De La Hoya: Mayweather ended his career with a little fire cracker

By Boxing News - 10/02/2015 - Comments

EW5G8638(Photo credit: Lucas Noonan/Premier Boxing Champions) By Dan Ambrose: Golden Boy Promotions promoter Oscar De La Hoya says he hopes that superstar Floyd Mayweather Jr. doesn’t make a comeback next year. It’s unknown why De La Hoya hopes that Mayweather comes back other than perhaps he was bored by his recent win over Andre Berto, or perhaps unhappy with Mayweather for beating his Golden Boy Promotions fighters Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero.

Mayweather also defeated De La Hoya eight years ago in beating him by a 12 round decision in a close fight. It was close but none the less, Mayweather won the fight by dominating De La Hoya in the second half of the fight.

When asked about Mayweather, De La Hoya told esnewsreporting.com “[He’s] retired, man.”

De La Hoya then said “I hope not,” when asked if he thinks Mayweather will make a comeback.

De La Hoya might be glad that Mayweather is gone for selfish reasons, because he thinks that his fighter the red-haired Saul “Canelo” Alvarez will be able to take over for Mayweather now that he’s gone and carry the sport for the next decade as the top pay-per-view attraction in boxing. With Mayweather around, Canelo’s chances of becoming the top PPV star are slim and none, because boxing fans will always focus on spending their money on a known commodity.

It’s hard for the American fans to rally around Canelo because he’s been beaten by Mayweather, had two close call fights with Austin Trout and Erislandy Lara, and then taken two recent soft jobs in Alfredo Angulo and James Kirkland. The American boxing fans know that Canelo isn’t fighting Gennady Golovkin, and they don’t understand why he’s not fighting him.

It obviously doesn’t help Canelo that he can’t speak English, because that’s something you’ve got to be able to do in order to be interviewed and for American fans to understand you without the help of an interpreter. Manny Pacquiao learned to speak English, as did Miguel Cotto. It didn’t take them long either. But unfortunately for Canelo, he still pretty much doesn’t known speak English in interviews.

“It wasn’t a guy going out with a big bang. It was a guy going out with a little fire cracker,” De La Hoya told the boxing media about Mayweather ending his career with a 12 round decision win over Andre Berto on September 12th of last month in Las Vegas, Nevada. “Good for him,” De La Hoya said about Mayweather. “He’s now retired, so now we move on to the good stuff.”

It’s true that Mayweather selected an easy mark in Andre Berto for his supposedly last fight of his career, but I think it’s pretty clear that Mayweather didn’t really retire. He just took a stay busy fight against Berto, and is going to sit around a while until 2016 before getting back in the ring to resume his boxing career.

There’s too much money for Mayweather to make for him not to come back to scoop it up for an easy $100 million payday against Pacquiao. Mayweather isn’t going to retire permanently when he has the option of coming back to get an easy $100 million beating Pacquiao so that he can buy another fleet of expensive $1.4 million cars or to buy a Learjet.

Mayweather isn’t going to walk away from boxing when he can still get big cash for fights against Pacquiao. But Mayweather definitely is going to need to improve his performances by being more exciting in the ring if he doesn’t want to hurt his PPV sales and destroy his brand name.

Fighting Berto was a huge mistake for Mayweather off the back of his less than impressive performance against Pacquiao last May.

Mayweather should have fought a decent opponent like Amir Khan so that he could have shown that he’s not afraid of the British fighter. It would have made Mayweather some good money, and it would have forced him to fight in an exciting all-action style in order for him to win.

Mayweather wouldn’t have been able to beat Khan while staying in 1st gear like he did against Berto. Khan would have forced Mayweather to fight hard in order to win.



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