By Allan Fox: Superstar Floyd Mayweather Jr. believes that there is racism that goes in the sport of boxing nowadays with some fighters getting elevated to the top and held to a different standard than others. Mayweather believes that the media are giving IBF/IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin a free pass by not skewering him for him wanting to fight smaller guys like himself.
Golovkin recently said that he was interested in moving down to junior middleweight to fight Mayweather. The media didn’t give Golovkin a hard time about this, and Mayweather says the media went after Bernard Hopkins years ago when he was fighting smaller welterweights like Oscar De La Hoya and Felix Trinidad.
At the time, Hopkins was fighting in the middleweight division and he had a considerable size advantage over those fighters. The media gave Hopkins problems for him pooling from the 147lb division for his opponents.
“You gotta really look at things like this, when Bernard Hopkins was a middleweight trying to fight Oscar De La Hoya, Shane Mosley, and Felix Trinidad, they [the media] said he was calling out smaller guys,” Mayweather said to Fighthype.com. “When the guy Triple G (Golovkin) does it, they don’t say s—. Once again, I’m not racist; I’m just saying racism still exists.”
Perhaps one reason why the media didn’t give Golovkin static for wanting to fight Mayweather is because Mayweather had voluntarily fought a bigger fighter than Golovkin two years earlier in 2013, when he fought Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. Mayweather showed that he could beat 175lb fighter in defeating Canelo. Since Golovkin only weighs 170lbs at the most for his fights at middleweight, and he was willing to fight Mayweather at 154, the media didn’t see it as a big deal.
Mayweather had already proven in the past that he could beat an even bigger fighter than Golovkin in his fight against Canelo, so it didn’t make sense for the media to give Golovkin grief for wanting to fight Mayweather too. If anything, the media saw it as a good fight between two of the best fighters in boxing. Why would media make an issue about a fight like Golovkin vs. Mayweather, when it’s a fight that made sense on many different levels.
It made no sense for Mayweather not to take the fight against Golovkin, because not only would it have made him a ton of money, but it would have also helped Mayweather create a real lasting legacy along the lines of great fighters like Sugar Ray Robinson. Mayweather had said in the past that he was better than Robinson, but it’s very unlikely that Robinson would not have faced Golovkin if he was fighting in the same era as Mayweather. Robinson was willing to take risks, and he likely wouldn’t have been satisfied to take the small money to end his career against Andre Berto the way Mayweather did. Robinson was a risk taker, and he very likely would have selected Golovkin in a heartbeat to show fans how good he was.
Boxing fans and the media really like Golovkin right now because he’s knocking everyone out, and taking risks in the ring. Golovkin isn’t like Mayweather, saying that he’s going to give fans a show and brawl and then play it say, which is what Mayweather did in his last two fights of his career against Berto and Manny Pacquiao. Golovkin says he’s going to make his fights a real “drama show” and he means it. Golovkin is willing to risk being knocked out in order to try and knock out his opponents, and this has paid off in him becoming a star in a real hurry. Golovkin’s rise to the top has been meteoric. He’s not someone that had a built in fan base supporting him like Canelo, or someone who had slowly built his career and had the help of Oscar De La Hoya to become a star like Mayweather. Golovkin has done it through achievement by knocking out 21 consecutive opponents over a seven-year period, and he’s not been content to play it safe like we’ve seen with Mayweather over and over again. Mayweather says he believes in being smart and getting of the sport with his mental faculties intact. He did that, but he didn’t excite the fans like we’re seeing with Golovkin.
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