By Keith Idec
NEW YORK – Floyd Mayweather Jr. and his team don’t think Conor McGregor is nearly as bad a boxer as the training videos he has released might lead people to believe.
Leonard Ellerbe, CEO of Mayweather Promotions and one of Mayweather’s closest confidantes, said Thursday night at Barclays Center that McGregor intentionally looked like an amateur in those videos to make Mayweather think their fight will be as easy as most boxing experts and fans expect.
Based on footage he has studied from McGregor’s UFC fights, Ellerbe believes the strong Irish southpaw’s power and timing make him a dangerous opponent for the best boxer of this generation next month in Las Vegas.
“Believe it or not, Conor McGregor’s a smart dude,” Ellerbe said before Thursday night’s press conference in Brooklyn. “Do y’all actually believe that footage he put out there was real? I’m just being honest. Do you actually believe he put that footage out there and it’s real, looking the way it looked? Come on, now. That man, Dana and those guys, they have my utmost respect because they know what they’re doing. Because guess what? He tricked all y’all, each and every one of you. He looked slow on the bag, he’s doing this, he’s doing that. Y’all can fall for it.
“What I’m saying is, only when he’s standing up, what I see with the guy and I have very good eyes, I see a guy who has tremendous timing, tremendous timing. He’s coming over the top of guys’ jab and when he turns it over, he’s doing damage. I mean real damage. And if he ain’t knocking them out, they falling down. And then they be messed up. So he was hoping that he was gonna bait Floyd into a situation where it’s like – nobody’s falling for that. One thing I do know is the guy can punch and he’s got great timing.”
Las Vegas’ Mayweather (49-0, 26 KOs) is more than a 5-1 favorite over McGregor, despite that the former five-division champion is 40 and hasn’t boxed in nearly two years. McGregor is 11 years younger than Mayweather and one of the top mixed martial artists in UFC, but has never participated in a professional boxing match.
Even though McGregor is a huge underdog, their 12-round, 154-pound fight has generated an enormous amount of mainstream media attention. The four-day, four-city tour to promote their August 26 pay-per-view bout at T-Mobile Arena will conclude Friday night at Wembley Arena in London.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
