By Huck Allen: Jeff Mayweather says he was surprised at how easily Devin Haney defeated unified lightweight champion George Kambosos Jr. in Melbourne, Australia, last Saturday night.
Jeff had thought that Haney (28-0, 15 KOs) was in over his head going into the fight, but he did the job on the previously unbeaten Kambosos (20-1, 10 KOs), winning nearly every round of the battle.
What made Haney’s win even more special was that he beat Kambosos in front of a massive crowd of Australian fans. Kambosos had the fans cheering for him the whole way, but it didn’t help him.
Some would argue that there was a lack of urgency with Kambosos and his career when things started unraveling for him early on. In the second of the fight, there seemed to be no urgency or desperation in Kambosos’s corner.
In the 12th, Kambosos finally got himself in gear, but it was too late by that point to win. Kambosos needed a knockout of Haney, but he lacked the power to accomplish that task.
“I thought Devin won almost every round. I maybe could have given one round to Kambosos,” said Jeff Mayweather to the Mayweather Channel. “Him beating Kambosos that easily did surprise me as well.
“Of course, I wanted him to win because he was a kid that I trained when I was young. That fight wasn’t close at all. I take my hat off to Devin because it’s funny. What he said to me stopped me in my tracks.
“Basically when he said was, ‘You’re supposed to inspire me,’ and I felt like s*** when he said that. It’s not because. It’s just the fact that he had to say that, even though it didn’t really mean anything to me because I wasn’t against him.
“I did have to accept it because I put something out there only because I thought it was too big for him to overcome. So, I had to accept it. I took it like a man, and that’s what you had to do.
“The reason it hurt me so much is because I don’t know if he ever even knew that I wasn’t really against him,” Mayweather said of Haney. “It was put out there, and basically, that’s how he came right.
“I think that out of all the people that said that it shouldn’t have been me. I trained him when he was a very young kid, and I told his dad, ‘This kid is going to be a world champion one day.’
“Of course, he’s lived up to everything I said he was going to do and most other people that I’ve trained with him. He’s lived up to all those things and probably even more.
“I’m man even to accept that I was wrong because I was wrong to put that out there in that way for people to perceive it as me saying, ‘Devin is going to lose.’ As opposed to me saying, ‘Devin is going to lose because of the situation and not because of his ability.’
“Right now, the world is his right now,” said Jeff about Haney’s possibilities for future fights. “He’s the king and has got all the belts. So now people have got to come to him.
“He better do way better than he did this time,” said Jeff about what Kambosos must do in the rematch to defeat Haney. “I hope the same judges are there.
“It’s in your country, so how fair can you get? You’ve got 60,000 people screaming for you, and you still can’t win. I take my hat off for Devin. I don’t think I should apologize for being wrong because I was never really against him,” said Jeff.
