By Chris Williams: The Floyd Mayweather Jr – Marcos Maidana 5-city press tour will kick off this Monday, July 14th, in New York City in the afternoon to promote their September 13th fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.
From there, Mayweather and Maidana will travel to Washington, DC on the same day as the New York press conference, and then Chicago [afternoon] and San Antonio [evening] on Tuesday and Los Angeles on Thursday.
The 5-city press tour should help attract more fans to see the Mayweather-Maidana II fight card on Showtime pay-per-view.
In an ideal world, an 11-city press tour for this event would be even better, because there’s a lot of major cities that are being skipped over for this one. Surely, Houston, Dallas, San Jose, Philadelphia and Baltimore would be great tour stops for the Mayweather-Maidana tour.
Maidana feels like he did his job to earn the rematch with Mayweather based on his spirited performance he put in last May in losing by a 12 round majority decision.
“The rematch with Mayweather is the only fight that really motivates me,” Maidana said.
Maidana had said that he only wanted the Mayweather fight, and that was the only fight he’d agree to take. His trainer Robert Garcia said that he would likely retire if he didn’t get the Mayweather rematch, because he felt that there was nothing else out there for him to take at this point in his career unless someone like Manny Pacquiao wanted to fight him.
“I feel I earned it in the ring and Floyd owed it to me,” Maidana said. “I’ve already proved that I don’t care if the man I have in front of me is the best pound-for-pound champion. I was close to ending his reign last time. On September 13 he will not get away undefeated.”
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Maidana came close to beating Mayweather the last time they fought. I had Mayweather winning by a comfortable 9 rounds to 3 score, and this was with Mayweather giving Maidana a huge handicap by willingly fighting with his back against the ropes just as Adrien Broner had in losing to Maidana last December by a 12 round decision.
Mayweather proved that he could beat Maidana by using the same style as Broner did by planting his back against the ropes and getting the better of Maidana in a toe-to-toe battle for 12 long rounds.
It’s going to be next to impossible for Maidana to win the rematch with Mayweather using his normal fighting style and not giving Maidana another handicap like he did last time. Without a handicap, Maidana stands no chance of winning the fight other than maybe getting lucky with one of his home run shots.
I think Mayweather would have been better off moving on and not giving Maidana a second chance, but Mayweather is a man of his word. When he says that he’s going to give a fighter a rematch, as he did after their fight last May, he means what he says. He’s giving Maidana a second winning lottery ticket by giving him a second fight.
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