By Chris Williams: Unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. was the highest paid athlete in the United States with projected earning 2013 of $90 million, according to Sports Illustrated. This will from Mayweather Jr. fighting just twice this year, once in May in easily beating Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero and another time in September against a still to be determined opponent.
Here is the list of the top money earners in the U.S:
1. Floyd Mayweather Jr. – $90 million
2. Lebron James [basketball] – $56,545,000
3. Drew Brees [football] – $47.800,000
4. Kobe Bryant [basketball] – $46.850,000
5. Tiger Woods [golf] – $40,839.027
6. Phil Mickelson [golf] – $39,528, 630
7. Derrick Rose [basketball] – $33,403,000
8. Peyton Manning [football] – $31,000,000
9. Alex Rodriguz [baseball] – $29,900,000
10. Zack Greinke [baseball] – $29,020,000
The reason why Manny Pacquiao isn’t on the list, if anyone wants to know, is he’s not an American, so his name wouldn’t be included on this list.
Mayweather will likely make even more money in 2014 because it’s possible that he could end up fighting three times next year. It depends on how well they schedule fights and whether he gets through training camp and his September fight without suffering any injuries that would slow down his progress.
There’s not a lot of interesting opponents for Mayweather to fight. Golden Boy Promotions is pushing WBA/WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez into facing Mayweather, but Canelo is really a middleweight that fights at junior middleweight by taking off tons of water weight and then he ends up facing welterweights more often than not.
It’s not interesting to see Mayweather fighting middleweights who are fighting out of their weight classes by two divisions. I’d rather see Mayweather fight an actual welterweight in his next fight and the remaining five fights he has on his Showtime/CBS contract.
The problem Mayweather has is there’s no one popular in the welterweight and light welterweight divisions for him to fight other than Manny Pacquiao, and Mayweather has already tried to fight him several times without any success.
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