By Sean McDaniel: According to Boxing Confidential, Floyd Mayweather Jr. wanted an absurd $20 million dollar guarantee to fight Shane Mosley. Apparently, Golden Boy Promotions met with Mayweather about a perspective fight with Mosley, but Mayweather wanted $20 million guaranteed money in order to take the bout said promoter Bob Arum to Boxing Confidential.
Arum, as you would guess, didn’t see that as a possibility, saying “He [Mayweather] is so bleeping way out of line that it is ridiculous. Nobody and no fight, against Manny or anyone else is going to get him $20 million guarantee.”
Arum feels that Mayweather is way off in his asking price for a fight against Mosley, and because of that, he doesn’t see a fight between Mosley and Mayweather taking place anytime soon. Though Arum does feel Mayweather could earn that much if he put in a big effort with another fighter before then, but Arum doesn’t see it possible that Mayweather would be able to fetch twenty million to fight Mosley or even Pacquiao.
Mayweather’s inflated sense of financial worth appears to be a little out of touch with the reality of the situation, perhaps due to his last two fights against Oscar De La Hoya and Ricky Hatton , both huge paying bouts for Mayweather that saw him make over twenty million both times around.
After retiring in 2008, Mayweather also received a huge payday in a WWE Pay-Per-View wrestling match against “The Big Show” in February 2008. Because of these matches, it’s understandable that Mayweather wants to continue to get huge paydays each time out.
The problem here is that Mosley isn’t as popular as Hatton or De La Hoya, so Mayweather is going to have to scale back his wishes if he wants to come back for a fight against him. Mosley probably isn’t going to get much more popular than he is now, and it doesn’t matter if Mayweather waits for the time to be right for a fight between them, because it probably never will if he expects a twenty million dollar payday. At the end of the day, there may not be a fighter alive that would give Mayweather the payday he’s looking for, unless he’s willing to move against someone like Kelly Pavlik. In other words, it has to be a competitive fight because boxing fans don’t want to see him fighting people he’s already fought before.
Under the best case scenario, if Hatton can somehow defeat Pacquiao, then it could set up another fight against Mayweather that could give him the payday he’s looking for. However, even then, he might not get the big money he’s seeking because most boxing fans have the image of Hatton being knocked out in the 10th round in December 2007, and few would probably want to waste money watching Hatton get pummeled again by Mayweather.
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