By Adam Baskin: Devin Haney blames Floyd Mayweather Jr for the current mess that boxing is in, with fighters not wanting to fight each other and promoters protecting them, looking exclusively for cash-out fights.
Haney feels that Mayweather is the one behind the collapse. He’s the mother of the current disintegration of the sport, with his focus on keeping an 0 at all costs, using cherry-picking to ensure that he was never en route to amassing his 51-0 record.
Fighters & their promoters have learned from Mayweather, choosing to take only soft touches, creating resumes carefully manufactured to fool the gullible public. The naive fans are none the wise, not realizing that they’re looking at fool’s gold instead of the genuine 24K stuff.
Floyd messed up the game
“We could change the whole dynamic of boxing and make it like the UFC. Those guys fight each other, lose, and fight again in maybe even bigger fights after a loss,” said Devin Haney to Pivot Podcast.
“Floyd made boxing bigger, but he kind of messed up the game with the undefeated record, so guys don’t want to fight each other; they want to keep the 0.”
Unfortunately, it’s too late for boxing to return to what it once was when the best was fighting the best. You can’t change back because fighters & their promoters have learned to make money; they need to guard their perfect record like a dog protecting a henhouse.
Mayweather has created a Frankenstein monster with his cherry-picking blueprint that is now followed by almost every fighter and promoter in the business.
When Floyd did take risks during his career, it was the carefully calculated ones where he would pull the trigger on a fight after a fighter showed signs of being old & shot.
For example, Mayweather didn’t fight Shane Mosley & Manny Pacquiao until they were over the hill and had been beaten. When Floyd fought Canelo Alvarez, he did it at the very start of the Mexican star’s career when he was just 22, and even then, he used a catchweight to weaken him.
Although Haney (30-0, 15 KOs) is unhappy with the mess that Mayweather has created with the pattern of avoidance, he’s just as guilty, swerving killers like Shakur Stevenson and fleeing the division to avoid his carefully built record marred.
Haney is kind of a hypocrite because if he really had an issue with Floyd’s cherry-picking model that is followed like a cookbook by fighters & promoters, he would stay at 135 and fight Shakur and the other killers that want to scalp him.