By Allan Fox: Luis Arias insists that Floyd Mayweather Jr is training just as hard for his eight-round exhibition match against YouTuber Logan Paul as he did for his much tougher real fight against Canelo Alvarez in 2013.
The Mayweather-Paul exhibition will take place on June 6th on Showtime pay-per-view at the Miami Gardens in Miami, Florida. The fight even sells for $50 on Showtime PPV.
Arias (18-2-1, 9 KOs), who is fighting former IBF/WBA junior middleweight champion Jarrett Hurd (24-1, 16 KOs) in a 10-round real fight on the undercard, says the 44-year-old Mayweather is angry at having his hat snatched from his head by Logan’s younger brother Jake Paul at a recent press conference.
According to Arias, the former five-division world champion Mayweather (50-0, 27 KOs) feels disrespected by Jake for the hat incident and untying his shoes while he was on stage.
Jake claims that he was doing it for fun, and it helped build up the fight, but Mayweather doesn’t see it the same way. He’s taken it personally, and he’s been training hard ever since.
Mayweather training like it’s the Canelo fight
“When the fight was first announced, I was like, ‘Logan Paul is a big dude, 200 pounds, 6’3″, and I was like, ‘How is Floyd going to handle that?'” said Luis Arias to Fighthype.
“But after seeing Floyd in the gym the last three weeks and watching him spar a guy 6’3”, 190, Floyd is going to look spectacular. I think he’s going to knock Logan Paul’s a** out.
“It won’t be right away because that dude is a big dude. But I think five, six. He’s training harder than he did for Conor McGregor,” said Arias about Mayweather.
“Everybody knows he was at the strip club and all that. He’s still going to the strip club, but he just went to the gym last Sunday.
“He came to the gym at 10 o’clock and worked out until 1:30, a hard workout, seven or eight rounds of sparring hard. And he had a hard mitt workout.
“He looked like he was training for the Canelo fight. I’ve been around all these camps. Canelo he worked hard for, Cotto he worked hard for, and Pacquiao.
“For Guerrero, he worked hard, but I saw the difference between Pacquiao and Guerrero. They said for McGregor. He was chilling for McGregor.
“I thought it would be the same for Logan Paul, but he’s training hard. It looks like he’s training for a legit fighter,” said Arias about Mayweather.
We’ll have to take Arias’s word for it that Mayweather is working as hard as he did for the Canelo fight because he doesn’t look like he’s working hard.
In the leaked workout clip posted on YouTube this week, a scruffy-looking bearded Mayweather looked slow and lethargic as he threw weak-looking punches at a heavy bag.
The slow speed and the lack of power that Mayweather showed while hitting the bag was that of a middle-aged person.
It didn’t look like the same youthful Mayweather that used to fire hard and fast shots into the heavy bags in training for his fights.
You can argue that Mayweather is perhaps 20% of what he was for the Canelo fight, and his workouts for the Logan Paul match are a fraction of what he was capable of eight years ago.
Mayweather looked flabby and slow in the recent workout video, and one gets the sense that he might lose to the 200-lb Logan.
It’s unlikely that Logan will beat Mayweather because he’s a godawful fighter, as we saw in his pro debut against YouTuber KSI in 2019.
Looking at how deteriorated and old Mayweather looks now compared to four years ago when he fought Conor McGregor in 2017, it’s a good idea that he not come out of retirement to fight a true fighter like Manny Pacquiao.
Mayweather would lose badly to the Pacquiao that defeated Keith Thurman in 2019.
Logan Paul will have to pay for Jake’s mistakes
He really wants to beat the f*** out of Logan Paul,” Arias continued. “He [Jake Paul] shouldn’t have grabbed his hat.
“He’s going to have to pay for his brother’s mistakes. ‘Why’d you do that? Now, he’s going to beat my a**.’
“I’m telling you, he [Mayweather] really wants to beat his a**. He’s training hard. I thought he was going to bull s***. I’m keeping it real.
“When I saw the fight, I thought, ‘Floyd is going to bull s***, and move around and grab and s***, look good and pity-pat.’
“That’s what I thought because of the size difference. But after seeing him work out, sparring these big guys, he’s been trying to beat the f*** out of everybody,” Arias said.
Logan probably will pay for Jake’s mistakes by getting beaten up by Mayweather, but where’s the gain by ‘Money.’ He’s not fighting a real boxer, and he looks as old as the hills.
With the way Mayweather is aging, it’s going to be pathetic if he keeps doing these exhibition matches for another four years. He’s not aging as well as Bernard Hopkins and Evander Holyfield in this writer’s view.
The fans aren’t going to watch a decrepit Mayweather reduced to beating up on Youtubers with no boxing experience to speak of. At this point, Jake Paul would have an excellent chance of beating Mayweather if he fights him next.
Unless Mayweather comes up with a handicap to reduce Jake’s punching power by insisting on a rehydration clause and lowering the weight limit for the fight to drain him, he’ll likely get knocked out by him.
Floyd angry because of his hat
“You would think that he’s about to fight for a world title,” said Arias on Mayweather’s training. “Logan Paul is going to get his a** beat bad.
“I thought he was going to move, but he’s training hard. I’m telling you the truth. I mean, he was bull s**** for McGregor, and they still bought the pay-per-view.
“I think because he got disrespected [by Jake Paul]. It was the hat thing. People thought that was a joke, but Floyd was pissed.
“I thought it was a joke too, but he’s mad. He had a lot of patience with him [Jake] untying his shoes and stuff.
“Floyd didn’t like that, I’m telling you, and you could tell by his sparring. It’s going to be a great fight from top to bottom.
“We got two real fights. Badou Jack and Pascal, and me and [Jarrett] Hurd, that’s a real fight. So I think it’s going to be a great card from top to bottom.
“You got some good guys turning pro on the card. It’s an event. It’s fifty dollars. Not ninety, fifty. It’s worth fifty,” said Arias.
Let’s be real about the undercard for Mayweather vs. Paul. It’s a terrible undercard, and the only halfway decent fight is the match between the over-the-hill Badou Jack and 38-year-old WBA ‘regular’ light heavyweight champion Jean Pascal.
Even that fight isn’t a great one because Jack doesn’t rate a world title shot because he’s done nothing to redeem himself after losing to Pascal in 2019.
As for Luis Arias, he hasn’t won a fight in three years since 2017, and he’s coming off a two-year layoff and a loss to Luke Keeler. That tells you all you need to know about Arias.
He’s going to get destroyed by Jarrett Hurd, and it won’t be pretty. It’s not even a fight.
So really, there’s nothing to see on the undercard. Badou, 37, is way past his prime and doesn’t look like the same guy that fought Adonis Stevenson to a 12 round draw in 2018.
That was a punishing fight for Jack, and he’s looked like a shell of his former self in his three fights since then. Jack’s record since the Stevenson clash: 1-2. He has two defeats to Pascal and Marcus Browne and a win over little-known cruiserweight Blake Mckernan.
Undercard fights on Mayweather vs. Paul card
- Jean Carlos Torres vs. Zack Kuhn
- Viddal Riley vs. Quintell Thompson
- Adrian Benton vs. Pedro Angel Cruz
- Micky Scala vs. Adam Ramirez
- Dorian Khan vs. Jonathan Conde
- Jalil Major Hackett vs. TBA
