By Jason Kim: HBO Sports is going to need to send a backup interviewer into the ring on May 5th if they want to get any comments on the fight from Floyd Mayweather Jr. (42-0, 26 KO’s) about his fight with WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto. Mayweather revealed on HBO’s Mayweather-Cotto 24/7 episode 1 that he won’t allow HBO analyst Larry Merchant to interview him after the fight.
It seems that Mayweather still has a beef with Merchant over their little run-in after Mayweather’s last fight against Victor Ortiz last September in which Merchant was trying to get to the bottom of it about what was going through Mayweather’s head when he decided to hit Ortiz with a left-right combination when Ortiz was in the process of apologizing to him for an earlier head-butt.
Mayweather took issue with Merchant’s questioning and told him that he thinks that HBO should fire him. Merchant fired back some of his own comments and it looks like Mayweather has given him the freeze in terms of him being allowed to interview him.
HBO analyst Max Kellerman would be a good substitute for Merchant in getting the hard hitting questions that Merchant usually asks. Hopefully, Mayweather doesn’t blow his stack and give Kellerman the permanent cold shoulder in future interviews. The last thing we need is an HBO analyst tip-toeing around Mayweather for fear that he’ll get upset and stop speaking to them.
The bad thing about stars like Mayweather is the power that they get over the media. When someone says something bad, Mayweather can freeze them out and only accept interviews from guys that will toss softball questions at him that make him look good rather than questioning him hard about things that boxing fans really want to know about. This is why it’s so bad that Mayweather has decided to not allow Merchant to interview him because it sends a message to the guy from HBO that WILL BE interviewing Mayweather that they better make sure they don’t upset him by asking questions that may cause his blood to boil.
I’m sure HBO can rotate interviewers where they have a new one each time Mayweather fights just in case he crosses guys off of his interview list each time out, but this may not work either. Mayweather can always he won’t give interviews period to HBO if he’s continually given a hard line of questions from them.
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