Originally posted by SpeedKillz
Before the rise of "Money Mayweather", Floyd was already the heir apparent for the best fighter of this era and the P4P#1 boxer in the world.
He was soft spoken, well mannered, and he had already accomplished great things before ever even reaching 140lbs.
Despite all this, Mayweather got very little respect and little support.
He wasn't a villain then. So how do you explain that?
I'll tell you.
Arum knew that if he had a boxer whose talents were greater than his need to be heavily promoted by Top Rank's services and could conceivably fight and beat anyone around him, Arum would have to keep that fighter on an extremely short leash. This was why Arum pulled that crap with there not being enough money in the DLH fight to guarantee Mayweather's demand.
Once Floyd got figured out that he could leave Arum and take home a much bigger portion of the money, Arum got the boot and has a vendetta against Floyd ever since.
The "Money" persona was just a way to make Floyd the most marketable commodity in boxing. And it worked. Floyd knew that he didn't have the fanbase to lend him the support necessary to rise to the top. So the only way to make that happen was to capture the attention of the masses and keep it ... even if it wasn't in the "Aww shucks .. thanks guys" kind of manner.
All that said, its important to keep in mind that Mayweather wasn't getting the support BEFORE all of this.
And its simply because Black fighters are like Black NBA players: There are tons of them. No one is going to stand up and take notice of another Black fighter winning unless he's knocking everyone .. and I mean EVERYONE out. He'd literally have to be the next Mike Tyson.
Let there be a Native American that can really bang, or a kid from Iceland who is as slick as Sweet Pea, or the next Mike McCallum "the body snatcher" be an Aborigine from the Outback ... they will be stars simply because its so rare.
The only way a Black fighter is ever going to get the support that these other ethnicities are getting is if he literally knocks each and every opponent out.
Just ask Roy Jones, who was the second coming of Ray Robinson and was the most dominant boxer of his era and some other eras before that.
Ask Bernard Hopkins who broke the title defense record, but was all but obscured to anyone who wasn't a hardcore boxing fan.
Ask James Toney, who was P4P#1 before Jones was. He also went up and won at HW. The man has the defensive wizardry of both Floyd and Whitaker. And they didn't call him "Lights Out" for nothing.
The list goes on.
After nearly 100 years of dominating the sport, a Black doing well in boxing isn't making any headlines.
Now if Floyd could just make the transition to tennis, hockey or the Tour de France ...
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