By Eric Thomas: You’ve got to respect the choice that Floyd Mayweather made in selecting Robert Guerrero to fight on May 4th next year. This was the perfect opponent for the date because Guerrero is Mexican and May 4th is Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday. To be sure, Mayweather could have selected the more popular Mexican fighter WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and the fight would be a bigger fight and would bring in more money on pay per view.
Canelo, however, still isn’t as popular as he’s going to be in a couple of fights, and Mayweather is better off waiting until Canelo has made a little more of a public name for himself in the U.S markets before he faces him next year or possibly the year after that. Alvarez is mostly popular in Mexico, and is still a fighter that is in the process of building a name in the United States.
Guerrero is a really nice fighter because he’s a punching machine with an ability to throw 80 to 100 punches per round for an entire fight. That’s something that Mayweather hasn’t faced in many years since his fights with Jose Luis Castillo and that was earlier in his career. Fighting a guy that averages that many punches per round might be a really tough fight for Mayweather because at 35, soon to be 36, he’s not able to throw as many punches as he once did earlier in his career.
When Mayweather beat Castillo, he had to use his feet because he couldn’t match Castillo’s work rate. Mayweather won’t be able to keep up with Guerrero’s punches, and he’d be crazy to even try. The way that Mayweather wins this fight is to keep moving around the ring to not let Guerrero set up his offense. Guerrero can do a lot of different things in the ring, but for the most part he’s a stationary guy that likes to plant his feet and wing shots.
That’s the type of fighter that Mayweather has done well against the past, and he should be able to handle Guerrero unless he surprises Mayweather with an ability to get around the ring to force the fight on him like he did his last opponent Andre Berto. Mayweather has better boxing skills than Berto, so he shouldn’t be caught in the same kinds of situations that he was against Guerrero.
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