By Eric Thomas: After Shane Mosley pulled off a huge upset by stopping WBA welterweight champion Antonio Margarito in the 9th round on Saturday night, it’s suddenly re-energized Mosley’s career and brought him some much needed popularity that has been missing from his career for the past six years or so since he was first defeated by Vernon Forrest. The natural assumption is to want to pair him up with the now retired Floyd Mayweather Jr. in a mega bout that would make both fighters millions of dollars.
However, I don’t see it happening. It’s not that it wouldn’t be a great fight that the boxing public would love to see, it’s that Mayweather seems content in his retirement based on his recent interviews where he describes himself as an entrepreneur.
He the last thing he seemed to want was to step foot back in the ring for some serious training against a good fighter like Mosley. I do see him coming back eventually, but only after he’s depleted much more of his money and is in need of cash. I doubt he would want to come back for a fight against Mosley, though.
Mosley pulled off a good win in defeating Margarito, there’s no doubt about it, but no one is mistaking Mosley for being the number #1 pound for pound fighter in all of boxing. That title still rests with Manny Pacquiao, who earned it the hard way by beating great fighters like Oscar De La Hoya and Juan Manuel Marquez. Mayweather is the type of fighter that needs big goals to get him motivated and it’s highly unlikely that a fight against Mosley, now 37, would be enough to get him to want to step back in the ring.
The reason being, not only is Mosley getting up there in age at 37, but he’s also been beaten five times – twice by Vernon Forrest and Winky Wright and once by Cotto – and it’s probably not something that would motivate Mayweather.
Even if he did fight and beat Mosley, Mayweather wouldn’t get much credit for having done so due to the advanced age of Mosley and the fact that he’s been beaten five times already by fighters considered below the ability of Mayweather. Mosley may not have proven as much as people think he did in beating Margarito, because the blue print was already made by Cotto in how not to fight Margarito a fight earlier, and all Mosley had to do was fight in the opposite way.
Besides that, Margarito was coming off a brutally hard fight in his fight with Cotto, whereas Mosley had had much less problems in his fight with Ricardo Mayorga. I think people will talk a lot about Mayweather and Mosley fighting, but I don’t give it even a remote chance of happening. If Mayweather does come back, it’s going to be to fight either Ricky Hatton or Pacquiao and not Mosley.
It would be a great fight, but it wouldn’t have enough of a draw probably to break Mayweather out of his year-long inertia.
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