By Allan Fox: Former HBO analyst Larry Merchant says he’s not interested at all in seeing Floyd Mayweather Jr’s fight this Saturday night against Andre Berto on Showtime pay-per-view because he sees the fight as not being a serious contest between Mayweather and a serious opponent.
Merchant notes that Berto has lost half of his last six fights, and he doesn’t see him as being a worthy opponent for Mayweather. The fighter that Merchant would like to see Mayweather fight next is IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (33-0, 30 KOs). Merchant thinks that the hard hitting power punching Golovkin would be a very serious opponent for Mayweather, but he says that fight obviously isn’t happening and it’s not going to happen.
Mayweather doesn’t want any part of fighting Golovkin for whatever reason, possibly due to the high risk involved in facing a puncher like him.
“The fighter that would inspire the most interest in me is if he would fight Golovkin, but he’s not going to fight Golovkin and he’s not fighting him,” Merchant said to TMZ.com. “There are a half dozen other welterweights out there that could give him more trouble than he wants. I usually expect serious fighters to fight serious opponents. Berto has lost 3 out of his last 6 fights.”
It looks bad that Mayweather has taken on a soft opponent like Berto instead of a real challenge like Golovkin or one of the top welterweights in the division. It just sends the signal that Mayweather is going to milk his final fight of his contract with Showtime/CBS by taking the path of least resistance.
That’s all well and good if Mayweather is only doing that to finish out his contract with Showtime before he starts up facing good opponents again afterwards, but he’s telling fans that the Berto fight will be the last one of his career and then he’ll retire from boxing. I think it’s a bad way for Mayweather to end his career.
Mayweather would shake up the boxing world if he were to take a risky fight like Golovkin. If nothing else, he would surprise Merchant by taking on the Kazakhstan fighter. But with Mayweather talking over and over again about being worried about his health, it seems like he’s worried about taking punishment all of a sudden.
To be sure, if Mayweather were to face a guy with the punching power that Golovkin has, he’d take a lot of hard shots to the head. There would be no way of escaping the punishment. Golovkin would certainly walk Mayweather does round after round, landing wherever he could. Martin Murray used a lot of movement against Golovkin, and he still wound up getting dropped twice and stopped in the 11th round.
Murray was a big middleweight with super middleweight size, and Golovkin was still able to catch up to him to knock him out. Mayweather couldn’t stand in the pocket against Golovkin, and he definitely couldn’t run from him for the full 12 rounds without getting nailed frequently by his shots.
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