With a desperate survival instinct, Floyd Mayweather has tried everything he could possibly think of to try and evade being hunted down and devoured by Manny Pacquiao. From the early postured intimidation attempts – He has to call me out first, he knows he can’t beat me, it will be an easier fight than Marquez, 60-40, I’m the best fighter of all time, God doesn’t want me to lose – to the more devious – I promise I’ll fight Mosley instead, Pac must fight me on March 13 – to the final panic move of launching the blood test smokescreens the hectic week before Christmas.
All the ideas Floyd concocted weren’t mind games, but clever schemes concocted with the express purpose to cancel the Super Bowl of Boxing.
Each and every tactic almost worked, just as it did with Margarito, Cotto and Mosley. But this time it was different. Like his style in the ring, Pacquiao is a far more complicated proposition.
We haven’t heard Floyd express a cocky desire and confidence to whoop Pac, like we heard him crow before Ricky Hatton, Arturo Gatti, Oscar, Carlos Baldomir, Juan Manuel Marquez. Floyd has been eerily silent lately. Like his defensive style of boxing, Floyd is being very careful and cautious with everything he says now about Pacquiao. Like it’s been said, the egomaniac never talks when he doesn’t have the upperhand.
And for sure, Floyd knows everything is changed now. The man who claimed he was his own boss, CEO and entrepreneur won’t talk about Pacquiao – he sits back in virtual hiding as his contollers speak for him.
From his temporary refuge, it’s conceivable that Floyd ordered the whole blood test charade which backfired badly on himself, Golden Boy and Schaefer, who now have backtracked out of fear of the forthcoming Pacquiao lawsuit.
There is nowhere to hide now. He can’t run to his HBO “family” because this time they will not protect him from Pacquiao by allowing him to use an easy escape route like Matthew Hatton.
Golden Boy will no longer permit Floyd to use the USADA random testing escape route, not after Richard Schaefer’s previous Mosley-Judah quotes proved him to be a hypocrite.
And worst of all for Floyd, after all his trickerations and deceptions, an angered Manny Pacquiao, more than ever, wants to tear him limb from limb and feed the bloody leftovers to his millions of supporters.
As we speak, Floyd is still in his safety lair, hiding and probably hoping that somehow this nightmare will all blow over and he can go back to the good ol’ days of defrauding the sporting public with more handpicked garbage fights for easy money from his “family” at HBO.
But the reality will soon set in, if it hasn’t already: Floyd will come to the conclusion he is the one who has been handpicked. He is the bullied and not the bully. He is the prey for the ruthless predator. And for the first time in his professional career, Floyd is going to have to face a man he doesn’t want to face. Fight a dangerous fight he doesn’t really want to fight. A “no-win situation.”
Sometimes the cornered animal is the most dangerous. Sometimes, astonishingly, the cornered animal simply surrenders in the moment of truth. We are soon going to learn the truth about Floyd Mayweather as he ponders the final deadline from Pacquiao.
As the Wimbledon champion Virginia Wade once said, “We only learn what a person’s true colors are by how they deal with adversity.”