By Ivan G. Goldman
When it comes to fighting Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather is like a boomerang that always comes back to the same place.
Not a chance, says Floyd.
And now he’s said it again. He’s also implying once more that Pacquiao uses PEDs. More on that later.
The welterweight champ, still claiming to be The Best Ever, is once again trying to explain why it makes sense for him — a man who unapologetically proclaims his love of money and regularly poses with stacks of hundred-dollar bills — to avoid the one fight that would make him more of it than any other two fights you could name.
When Floyd wants to spread a ridiculous story like that he likes to use the facilities of fighthype.com, a fight site that’s always willing to at least pretend “Money” Mayweather is talking sense. This time he also threatened to fire his father, Floyd Mayweather, Sr., if he doesn’t shut up about Pacquiao. No surprise there. Junior’s fired Daddy before.
“I want my dad to be with my team,” he said, “but if he continues to go out there and speak on things that he has no knowledge about without communicating with me, then I must get a new trainer.”
Over the course of the last year, Pacquiao’s promoter, Bob Arum, has made positive statements about putting together the Mayweather-Pacquiao superfight, implying and sometimes even saying that negotiations are taking place. Arum, shooting for the stars, has even raised the possibility of staging two fights.
Also, Richard Schaefer is no longer running Golden Boy Promotions, which does all the promotional heavy lifting for Mayweather cards on a fight-by-fight basis. Schaefer never had any right to speak for Mayweather, but he did anyway, quite routinely, and said repeatedly that he would never work with Arum and there would be no Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, period. Mayweather clearly liked what Schaefer said.
It made perfect sense to Schaefer, who comes from a Swiss banking family, to avoid doing something necessary if he found it unpleasant. Why worry about millions of fans and the lost hundreds of millions of dollars?
Now that Mayweather has only two remaining fights on his six-bout contract with Showtime, lots of people figured the logical last opponent would be Pacquiao, who will defend his WBO title Nov. 22 against Chris Algieri in Macau.
If Mayweather were to score two more victories, he would equal the 49-0 record of the great Rocky Marciano. How sweet it would be to notch that 49th win against his nemesis the Philippines Congressman.
But Mayweather doesn’t like to hear that kind of talk, and he surrounds himself with people who obey his preference.
Recently, “Money” fired sidekick Leonard Ellerbe. Lately, Floyd’s own father, apparently forgetting that entourage members can be easily replaced, has been failing to heed Floyd’s encyclical.
Mayweather, who turns 38 in February, has already paid Pacquiao we don’t know how many millions as part of an out-of-court settlement because with no proof whatsoever he’d accused Pacquiao of using banned performance-enhancing drugs. As part of the settlement, he issued an apology that stated he never said the things that he said.
Recently Floyd hired strength and conditioning trainer Alex Ariza, who used to be in Pacquiao’s camp, and in his telephone interview with Fighthype, he alluded to this, but tried to do it in such a way as to avoid having to make another out-of-court settlement:
“One thing that I really want to say while I’m on this phone, a lot of things that I talked about in the past, I was 100 percent right,” says Mayweather. At another point, he states, “Some of the people that used to work with Manny Pacquiao are now working with me, so the best thing for Pacquiao to do is be quiet before he really gets exposed and I tell some things that he don’t want me to tell.”
Despite what Mayweather implied, Pacquiao looked like his old self and much improved in his last two fights (against Brandon Rios and against Timothy Bradley a second time). He looked quicker and stronger than he did when Ariza was in his corner interrupting Freddie Roach.
In fact, Rios had Ariza on his team when he looked useless against Pacquiao. Ariza distinguished himself by kicking Parkinson’s disease sufferer Roach in the chest during a squabble over the gym schedule in Macau.
Mayweather, in his latest rant, also says once again that Pacquiao can’t draw fans or make much in endorsement money. Interesting, when you consider that Mayweather gets no real endorsement money at all because he keeps pleading guilty to beating up his girlfriends and then denying it later.
Mayweather knows he has some fans who believe it makes sense for him to avoid earning the fattest purse in history against a guy that he claims can’t fight and that he should instead compete against lesser fighters for lesser purses.
But fewer and fewer fans believe it. And history won’t believe it at all.
New York Times best-selling author Ivan G. Goldman’s Sick Justice: Inside the American Gulag was released in 2013 by Potomac Books. Watch for The Debtor Class: A Novel from Permanent Press in spring, 2015. More information here.