By Dan Ambrose: Undefeated WBC welterweight champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. (45-0, 26 KO’s) has been named as the Fighter of the Year for 2013 by the American Boxing Writers Association after beating Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez by lopsided 12 round decisions.
These were supposed to have been competitive match-ups going in, but Mayweather totally dominated both fighters and made them look bad in the process. For the 36-year-old Mayweather, this is the second time in his career that he’s won the Fighter of the Year award. He also captured the aware in 2007 when he beat Oscar De La Hoya and Ricky Hatton.
You can make a strong argument that Mayweather likely would have won the arm in 2008-2012 if he had stayed busy fighting 2-3 times. But Mayweather was inactive in 2008, and fought only once in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Mayweather looked great in each of those years in beating Juan Manuel Marquez, Shane Mosley, Victor Ortiz an Miguel Cotto, but the BWAA don’t give the awards out for fighters that only fight once per year.
It might be a little more difficult for Mayweather to capture the award in 2014 unless he finds some good opposition. Wins over Amir Khan and Marcos Maidana likely won’t be good enough to get Mayweather a third award. He needs to beat someone like Manny Pacquiao, Tim Bradley, Keith Thurman, and Danny Garcia for him to win the award. Khan and Maidana are good fighters, but they’re not really in the same class as Garcia, Thurman, Bradley and Pacquiao.
Pacquiao wasn’t considered for the award because he only fought once in beating Brandon Rios by a 12 round decision. Rios was coming off of a loss and the win for Pacquiao over him didn’t mean nearly as much as what Mayweather had accomplished in beating Guerrero and Canelo Alvarez.
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