Mayweather says he’s training soon for MMA

By Boxing News - 03/15/2018 - Comments

Image: Mayweather says he’s training soon for MMA

By Allan Fox: Boxing superstar Floyd Mayweather Jr. says he’s he’ll be soon working with UFC welterweight champion Tyron Woodley in developing his MMA skills to begin his new career in that sport. At 41, Mayweather is old to be starting out in Mixed Martial Arts.

Unlike most fighters that compete in MMA, Mayweather has no background in wrestling or Jiu Jitsu. Mayweather says he’s developed his wrestling and kicking skills, and he rates them fairly high.

It’s thought that Mayweather wants to learn enough MMA so that he can Conor McGregor in the octagon in the UFC. McGregor is the only star in MMA that is recognizable enough to the casual MMA and boxing fans that would be willing to purchase a fight between him and Mayweather on pay-per-view. Mayweather recently beat McGregor in a boxing match last August in stopping him in the 10th round in a fight that looked more like an exhibition than a legitimate fight.

The organizers for the Mayweather-McGregor fight sold the match for $100 per household on PPV. A lot of fans bought into the fight, thinking it would a great fight. It turned out to be a huge disappointment with Mayweather appearing to take it easy on McGregor until stopping him in the 10th. The fight looked scripted to some fans, like a professional wrestling type affair.

“I’m gonna start soon,” Mayweather said to TMZ.com. “We’ve been texting back and forth. We talked a couple times, so we gonna start working out real soon.”

Mayweather is currently retired after his fight with McGregor. Mayweather stopped fighting actively in boxing after his win over Andre Berto in September 2015. Mayweather came back after 1 ½ years of retirement to defeat McGregor last year. That was McGregor’s first fight in the sport of boxing. He was 0-0 before that fight, and yet the Nevada State Athletic Commission still sanctioned the fight.

It was crazy for the Commission to sanction a mismatch like that, because you don’t normally see novice fighters with a 0-0 record fighting former multi-division world champions. It’s just not done in boxing until Mayweather did it, and the results were disappointing. After the dreadful fight, it’s hard to believe that fans would be willing to purchase a fight between Mayweather and McGregor in the octagon.

“I can wrestle. My wrestling game is not that bad,” Mayweather said. “On a scale from 1 to 10, it’s probably a 7. And I think we can take it up to a 9 if possible. Of course, my hand game, on a scale of 1 to 10, is 100. My kicking game, on a scale from 1 to 10, is probably a 4.”

My guess is Mayweather’s true wrestling ability is a 1 on a 10 scale. He’s a beginner and nothing more than that. You can take Mayweather and bring him to a high school and I would bet that he would be beaten by anyone with experience in wrestling from 135 on up. Mayweather isn’t going to learn how to wrestle in 3 months, and that’s what makes his venture into MMA look like a scripted affair rather than true fight. It’s all being done in a superficial, hurried up manner.

Coming from a wrestling background myself, there is no way that a person can learn enough grappling skills in just three months to compete against someone with years of experience in high school and college. Mayweather doesn’t realize doesn’t realize how little he knows about the sport.

If Mayweather is truly serious about wanting to fight in MMA, it’s going to take years to learn all the wrestling, jiu jitsu and the various submissions holds. Mayweather is too long in the tooth for him to properly learn all that stuff over years, and I think he’s serious about wanting to become proficient at MMA.

I get the impression that this is mainly about Mayweather going through the motions to learn some VERY basic MMA skills before facing McGregor in what he would hope would be a big money fight in the UFC. Before Mayweather fights McGregor, he’ll likely continue to tell the boxing and MMA media that he’s learned tons of new skills. The fans will believe it, and then eagerly purchase the Mayweather-McGregor fight on PPV, and end up watching a mismatch. McGregor will destroy Mayweather.

UFC president Dana White says that Mayweather is serious about wanting to fight in the UFC, and they’re doing a deal to make it happen.

“We’re talking to Floyd about doing a UFC deal,” White said to ESPN.com. “It’s real. He was talking about [boxing] Conor McGregor. Was that real? Have you heard Floyd talk about many things that aren’t real? He usually tips his hand when he’s in the media, and then that s— ends up happening.”

It sounds like it will happen for Mayweather in him fighting in the UFC. Mayweather is going to have to do it soon. When you’re not competing for more than a year, you lose fans. Mayweather hasn’t fought against a real boxer in 3 years since his mismatch against an over-the-hill Andre Berto in 2015.

McGregor hasn’t competed in the UFC in 2 years since his fight against Eddie Alvarado in November 2016 at UFC 205. Mayweather and McGregor need to face each other in a rematch in the UFC soon for them to take advantage of the people that still care about their careers, because the longer they wait then more the fans will forget about them, and see their fight as a money-grab.

“[I’ll] probably need a little bit longer, a little bit longer,” Mayweather said. ”Even if it takes 6-8 months, whatever it takes. We wanna make sure everything is done correctly and everything is done the right way.”

6 to 8 months for Mayweather to learn enough MMA to compete against McGregor in the UFC? He can’t be serious. This is a joke. He says he wants to make sure things are done correctly. Well, they’re certainly not going to be done correctly with a rush job of 6 to 8 months to learn what takes most MMA fighters years to learn. This fight is going to end up as an insult to MMA fighters and their fans that purchase Mayweather-McGregor 2 the mismatch.

It looks like Mayweather is trying to keep himself in the news, while taking away interest from the upcoming fights between Gennady Golovkin vs. Saul Canelo Alvarez and Vasyl Lomachenko vs. Jorge Linares. Instead of helping boxing, Mayweather is putting the focus on himself and in the position to hurt the sport by distracting fans from the important fights.

YouTube video