By Jim Dower: It’s like Floyd Mayweather Jr. has been asleep for the past two years and has only now woken up with his announcement today of his planned boxing comeback on July 18th against Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez at the MGM Grand, in Las Vegas. At the press conference Mayweather said, “He’ll [De La Hoya] come back, and we’ll still another $50 or 60 million.”
That sounds like wishful thinking on the part of Mayweather, because a lot of things have changed since Floyd last fought De La Hoya two years ago in April 2007, beating him by a 12-round split decision. First of all, the economy has taken a tremendous dip, and many boxing fans are more discerning about how they throw their hard-earned money away.
Many fans can’t afford to pay the huge $49.95 or whatever they’d be charging for a second De La Hoya-Mayweather bout. And secondly, De La Hoya isn’t the same fighter he was back then and boxing fans are aware of that. De La Hoya took a year off from the sport after losing to Mayweather and re-serviced against little Steve Forbes in May 2008.
De La Hoya won but got hit a ton of times and had his face all swollen up from the many shots he was tagged with by Forbes. The De La Hoya took a terrible beating by Many Pacquiao in December 2008, losing by an 8th round stoppage when De La Hoya quit on his stool after the 8th round.
Now for Mayweather to think that boxing fans would want to pay huge cash to see him and De La Hoya fight for a second time, it seems more than a little deluded. I think some fans would like to see them fight again, but not nearly the big numbers that Mayweather would likely have in mind.
It would be a good fight show an old timer against a part time boxer, but it would likely bring in numbers way below what De La Hoya and Mayweather are used to getting. I’m just wondering how they would sell the thing. I can’t see De La Hoya taking any tune-ups before the fight, because after all that would be way to dangerous for him to do given his age and how badly De La Hoya looked against Pacquiao last time out.
It would have to be a fight that they both go try to sell as “unfinished business” or something along those lines. There obviously was unfinished business with the first fight because the bout was very close with Mayweather coming on the take the fight in the second half.
However, the time to have a rematch for that fight is way past it’s expiration point and even if they did fight at this point, its hard to see this fight as being connected to the last one due to the time that has gone by and the faded ability of De La Hoya.
Instead of going after De La Hoya, Mayweather should focus on trying to establish himself as the best in the welterweight division rather than cherry picking for big fights over faded fighters and ones that are smaller than him like Marquez, Hatton or Pacquiao.
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