By Eric Thomas: Floyd Mayweather Jr. seems to be worrying about everything but his September 19th opponent Juan Manuel Marquez. In a conference call yesterday, Mayweather, 32, played down Manny Pacquiao’s wins over Ricky Hatton and Oscar De La Hoya for some reason. It’s as if Mayweather needs to downgrade Pacquiao’s wins against them to somehow feel validated as a fighter. It’s quite bizarre and such a waste of time. This is what Mayweather had to say about Pacquiao’s victory over De La Hoya:
“De la Hoya is more comfortable at 154 …When he [De La Hoya] fought Pacquiao, basically he [Oscar] was on a diet. He [De La Hoya] was training to lose weight instead of training to fight. Go back and look at the fight when I fought de la Hoya. They said, ‘Oh, he’s over the hill.’ How is he over the hill if we both are in our thirties?”
So basically, the way that Mayweather explains it, Pacquiao’s victory over De La Hoya is somehow tainted and not worth as much as his won win over De La Hoya, which took place a year earlier at a higher weight. Mayweather makes mention of the dieting that De La Hoya had to do for his fight against Pacquiao, but makes no mention of the fact that Pacquiao had to put on a lot of weight to and was the much smaller fighter in terms of size.
It hardly seems fair and I can’t imagine that Mayweather got too much sympathy from anyone based on that statement. Sure, De La Hoya was weak for his fight against Pacquiao, but we don’t know for sure how weak De La Hoya really was, because Pacquiao’s lightning fast hands and constant attacks seemed to play a much bigger part in De La Hoya losing the fight rather than Oscar coming into the fight weak from dieting.
It looks as if this was a move by Mayweather to raise his stature in the minds of boxing fans and writers by shoving sand on Pacquiao’s win over De La Hoya.
Once Mayweather was done with commenting on De La Hoya, he then started in on Ricky Hatton, saying:
“I laid the blueprint on how to beat Ricky Hatton and [when] he went out there and fought [Pacquiao], that wasn’t my daddy’s game plan. Anybody can get caught cold in the first couple of rounds in the sport of boxing.”
Here we have Mayweather taking credit for showing Pacquiao how to beat Hatton, a move to make Mayweather look in higher light because it took him 10 rounds to knockout Hatton, whereas in Pacquiao’s case, he got the job done in only two rounds. It’s as if Mayweather is saying, ‘So what if you stopped Hatton before I did. I showed you how to do it by beating him first.’
At the same time, Mayweather is quick to shield his father, Floyd Mayweather Sr., who was in Hatton’s corner as his trainer on the night Hatton was stopped by Pacquiao, from the tarnish of Hatton being stopped by Pacquiao.
Mayweather points out that his father didn’t tell Hatton to fight that way against Pacquiao. This really doesn’t even need to be said at this point, because even Hatton himself has said that he was the one that got caught up in the excitement of the fight and tried to slug with Pacquiao.
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