane Mosley. If you want to be the best, you must pass me. All roads in boxing lead to Floyd Mayweather,” he said, walking imperiously from the ring, throwing a towel over his head and slipping a $10,000 diamond-encrusted watch over his left wrist. The king of bling and master of this hard, unforgiving business.
With his big Hollywood smile and handsome, unmarked face, “Pretty Boy Floyd” could be the Sugar Ray Leonard of his generation. In the early hours of November 5 in Las Vegas, he will challenge the rugged Argentinian Carlos Baldomir for the WBC welterweight (10st 7lb) title. If successful, a fourth world title in four different weight divisions will be his, having won his first, the WBC super featherweight (9st 4lb) belt, in 1998. He has also taken belts at lightweight (9st 9lb) and light welter (10st), and for more than a year the 29-year-old resident of Las Vegas has led The Ring’s pound-for-pound rankings.
“Floyd is probably the closest thing to an unbeatable fighter today,” declared Emanuel Steward, who trained Thomas Hearns and Lennox Lewis, among others. “He’s supremely confident and technically superior to any fighter in the world.”
But too often he is unsentimental and brash, lacking the natural charm of some of his predecessors. Recently, at a boxing awards dinner in Vegas, he approached Leonard and began to berate him for losing to a lightweight when he was in his prime (the lightweight in question was a legend called Roberto Duran). Leonard recalls, smiling and shaking his head ruefully: “He said, ‘Ray, you know, if you were in my era you wouldn’t be in the top 10’.
“Of all the fighters today, I have to say that Mayweather reminds me the most of me. The kid has every gift and physical attribute, but if he continues to be the type of person he is, he’ll never be up there with us. He’ll never make it.”
It is a sad character reference from a classy old fighter, for his talent compares favourably. Unbeaten in 36 fights, with 24 stoppage wins, Mayweather is a beautiful composite of nerve, fluid movement and ruthlessness which, at its best, can be clinical. Encouraged by his father, Floyd Sr, who lost to Leonard as a pro himself, he first punched a bag before he was able to walk and has grown, virtually, into the complete fighter. As a man, his reputation is nowhere near as whole.
When he sacked his father as his trainer he also threw him out of his house, in which he was living at the time, and took the keys of the car he had bought him. Despite earning more than $40m in his 10-year career, Mayweather described the $12m offer made to him a few years ago by HBO, the American cable network, as “a slave contract”. Anger seems to swell up from deep inside him, which in the past has led to almost Tyson-esque behaviour. In June 2004 he was convicted of assaulting two women in a club. He received a one-year suspended jail sentence and was ordered by the judge to undergo “impulse-control” counselling. In February 2005 he received a 90-day suspended sentence for kicking a bouncer. Four months later he faced charges of hitting and kicking his former girlfriend, Josie Harris, the mother of three of his four children, outside another Vegas nightclub, but was acquitted when Harris claimed she lied on the police report. The overall pattern, however, is disturbing.
Perhaps the seeds to some of his flaws were sown in a strange, conflict-strewn upbringing. He was still in nappies when an argument, reported in Sports Illustrated, between his father and his uncle Tony, who, in his rage, drew a shotgun, culminated in Floyd Sr — who was holding his baby son in his arms — shouting out, “This is all I got in the world, my son, so if you’re going to kill me, shoot.” Tony did, wounding him in the left leg. Physically, little Floyd was unharmed. But violence became his creed and his view of his own profession — however aesthetically pleasing the way he practises it might be — remains pointedly unromantic.
“They’re trying to make this sport into tennis or golf, but boxing’s not like that,” he declared by the side of the ring. “They’re trying to turn what we do in here into a gentlemanly sport, like golf where they got collared shirts on and go hit a ball, be nice to one another and shake hands. To me, boxing is hard-core, raw and uncut, a legalised street fight. A man is in there trying to hurt me. It’s just raw. It’s like gladiators. The only difference is that we fight over a certain distance and we don’t fight on dirt. When people come to a fight they sit down in an arena with nice chairs and they root for one of two men putting real hurt on one another. But this will always be the game of the gladiator and that’s
why this is the sport of Floyd Mayweather. Just put ’em in there and I’ll beat ’em, one by one. I’ll be the last man standing. That’s what I’m all about.”
Hatton would relish the chance to test the American’s confidence. “Mayweather is the ultimate fight for me,” the unbeaten 28-year-old Mancunian said this week and, according to Hatton’s father, Ray, the showdown could happen towards the end of next year.
“Listen, I’m not even thinking of Ricky Hatton right now,” Mayweather insisted. “We tried to get Hatton before we put together this fight with Baldomir, but he asked for $13m. He asked for Floyd Mayweather-type numbers, which is impossible for him to get.
“Fighters like Hatton don’t compare. I’m one of the best fighters ever to put on a pair of gloves. You see fighters come in, hit the pads, hit the bags, jump rope and go home. Well, that’s not me. I want a physical body in the ring so we can bang, head-to-head, to prepare me. Blood, sweat and tears, this is the business I’m in. I don’t look in boxing books, so I don’t know who is the pound-for-pound number two, but I know there ain’t no fighter in the world does his business like me.”
He handed a camp member a $9,000 roll to place a bet for him and drove off in his white Mercedes. When he re-emerged to go running in the cold desert air it was past midnight. “Ain’t no shortcuts,” he said after five miles, breathing easily
