By Jason Kim: Since Floyd Mayweather Jr. announced that he was coming back and fighting Juan Manuel Marquez boxing fans have had to listen to Mayweather brag endlessly about how he’s still the number #1 star, and how he’ll never let a small man beat him. Yet Mayweather has no answers for why he didn’t choose to fight someone in his own weight class like Paul Williams, Shane Mosley or Miguel Cotto.
Mayweather says he fights for checks and not bragging rights and therefore I suppose this gives Mayweather a free pass in not fighting the top welterweight fighters in the division. It’s sickening to hear the excuses that Mayweather makes for dodging this fighter or another, because it’s exactly what he did before retiring two years ago.
I, for one, am hoping that Marquez can somehow pull it together and beat Mayweather in a convincing manner so we can drive Floyd one step closer to another retirement. I know Mayweather’s fights tend to make a lot of money, but his choice of opponents – older and smaller – is what turns a lot boxing fans off from Mayweather.
Floyd often doesn’t fight the opponents that boxing fans want him to fight and instead seeks out fighters that are obviously not going to be able to match up well him. Few people thought that Ricky Hatton or Oscar De La Hoya would have a chance at beating Mayweather, and sure enough Floyd beat them both as expected.
The excuses that Mayweather makes for not fighting the top fighters in the welterweight division are silly sounding as if Mayweather is making them up on the fly just to deflect attention from what he’s doing. Mayweather didn’t choose Shane Mosley to fight, he says, because Mayweather saw Marquez as the bigger draw with fans.
That’s pretty incredible and hard to swallow. Marquez may be a semi-popular fighter but I highly doubt that he’s as popular as Shane Mosley is in the United States. Yeah, maybe Marquez is more popular in Mexico, and I’ll admit that, but the fight is being fought in the U.S., so it’s irrelevant how popular Marquez is outside the country.
It probably doesn’t matter that Mayweather chooses to temporarily dodge the welterweights like Williams, Mosley and Cotto, as he’s still going to have to fight at least some of them sooner or later if he wants to avoid being laughed at by the boxing community.
But, if Marquez can beat Mayweather that would be a great thing, because then we could start looking at some serious fights in the sport and not all the division jumping that has been going on the past couple of years. At least with Mayweather out of the picture more deserving fighters could get a chance at getting a shot at Pacquiao.
I can’t see Mayweather still being in the picture for a Pacquiao fight if he loses to Marquez, but you never know. If the fights close, then Mayweather can always say that he was robbed and if he makes enough noise in the media, enough fans will believe it to enable Mayweather to move on to a Pacquiao fight regardless if he’s beaten by Pacquiao.
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