Boxing is the art of hitting, and not getting hit. That is the most basic equation of the sport. When any boxer is capable if doing both with great success, that pugilist is invariably a winner at the sport of boxing.
Floyd Mayweather further strengthened his claim to greatness with a one-sided defeat of Saul Alvarez in Las Vegas. In doing so he has secured the WBC and WBA light-middleweight titles and stretched his unbeaten professional run to 45 fights.
He pockets upwards of $45m plus some $35m from the pay per view figures for his efforts, a world record purse, and the fight is set to go down as the most lucrative pay-per-view show in history.
Mayweather was never threatened, making his Mexican foe look completely ordinary. Such was Money’s defensive mastery that this fight never caught fire as a contest, with Alvarez spending much of the fight either hitting arms or swinging at fresh air.
Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather has proven once gain that he can outbox, outwit and outpunch any boxer in the ring. That and perhaps this, is why he has upheld his unblemished record of 45 professional fights with zero loses and zero draws.
However casual armchair fans think that boxing is about hitting your opponent and getting hit too. These fans have no problem with Mayweather‘s hitting. It is his elusiveness in the ring – avoiding getting hit too – that holds their bone of contention. Why can’t Mayweather just get hit?
Let’s be clear. For these sadistic fans the show of brute strength – as this is all there is to boxing for them – lies in surviving multiple and periodic hits as well. Their problem with Mayweather hence, lies herein and to them, forms the basis why Money is ‘boring’.
But is he boring if fans are willing to dispatch him with more than $80m a night? That number is the nice round amount Floyd Mayweather heaves home for a single night at the office. No wonder he only needs two nights at his job, if at all, out of a whole calendar year.
Mayweather has now made $73m (outside his per-pay-view revenues) for two fights in 2013 alone – he easily beat Robert Guerrero in May – making him the highest-paid athlete in the world for the second successive year.
Some don’t believe he deserves it. Others think they would be happy to enter the ring and let Floyd knock them out for a paltry $5170.91 – or probably less!
To some of the doubters the perspective is simply misplaced – Floyd’s schedule, they claim, is suspect.
At fight night, Mayweather has summarily dispatched 6 out of the top 8 pound-for-pound boxers in a consecutive fashion. Oscar Dela Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Juan Manuel Marquez, Shane Mosley, Miguel Cotto and even Saul Alvarez were all in the top 10 pound-for-pound ratings.
No one in boxing has had a tougher schedule and Mayweather remains an undefeated world champion for 17 years. If he looks like a champion, quacks like a champion and walks like a champion, he’s a champion. He is definitely no ordinary boxer. If he is not the greatest of all time I don’t know who is!
Some say that Mayweather is past his prime at 36. But nobody seems capable to have the prime knocked out of him. ‘Things in the ring are so much different from what you see from the outside,’ Mayweather would say.
Peradventure, many folks love the fighting wars, but Floyd Mayweather is beyond that. He is a breathing legend at the sport. His style of boxing is in fact the complete science of boxing. That is simply what elevates Money’s Boxing from a purely brutal fist-cuffing sport to one of a symphonic art form.
When you say a King is Born, even that, for Mayweather is still an understatement.