By Dan Ambrose: The hold-up between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and WBC interim welterweight champion Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero (31-1-1, 18 KO’s) is not money related for their proposed May 4th fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, according to Steve Kim. There’s something on Mayweather’s end that he’s not happy with, so he’s holding off on making that fight.
The money has reportedly been already agreed on for Guerrero, but something else is keeping the fight from being signed. It could be that Mayweather is having second thoughts about fighting the Guerrero or something else entirely.
Mayweather has always been very picky about the types of opponents he faces, and he likes to maximize his revenue by facing the most popular fighters he can get. Guerrero, as good as he was at featherweight, super featherweight and lightweight, he’s not a particularly popular fighter.
Guerrero doesn’t bring a lot to the table for this pay per view fight, and the best that Mayweather can really hope for is that the Mexican boxing fans will just automatically show interest in paying to watch the fight based on Guerrero’s Mexican descent. He’s American, and not from Mexico, so that doesn’t help.
Mayweather hopefully has had market research polls taken to determine if boxing fans would be interested in this fight because if he makes the wrong decision, he might end up with less than the high PPV numbers that he was hoping to get. The card will still do well, though, because WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will be fighting a still to be determined opponent in the co-main event, but we could see PPV numbers reach just a little over the 1 million PPV buys if boxing fans aren’t interested in seeing Mayweather fight Guerrero.
Last Tuesday, Mayweather shocked the boxing public by saying that IBF welterweight champion Devon Alexander is his leading candidate for the May 4th fight. It’s still unknown if Mayweather was serious or just using Alexander to get a better deal with Guerrero, but given that the money has already been set for Guerrero, it appears that it’s something else that is causing Mayweather to have second thoughts about facing Guerrero. My guess is Mayweather realizes that Guerrero won’t bring in a lot of fans, so he’s looking to find someone that will potentially do that.
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