By Peter Broderick: – “There’s no blueprint on how to beat Floyd Mayweather!”. If you’ve been watching the Showtime series; all access, or any other piece of media that features Floyd Mayweather of late, the preceding quote might seem familiar to you. Mayweather is never more than a couple of sentences away from reminding us that 43 have tried and 43 have failed to beat him, something he’s also been saying recently is that there’s no blueprint on how to beat him. But there is.
The Blueprint
When Oscar deLa Hoya fought Mayweather in 2007, many people thought that the Mexican won the first half of the fight. Mayweather was shipping rounds because he was finding it difficult to counter the jabs from the bigger man.
Teddy Atlas, who was ringside for the fight said “Is this really happening? If Oscar continues jabbing like that, he’s going to win”. De La Hoya himself said in an interview recently that the jab was the key to beating Mayweather and acknowledges that that was his best chance of winning the fight. He feels he would have won if he’d carried throwing it for the second half of the fight.
But jabbing with one hand for 12 rounds is much easier said than done. Even if you plan to implement a strategy that’s based off a solid jab, your body might veto that decision late on in the fight. Mayweather deserves a lot of credit for making good fighters think the best chance of beating him is using their weakest punch. Not many fighters can make themselves unavailable to hooks and crosses the way Mayweather does.
I still think the jab is the best way to beat Mayweather. There’s no point squaring your shoulders, bowing your head and walking him down, we’ve seen that method tried, tested and proven to be useless against Mayweather. Unfortunately this is what we’ll see again tonight. The Guerrero’s already told us this. They proclaimed that they weren’t going to jab, that they’re going to fight toe-to-toe and then asked aloud whether Mayweather was a man of his word (Mayweather having promised to fight him in the pocket in one of their first meetings). Obviously, Mayweather isn’t going to do this. He’ll fight smart as he always does.
Guerrero is a fighter I admire, and he’s shown himself to have good heart inside and outside of the ring but the fact that he’s already discarded the one punch that allows you to get close to the most elusive fighter of our generation in favour of a plan for a dogfight is irresponsible, and the fact that he thinks Mayweather will entertain this notion belies his naivety. He seems to think that a gentleman’s agreement will hold water with Floyd. It won’t. What Mayweather knows is winning, at all costs. He’ll do what he has to do. Regard Victor Ortiz.
Prediction
I think Guerrero’s heart and beard will take him along way in this fight, they will be enough to carry him over the line I suspect. Mayweather will be uncomfortable all the way through, possibly even hurt once or twice but I think he’ll still win a lopsided unanimous decision. Hopefully, it’ll be more competitive than I’ve predicted because Mayweather’s fight’s have been just an annual event in the past 5 years and having watched all of these fights I’ve yet to see him tested. A testament to his greatness as a fighter, or a matchmaker, I’ll let you decide but my feeling is that it’s a bit of both.
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