Mayweather Jr. dislocates left arm in Canelo fight

By Neil Jason Blake - 09/16/2013 - Comments

floyd0001By Miguel Alejandro Lopez: From a boxing purist’s standpoint, Floyd Mayweather Jr. (45-0) simply outpointed Canelo Alvarez (42-1) in their fight last September 14, labelled as “The One”. From jabs to feints to lateral movements, Mayweather exhibited Olympic style boxing at its best. For the general mainstream viewers however, this tactical chess-match style of fighting can really be a challenge to the attention span, especially if one has to sit thru 12 rounds of monotonous activity in the boxing ring with no knockdowns and furious exchanges.

The unbeaten Mayweather explains why he wasn’t able to give the kind of fight excitement that the paying public is looking for:

According to Floyd Jr., he dislocated his left elbow during the fight. He said in the post fight press conference: “I could have used more combinations down the stretch. I think I dislocated my elbow. My arm was hurting, and I wanted to stop using my jab and just paw with it.”

This is probably a result of Canelo’s overall game plan of hurting Floyd’s left elbow, which serves as the primary line of defense in the “Philly shell” stance. If only Canelo had been more patient and used the strategy early on, he could have crippled Mayweather and limited his punching severely in the later rounds. But the Mexican star’s inexperience and lack of temper control proved to be the death blow for him in the fight.

It’s starting to sound funny because each time Floyd fails to KO his opponent or at least give an exciting fight, he complains about a sort of injury or something. In the Robert Guerrero fight, Floyd said he could have knocked out Guerrero if he had not hurt his hands. Now in the fight with Canelo, it’s his left elbow that’s the problem. It’s as if he is trying to console the mainstream public for their wasted time and money having watched a sleep-inducing fight. I think the problem is not Floyd’s hands or elbows, it’s his overall fighting style. No doubt he is a great tactical boxer who can win fights, but in a prized fight with millions of mainstream fans paying for the event, his fighting style is just plain boring with no action.

One of the reasons why “The One” garnered lots of PPV is because they put Danny Garcia and Lucas Matthysse in the undercard. These are the truly exciting fighters who can really bring back the fire in boxing. The main event though, is more like an anti-climax. In fact, thousands of people left the arena early and didn’t bother to finish the bout.

I think it is too late for Floyd to change his style and become a more exciting fighter. In the Miguel Cotto fight, he tried to trade and fight toe to toe, but it resulted in him getting bloodied and all that. So expect the Money Team and Golden Boy to try to hype up Mayweather’s next fights. Before the next fight, you will hear how Mayweather will try to give the fans an exciting fight (just like we heard them say before the Canelo bout), but when fight night comes, it’s just the same Mayweather. Obviously at this point, he has proven that he can no longer knock out opponents (the last opponent he KOed was Victor Ortiz), so why expect anything different in his future bouts?



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