By Raj Parmar: As the Floyd Mayweather-Marcos Maidana clash rapidly approaches this Saturday, boxing fans who feel Maidana has a real chance to upset Mayweather (despite the heavy odds stacked against him) point out that “El Chino” was able to break through the shoulder roll defence that Mayweather uses when he punished Adrien Broner over the course of 12 rounds.
I re-watched Floyd’s latest fight against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, and it is apparent that Mayweather and Broner’s defence are nothing alike. Where Broner uses a similar hand position as Mayweather, one arm across the body and the other protecting the chin, their postures and movements are astronomically different. Broner squares straight up to you without moving his feet very much, while Floyd offers a much more complex situation.
Floyd actually sets his body in a bit of a side-stance instead of squaring straight up to you, leaving only half his body as accessible to hit. And on the half that is available, he has an arm covering the part of his body that is showing and his head is leaned back out of reach with the other arm guarding his chin just in case. Now you add in his lighting quick movements to incoming punching, and you have an extremely small target of flesh available to cleanly hit which is also now moving around very fast. This combination Mayweather presents makes it almost impossible to regularly hit anything other than his bicep or shoulder.
In recent years the only fighter who has been able to consistently tag Mayweather was Miguel Cotto. Miguel was able to bloody Mayweather’s face up using short straight left hands as Floyd came into Cotto looking to land combinations. It should be noted that Mayweather at this time was being trained by his uncle Roger, who is much more offense minded than Floyd’s father who is now his current trainer. In the last two fights with his father as his trainer, Floyd has not been looking to create as much offense like he did against Cotto and has instead relied on opponents Alvarez and Robert Guerrero to make mistakes as they vigorously tried to land on Floyd and he made them pay with sharp crisp counters.
Both Alvarez and Guerrero were thoroughly embarrassed by their inability to touch Mayweather and his father proudly stated that this is the real Mayweather Jr.; implying that the one who was hit repeatedly by Cotto was too offensive minded and a Floyd fully focused on defense will not ever take any real punishment. With his dad’s philosophy of pure defense ingrained in him, the question now is if Floyd is simply impossible to hit cleanly over the course of 12 rounds.
Maidana’s trainer Robert Garcia has acknowledged the difficulty in hitting Mayweather’s head, and is encouraging Maidana to bang Floyd’s shoulders, chest and biceps as hard as he can in hopes that Floyd may wear down and slowly drop his seemingly impenetrable guard. Garcia knows that if Floyd is able to keep his defense intact over the full fight, for Maidana it will be like trying to shoot a bullet at the flesh of a SWAT team officer that is guarded with armour from head to toe.
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