By Chris Williams: After looking at a recent video of Floyd Mayweather Jr. complaining about not being loved, among other things, I’m beginning to think that Mayweather Jr. has a huge chip on his shoulder. Looking a little emotional, Mayweather went on at length, saying “This country needs to be more positive,” he said. “We’re already at war.
“We’re in a recession, we’re at war and we continue to be negative. The fans in the UK showed me more love than in my own country. That’s crazy … Sometimes I’ll sit back, I’ll be in my theater sometimes, and I’ll think: ‘Imagine if I was the same fighter that I am, and I was the same person that I am, and I was from another country. Can you just imagine how big I’d be?”
So it seems that Mayweather isn’t getting a lot love. Well, what does he expect? Mayweather makes a comeback after two years and opts to fight a fighter two divisions smaller than him in Juan Manuel Marquez instead of a welterweight or a light middleweight. Come on, boxing fans gave Mayweather a pass when he decided to fight Ricky Hatton, a light welterweight, two years ago. I know for me, I thought Mayweather was just getting it out of his system with his fight against a small opponent.
But now, Mayweather has chosen another tiny fighter and is looking to fight an even smaller one in the future with Manny Pacquiao. What does Mayweather expect people to say about all that? He can’t think that it will go ignored and not commented on. Boxing writers have to explain the situation, and that obviously includes the fact that Mayweather has picked a little guy to fight instead of someone his own size.
Besides that, perhaps another reason why Mayweather isn’t feeling any love is because boxing fans are wondering whether he’ll fight an entertaining fight. Many of them still remember Mayweather’s safety first performances in the not too distant past and are hoping that Mayweather doesn’t decide to fight in this manner on Saturday night against Marquez. This is a bad economy and fans are going to have to pay a lot of money to watch the Mayweather vs. Marquez fight on pay-per-view.
Who wants to plunk down $50 bucks to watch one good fight, and then the turns out to be filled with Mayweather running around the ring, not engaging and mostly throwing pot shots. That’s boring. And the thing of it is, boxing fans have been burned in the past when seeing Mayweather fights and are now remembering what a bad experience it was.
It’s the same for anything, I guess. If you watch a television program and it turns out to be really bad. Are you going to want to watch it again? What makes it worse is that boxing fans will have to pay a ton of money to see something that they’re not feeling too good about in the first place.
“But I wouldn’t change my life for nothing in the world. There’s nothing like being young, black and rich. But there are certain things you think about. If Floyd Mayweather was white, I’d be the biggest athlete in America. The biggest, the biggest. I know that for a fact,” Mayweather said.
I think Mayweather is dead wrong about this too. There’s plenty of black stars that are embraced in the U.S., and it’s not about color. The reason why, I think, Mayweather isn’t embraced is because his fights are entertaining and he makes things worse by bragging about how good he is. In a way, Mayweather seems out of touch with reality.
I find it hard to believe that if he saw a fighter winning a bout in a safety first manner, he would get all excited about that fight and want to see him fight again. There’s other things to watch nowadays, and watching a safety first guy run around the ring trying not to get hit is frankly very boring. That’s what Mayweather is missing.
It’s not about color; It’s about him being a boring fighter and someone who is picking fighters that are smaller than him in recent fights, which almost guarantees that the fight will end up one-sided, and boring. Why can’t Mayweather see that?
Comments are closed.