Mayweather: “I don’t think a two year layoff is going to affect me”

By William Mackay: In a sign of wishful thinking, Floyd Mayweather Jr. (39-0, 25 KO’s) feels that he hasn’t lost a thing in the two years that he’s been out of boxing, and for some reasons, Mayweather thinks he’ll be even better because of the time off. How that is possible? I have no idea.

Generally speaking, when athletes take off as much time as Mayweather, they’re worse, not better, when they stage a comeback. It could be that the 32-year-old Mayweather is whistling past the graveyard, and fooling himself about how he’ll look against Juan Manuel Marquez on September 19th.

“I don’t think a two year layoff is going to affect me,” Mayweather said to The Sun. It’s unclear why Mayweather would be any different than any other fighter that takes a long time off from a sport and comes back. Whether it be tennis, football, baseball, hockey, or boxing, when an athlete takes as much time off as Mayweather, they almost always comeback looking and performing worse than they did before.

The reasons are simple. It takes a lot of years of training to get to high level in a sport like boxing, and when you take off a lot of time, you lose the timing, conditioning and physical ability that you had before. Mayweather says that he hadn’t had a break from boxing since 1987, and feels that the two years he took off helped his body heal.

It may have, but it also wasted two years of his career and now he’ll be two years older and rusty facing Marquez, who has been fighting all this time and staying at the top of the game against the best fighters. It really sounds like Mayweather is slightly deluded about his time away from boxing. I don’t know how Mayweather will be better than he was before or even close.

Mayweather may win this fight comfortably, but with his size advantage that he has, he certainly stacked the deck enough in his favor to ensure that he would look good. You notice how Mayweather made sure not to fight someone his own size and weight class, don’t you? That probably wasn’t an accident that Mayweather chose a smaller fighter instead of a welterweight. He says he was called out by Marquez, and that he didn’t pick him. Yeah, right.

This is going to be interesting to see how much Mayweather has slipped in the past two years. If he comes back looking like he did in his last few fights before his retirement, I’ll be shocked to the say the least. Marquez is going to be putting a lot of pressure on Mayweather, and forcing him to fight harder than he has in years.

With the time off, it would take a lot of training for him to have stayed where he was before his retirement. You just don’t set it down and pick it back up after that much time off. I can see him winning the fight, but Mayweather sure made it easier on himself by picking a fighter from two divisions below him to fight.

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