By: Hector Franco
“You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” – Abraham Lincoln.
The return of Floyd Mayweather Jr. to the squared circle will take place this weekend in the form of an exhibition at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida.
The rules for the eight-round exhibition include knockouts being legal, no headgear, no judges, no official winner being read, and 10 oz. gloves will be used by both participants.
The opponent he will be facing will be the biggest opponent he has faced standing at 6’2 and will outweigh Mayweather by over 30 pounds. However, his opponent isn’t a former professional boxer coming out of retirement or a mixed martial artist, but YouTube sensation Logan Paul.
The 26-year old Paul is a former Division-I high school wrestling champion from Ohio, giving him an athletic background.
Paul first entered the world of boxing in 2018 when he took on another YouTube star in the United Kingdom’s Olajide William Olatunji, better known by his alias KSI.
Their first encounter was an amateur boxing match that ended in a majority draw at Manchester Arena in Manchester, England. From a financial standpoint, it was a massive success selling 1.3 million PPV buys.
Over a year later, in November 2019, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, a rematch took place between Paul and KSI, this time at the professional level in a six-round match. Paul would lose a split decision after losing two points in the fourth round for illegal punches.
To say that Paul is making a jump in his level of competition is an understatement. Going from KSI to even this version of Mayweather could be compared to learning the alphabet to then attempting to complete a dissertation for your Ph.D. at Harvard.
However, a loss to Mayweather for Paul isn’t likely to impact his social media following or stop him from continuing a boxing career. The expectation is for him to lose and lose badly. Mayweather is the one who is in a lose-lose situation as all he gains from this fight is a gargantuan paycheck.
“I’m not going in there with the fight meaning the entire world to me,” Paul stated during his media workout. “I have nothing to lose. This whole thing is going to be fun for me. I’m going to play with Floyd-gonna dog him and hit him hard. I’m going to break him down physically, mentally, everything.”
If there were a time when Floyd Mayweather was going to lose in a boxing ring, even in an exhibition, it would be at the age of 44, with almost three years gone by since his last exhibition in 2018.
“What I’m about to say might turn people crazy,” stated longtime trainer and ESPN boxing analyst Teddy Atlas to The Athletic. “But as well as Floyd knows how to pick his spots, guess what? Logan Paul is picking his spot well too. People might say, ‘How can you say that?’
“Well, he’s going against a great fighter who’s 44 years old, who hasn’t fought for three years and is a counter puncher. Floyd is not a go-get-you guy. Also, Floyd didn’t have a lot of time to prepare for this. They shortened it up. You know what? Pretty damn smart!”
Win or lose, Logan Paul does have a future in boxing. He can choose to participate in matches that are strictly events to be taken as more entertainment than sport or attempt to become a real professional starting from the ground up.
Whatever happens, there will be a stage available and an audience watching for Logan Paul. The risk in facing professional boxers that are in their prime is a risk, but with the amount of money and attention he generates, he would be a fool not to try.