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Nice article from Ring magazine regarding Floyd Mayweather Jnr
TOO MUCH PRETTY BOY,
NOT ENOUGH GRITTY BOY?
New Welter King Mayweather Leaves Us Wondering If Perfection Is Enough
By Eric Raskin
(From The Ring Double, March 2007; on sale January 2, 2007)
Floyd Mayweather is not Arturo Gatti. Carlos Baldomir found that out the hard way on November 4. And so did the 9,427 fans who filed into the Mandalay Bay Events Center that evening and, in gradual waves, filed back out.
Mayweather is the best pound-for-pound fighter in boxing right now, a product of other-worldly pugilistic genetics mixed with other-worldly pugilistic breeding. He is boxing’s answer to the Triple-Crown-winning racehorse, sired to be a champion, trained to be an all-time great. When Secretariat ran, it was not his finishing position that made people talk; it was the distance between his tail and the next closest nose. As Mayweather showed against Baldomir, even undisputed world champions sometimes have trouble getting close enough to catch a whiff.
Truly, Mayweather is a marvel. He is a once-in-a-generation boxing artist. He is a special athlete.
And he is, at times, a colossal bore.
The boos began drowning out all other forms of crowd noise in round 10 of the Baldomir fight. In round 11, fans were heading for the exits—and even with the numbers in the arena dwindling, the booing was getting louder. With 40 seconds to go in the 12th, it sounded like a Barry Bonds at-bat on the road. Mayweather was putting the finishing touches on a technically flawless fight, capturing the legitimate welterweight championship of the world by winning every round against a fighter who’d proven his quality by beating Zab Judah and Gatti earlier in the year, and rather than applauding in awe, celebs at ringside like Tiger Woods and Charles Barkley, were showing Mayweather their backs.
And Mayweather, in a sparring session with HBO’s Larry Merchant after the fight that arguably upstaged the in-ring action, showed himself to be either deaf or in denial.
“My fans rooted me on,” he insisted. “[Baldomir] fought his heart out, I fought my heart out, we put on a pleasing performance tonight.” When Merchant pointed out that the sounds emanating from the mouths of the paying customers suggested otherwise, Mayweather took it as a personal attack. “You’re hoping and wishing that I get beat,” the new 147-pound champ asserted.
If indeed that’s what Merchant wants—and clearly it isn’t, he just wants an entertaining fight for the viewers—then he’s probably out of luck. Mayweather, 37-0 (24), doesn’t look like a fighter who’s going to be getting beaten anytime soon. Are there potential opponents out there who are bigger threats than Baldomir was? Certainly. But the gap between “Pretty Boy Floyd” and the typical world-class contender is still vast, and you can count on one hand the number of pro fights he’s had that were remotely competitive.
“I would liken Mayweather to a really good sports franchise without that star performer who you’re dying to see perform,” HBO boxing analyst Max Kellerman analogized. “He’s from the Detroit area, so let’s say he’s the Detroit Tigers. If you’re a Tigers fan, and the Tigers are winning by a lot in the eighth inning, you might file out, because you’re not there to see any particularly exciting performer, you’re there just to see if the team wins. You might go to a Cavs game, and they’re up 20 points in the fourth, but if LeBron James is in the game, no one’s leaving, because he’s such a spectacular performer. Even when Roy Jones was in boring, one-sided fights, people weren’t leaving in the 11th and 12th rounds, because you might see something you’ve never seen before from Roy. But Mayweather’s not that kind of performer.”
No, if Mayweather is to be compared with a fellow recent pound-for-pound champ, it’s becoming clear that, as a performer, he more closely resembles Pernell Whitaker. Especially as he continues moving up to less natural weights, Mayweather doesn’t pack much kayo power, but he does have mesmerizing technique and dazzling defensive skills.
Here’s the thing: Even if you’re a fan of the wild sluggers, you have to admit that defense can be entertaining. For example, the most spectacular and memorable moment from Whitaker’s 1997 fight with Oscar De La Hoya was when “Sweet Pea” made his opponent whiff with every punch of a potentially deadly eight-punch combination at the close of the fourth round. And 60-some-odd years later, boxing nuts are still talking about the time Willie Pep won a round without throwing a punch.
Mayweather had his share of those moments in the Baldomir fight—a fight in which, according to CompuBox, the defending champion landed in single digits in 11 of the 12 rounds. In round four, Mayweather’s radar was locked on and he made the Argentine just barely miss with a series of right hands. At the beginning of the sixth, Baldomir moved Mayweather to the ropes and threw a flurry of punches, but the challenger evaded them all; at the end of the same round, Mayweather dominated an exchange in which Baldomir just couldn’t land anything clean. Early in the eighth, Mayweather had that Whitaker-against-De-La-Hoya moment, standing in a corner and doing a beautiful job of making Baldomir miss punch after punch.
But by then, we knew that, as the cliché goes, Baldomir couldn’t hit Mayweather in the rear of his ostrich-skin trunks with a handful of salt. By midway through the fight, we knew there was nothing Baldomir could do to make it competitive. And from that point on, if he didn’t want to hear boos, the onus was on Mayweather to complement his stellar defense with accelerated offense and knock his man out. HBO commentator Emanuel Steward observed in the late rounds that the great welterweights of Mayweather’s childhood, Sugar Ray Leonard and Tommy Hearns, would have cranked it up and scored a knockout against someone they were dominating as easily as Baldomir. Mayweather didn’t seem to care about producing such a result.
The fact that he injured his brittle right hand somewhere around the sixth round is probably partially to blame for that. But is it also possible that Mayweather somehow feels his title as pound-for-pound monarch entitles him to fighting in such a fashion? That certainly seems to be the trend over the last 15 years or so—ever since the P-4-P title has become more important to some elite fighters than any belts they can win in the ring.
Since the early-’90s, when Julio Cesar Chavez was removed from the P-4-P throne, the five fighters with more-or-less undisputed claims to that title have been Whitaker, Jones, Shane Mosley, Bernard Hopkins, and Mayweather. There were moments when some people recognized James Toney, De La Hoya, or Felix Trinidad as the best, but none of them had anything resembling a hammerlock on the title. Of the five who did have almost universal recognition, four spent most of their time on top winning almost every single round of boring fights. Mosley is the lone exception in terms of providing excitement, but his P-4-P reign was brief—not to mention disputed by Jones and Trinidad fans. Whitaker was content to box his way to uneventful victories. Hopkins liked fighting at a slow pace, making his fights as ugly as possible, and dominating without expending any unnecessary energy. Jones had the remarkable speed and power to make his one-sided beatings of unworthy foes fun for a few rounds, but they tended to grow extremely tedious as he carried opponents across the finish line.
And that’s what Mayweather’s bout with Baldomir felt like. It was fun for maybe six rounds or so, watching him do things only a handful of fighters in history were capable of doing, but without that push to finish off an opponent who seemed perfectly willing to be finished off, it grew terribly boring over the final few rounds. Hence the boos. And the premature evacuation.
Are fighters using the pound-for-pound title as an excuse to be boring? Is it about winning every round with P-4-P dominance, and if the fans don’t like it, too bad? Does the pound-for-pound leader owe the sport more than that?
Certainly, for a fighter like Mayweather, who has never quite crossed over to the mainstream—as the middle-of-the-road pay-per-view numbers for this fight, estimated at 325,000 buys, bear out—an exciting performance could have pushed him closer to true superstardom. And we know he has it in him; his fight five years ago against Diego Corrales was one-sided like the Baldomir fight, but Pretty Boy gradually upped his attack, scored five knockdowns, and got the knockout win before anybody had a chance to criticize or boo. He boxed beautifully, and then he finished the show. Against Baldomir, he boxed beautifully. End of sentence.
Or, to quote Merchant in the ninth round, “It’s a wonderful exhibition, but where’s the drama?”
The drama came at the postfight press conference, when Mayweather caught everyone off-guard by declaring, “All I have it one more fight, and that’s it.” His emotions immediately overtook him, and he turned away from the crowd for a few moments, covered his face, and cried.
“I’ve been saying this for a while, but nobody wanted to believe me,” he eventually continued. “I actually thought about quitting from this sport after the Zab Judah fight, but this is it. I’m doing only one more fight and then I am walking away … I don’t need boxing anymore and I don’t need money anymore.”
The “one more fight” is, of course, a pay-per-view superfight on May 5 against De La Hoya, which will earn Mayweather somewhere upward of $10-million, not to mention possibly giving him his defining win against a fellow future first-ballot Hall of Famer. Maybe the retirement-to-come announcement was some sort of negotiating tactic to help encourage “The Golden Boy” and HBO to hurry up and make the fight. If so, it worked, as the fight was signed just nine days later. But maybe we should take it at face value; maybe it really is how Mayweather intends to end his career, still in perfect health just a few months after his 30th birthday.
“So far, he’s made good on what he’s said he’d do throughout his career,” Kellerman noted. “Do I think that he might walk away for a while after the Oscar fight? Sure. Permanently? There’s nothing he can do in his life that will generate the kind of payday that he’ll be able to generate boxing. It’s not that I doubt he’ll retire. If he says that, there’s a good chance I think he does. But to stay retired? I just don’t see it. It’s just too tempting to come out.”
Mayweather has saddled himself in recent months with outrageous expectations, saying he’s the greatest fighter who ever lived, name-dropping the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali among those he’s surpassed. If he retires after one more fight, even if it’s a sensational destruction of fellow great De La Hoya, he won’t be giving himself an opportunity to surpass them—not to mention the 20 or 30 (or more) other legendary fighters to whom he shouldn’t dare compare himself.
He can choose one or the other, but he can’t have both: Either he fights on for several more years, adds several huge names to a resume that doesn’t yet have a single sure-shot Hall of Famer on it and earns the right to put himself in the “greatest of all-time” discussion, or he retires young and on top, something very few of the greats—including Robinson and Ali—were able to do.
At the very least, he does need to have that one more fight he’s promised us. He can’t pull out of the fight with De La Hoya and retire right now. And all he has to do is watch the last three rounds of his fight with Baldomir, close his eyes, and listen to the crowd to know why.
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