My opening question would be “How do you hurt a boxer who is hard to hurt?”, but before I get to that let me talk about a few things that I would like to share. The first time I started hearing fuzz about Floyd Mayweather Jr (45-0, 26 KO’s) was when he fought and beat Oscar De La Hoya in 2007. The first Mayweather fight I ever watched was Mayweather vs. Ricky Hatton, which me being a Hatton fan hurt me to see him get KO’ed that way.
I have seen all his fights up to this present day and the obvious notoriety is, he has a really good defense, his counters are perfectly timed, his leg movement is very fast and agile, he has good head and upper body movements, and most importantly he manages to ALWAYS leave the ring without any serious damage. One of my mentors told me to always give things its proper respect regardless if your bias or not. Even though I am not a fan of Mayweather, I do recognize that he is a really good a boxer and has paid his dues to get to where he is at today.
In order to fight Mayweather a fighter basically has to get out of his comfort zone, and keep up with his pace. One of the fundamental factors I think is needed to beat Mayweather or at least to give a good 1 on 1 fight is SPEED. A good example of this would be the fights with Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Robert Guerrero, and Juan Manuel Marquez. With thee exception of Marquez, none of these fighters were able to even touch him or land any serious punches. They didn’t have the necessary speed or agility. Now people often go with the assumption that in order to break Mayweather’s guard you need to apply pressure, which to an extent is true. But than the question changes to ” is that all your going to do to him?”. I recently revised his fight against Cotto, and noticed how Miguel Cotto was applying this concept in the ring. He was able to hurt Mayweather, BUT after the 4th round he noticed how just applying pressure wasn’t doing much and ended up running out of options.
I actually think Amir Khan has a couple good qualities that can benefit him on a match up with Mayweather, he has the SPEED and he applies good pressure when attacking. But of course the down sides are he has a weak chin and his attacking flurries are very predictable, so he wont go far if this fight were to happen. Figuratively speaking the perfect fighter to beat Mayweather would have to have: Margarito’s chin, Prodnikov’s power, Paulie Malignaggi’s legs, Cotto’s attack/pressure, and Amir Khan’s speed.
Now in Marcos Maidana’s case, I have only seen him fight a couple times. He has the power, the aggressiveness, a very complex offense, and most importantly the attitude. I thought his win over Adrien Broner was impressive. Now a lot of people go with thee assumption that since Maidana beat “Mayweathers little brother” he has what it takes to take on the Big Challenge. To set things clear, “Broner is just an amateur version of Mayweather”. Maidana will be facing a much more advanced and experienced version of Broner. To put things into perspective even more, if Broner would have stopped acting immature and put more seriousness into his moves on that ring with Maidana, the results of the fight would have differed. I am not underestimating Maidana he clearly is a good boxer, going back to my previous statements though I don’t think he has the speed or the agility. Now even if he doesn’t beat Mayweather, I do think he has the potential to possibly drop him on the canvas for the first time in his career (And if he does he should be proud of himself, nobody has ever been able to do that lol)
I really want Maidana to win, but we all said the same thing about Canelo and the past 10 fighters and have ended up with the same result.
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