by David P. Greisman (photo by Chris Cozzone/FightWireImages)
To hear Floyd Mayweather Jr. is to listen to a man addicted to the tenor of his voice, a man who talks with a confident tone but whose caricatural hubris suggests he is compensating for some shortcoming.
His swagger inflates his standing: “I truly believe I’m the best,” he says. “I know I’m the best. Someone could say, ‘Oh, he said he’s better than Muhammad Ali.’ Yep. I’m better than Muhammad Ali. Sugar Ray Robinson? Yep. I’m better than Sugar Ray Robinson. I would never say there’s another fighter better than me. Absolutely not.”
He insolently insults his opponents. There were the personal barbs about Shane Mosley’s hairstyle (“He got a Jheri curl, man. Come on, man, it’s 2010.”), his face (“Don’t talk bad about Shane because he got a nose job.”), his past use of performance-enhancing drugs (“Tell Shane to stop taking them steroids.”). And then there were the physical taunts: “Vernon Forrest f**ked you up. Winky Wright f**ked you up. Miguel Cotto f**ked you up. Money Mayweather, I’ma f**k you up some more.”
Shane Mosley listened to Floyd Mayweather Jr. He heard sound and fury and concluded that it signified something.
“I think sometimes when people start doing a lot of barking, he kind of shows that he might be a little bit intimidated, a little bit afraid,” Mosley said.
To hear Shane Mosley is to listen a man who believes bluster is bluffing, that sometimes it takes someone coolly confident to call a bully out to the schoolyard.
“He’s backed into a corner,” Mosley said. “He wants to believe that he’s the best. He keeps saying that he’s the best. He runs his mouth and says ‘I’m the best. I’m the best. I’m the best in history.’ At some point you have to back that up.
“I’m just as fast as he is,” Mosley said. “I’m stronger than him. My arms are longer than his. I can hit him before he hits me. This is a real fight. He knows this, too.
“I don’t bark,” Mosley said. “I bite. My bite is very deadly.”
To see Mayweather against Mosley was to watch a man whose ego wasn’t compensation for what he isn’t, but rather a representation of what he is – a man who can be both bombastic and fantastic, who will browbeat you and then defeat you.
To see Mosley against Mayweather was to watch a man who went from coolly confident to frozen and faltering. Just as Mosley never found the words to shut Mayweather up, he never found the way to shut Mayweather down.
Shutting down is Mayweather’s game. He is quick. He is accurate. He is elusive. He makes what he does look easy. He takes what his opponent wants to do and makes it hard to get done.
Against the five men he had faced at welterweight prior to the Mosley fight, Mayweather had averaged 17 landed punches per round for every 37 thrown, nearly one in every two, an impressive 46 percent connect rate, according to CompuBox statistics. The average for welterweight fighters is 19 out of 58 per round, one in every three punches, or 33 percent.
Mayweather’s five welterweight opponents averaged 6 landed punches per round for every 45 thrown, just one in every seven-and-a-half, a paltry 13 percent connect rate.
Against 13 welterweight opponents prior to the Mayweather fight, Mosley averaged 18 of 48 per round, a 38 percent connect rate. His opponents, on average, were 13 of 53 per round, a 25 percent connect rate.
It would not be the average Mosley fight. It would be the average Mayweather fight – he landed 17 of 40 per round, 208 total, a 43 percent connect rate, and he kept Mosley to 8 of 38 per round, 92 total, a 21 percent connect rate.
The scorecards: 119-109 (twice), 118-110, all for Mayweather. One round for Mosley on two scorecards, two for Mosley on the other. Fitting, for Mosley only had one big moment – as a result of two big punches.
Less than a minute into the second round, Mosley shot a jab to Mayweather’s body and followed with a right hand that lifted Mayweather’s left foot off the canvas. Fifty seconds later, Mosley landed a right hook that buckled Mayweather’s knees.
That second round would see Mosley land 13 of 30 power shots. Mayweather survived the onslaught, however, and for the remainder of the fight he shut Mosley down – keeping him to just 29 total power punches landed in the next 10 rounds, including just 1 landed out of 7 thrown in the third, 0 of 7 in the fourth, 2 of 11 in the eighth, and 1 of 15 in the ninth. In turn, for the remainder of the fight, he shut Mosley out.
Mosley would blame his second-round success for his subsequent lack thereof. “After when I caught him with the big right hand, I might’ve started loading up a little bit too much,” he said in a post-fight interview. “I played into his hands. I was just too tight. I couldn’t throw nothing but big shots.”
At first, Mosley loaded up on his punches because he knew he could hurt Mayweather. But later, he loaded up on his punches because he knew he couldn’t hit him.
Quick. Accurate. Elusive. Mayweather’s skills didn’t just cut down on the number of punches Mosley landed. His skills cut down on the number of punches Mosley threw.
Mosley’s jab was mostly jittery and tentative. He was wary of the counter right hand that would come over top of it. It was a war of nerves, one man less willing to draw his gun when the other man could shoot first.
And with Mayweather’s ability to slip punches, Mosley rarely had a perfect shot. The perfect shot was what he was looking for. Anything else would put him in danger of missing and getting hit hard in return. Mosley threw just 169 power punches on the night, only 14 per round, landing just 46, less than 4 per round.
As Mosley fell behind, he knew he had to do something else.
As Mayweather took over, he knew he need only do exactly what he’d been doing.
Desperation versus confidence. Mosley was a ball of nervous energy, bouncing on his feet, shuffling his hands, a speed bag shaking in motion but largely returning to the same spot, where he would be hit again and again.
“I’m as fast as he is,” Mosley had said before the fight. Mayweather was faster.
“I’m stronger than him,” Mosley had said. His punches lost their pop. Mayweather grinned at what his opponent had left, then landed some more crisp rights.
“I think sometimes when people start doing a lot of barking, he kind of shows that he might be a little bit intimidated, a little bit afraid,” Mosley had said. In the eighth, Mosley arm-dragged Mayweather into the ropes, then started mouthing off at him. Mayweather threw a left hook and a hard right hand, and the men exchanging pleasantries, but now it was Mosley who was compensating for his shortcomings and Mayweather who was coolly confident.
To hear Shane Mosley after the fight was to listen to a man who sounded as if he had pushed his chips to the center of the table, thinking he had the winning hand, only to then learn that bluster doesn’t always mean bluffing, that tough talk doesn’t necessarily indicate hidden weakness.
To hear Floyd Mayweather Jr. after the fight was to listen to a man put aside the caricatural hubris that had characterized him beforehand. He didn’t need it. He had done exactly what he promised he would do. For all of his talk, it was what he did – not what he said – that gave him the last word.
The 10 Count
1. Though Floyd Mayweather Jr. did not pick up Shane Mosley’s title belt with his win – Mayweather opted against paying a sanctioning fee to the World Boxing Association (a $150,000 maximum, not 3 percent of his purse, according to WBA rules) – he did earn recognition of being, for the second time, the lineal welterweight champion.
Does that completely make up for his not facing the best fighters at 147 pounds in the past few years?
No.
Mayweather is the legitimate champion. He beat the man who beat the man. But being the best in a division isn’t just about lineage and rankings and handicapping match-ups on paper. It is a matter of duration, of taking on all comers and beating them. It is the difference between Bernard Hopkins being the best at middleweight and, say, Manny Pacquiao being the momentary champion at junior welterweight.
One cannot say that Pacquiao is the best at 140 when he’s only fought there once. And one cannot merely look at Mayweather’s preternatural talents and decide that his being favored to beat everyone else means he does not need to actually face anyone else.
Beating the man who beat the man isn’t all that’s necessary when it comes to proving yourself the best in a weight class. Cleaning out a deep division over an extended period of time is what takes a champion from superb to superlative.
2. That said, let’s not take away the value of Mayweather’s victory. If a fighter were just to go from division to division and knock off the top guy there, that’d be quite the accomplishment. The problem has always been that what Mayweather sometimes says he’s done doesn’t align with what he’s actually done – being the best at 140, for example.
If Mayweather stays at welterweight and faces Manny Pacquiao, we’d get the fight we all want. But if that fight doesn’t come together and Mayweather were to go up to junior middleweight or middleweight and take on Paul Williams or Sergio Martinez, those would be worthwhile ventures worthy of praise should Mayweather win.
3. I still think (1) there’s no legitimate reason to say Manny Pacquiao uses performance-enhancing drugs, that there’s only a modern-day, Salem-style witch-hunt. Though we could never be wholly certain, we can be far more certain Pacquiao is clean than we can be certain that he is not.
I still think (2) Pacquiao should take whatever blood tests are necessary to shut those accusers up – even though those accusations were the kind he never should’ve had to face anyway. There’s been no bottle of andro in the locker room, no ties to pharmacies distributing illicit substances, nothing but armchair experts with axes to grind.
My father has always said: “Never argue with an idiot. You can’t win.” Pacquiao doesn’t need to convince the idiots of anything. But he can do something to keep the idiots from persuading others to be suspicious.
4. Line of the night: “Hail Mosleys,” – Larry Merchant, coining a term for the single shots Shane Mosley was trying to land to take momentum back from Floyd Mayweather Jr.
5. Not the line of the night: “And now, for the tens of millions around the world, and for the tens of thousands here in attendance: Ladies and gentleman, let’s get ready to rumble!” – Michael Buffer.
Really? Was the hyperbole necessary?
Attendance at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas was 15,117. Good crowd. Not in the tens of thousands.
As for the tens of millions around the world, I’m not sure how much play a bout between two American fighters – two great American fighters, yes – gets in other time zones. It was past 4 a.m. in London, past 7 a.m. in Moscow, past 11 a.m. in China and just after noon in Tokyo. Not exactly prime viewing times for anyone but the most hardcore of boxing fans in other countries, who I imagine sought streams online in lieu of live broadcasts (admittedly, I know nothing about this).
We already knew Mosley-Mayweather was a big fight. No need for Michael Buffer to change his introduction just to find some way to emphasize that.
6. Speaking of watching boxing from different time zones, a question for those West Coast viewers three time zones behind me:
Do you watch Showtime’s “ShoBox” broadcasts live – 11 p.m. Eastern Time, 8 p.m. Pacific – or do you watch the tape delay broadcast at 11 p.m. Pacific?
I ask because I just don’t get the logic of starting a show at 11 p.m. on a Friday night that drags into the morning. In this case, the three bouts took the broadcast past 1 a.m. It’s far easier to stay up on a Saturday night for a pay-per-view when one didn’t need to get up for work that day. I’ve long said that the way Showtime programs its occasional Friday broadcasts isn’t the best way to maximize its potential viewership.
7. Boxers Behaving Badly update: The resuscitation of a legal case against Nikolay Valuev has ended in the former heavyweight titleholder’s favor, according to BoxingScene.com correspondent Ruslan Chikov, citing Russian media reports.
In 2008, Valuev was fined 130,000 rubles, or approximately $4,447, for punching a security guard in 2006 outside of a sports complex in St. Petersburg, Russia. The security guard, at the time, was 61 years old. Valuev had told local media that the incident was merely an attempt to “shake off” the man after he insulted Valuev’s wife.
“Just imagine what would have happened to that old man if I really punched him,” the seven-foot-tall, 316-pound Valuev was quoted as saying at the time to Russian media.
Last year the man, who had received 100,000 rubles from Valuev’s fine, sought a harsher penalty of 1 million rubles (about $34,200), saying he had suffered further injuries, “posttraumatic changes to a pair of ribs,” according to the Pravda online newspaper.
This most recent court case ended because a medical exam could not link the man’s injuries to the 2006 incident.
Valuev, 36, last fought in November, losing his heavyweight belt to David Haye via majority decision. That dropped his record to 50-2 with 34 knockouts and 1 no contest.
8. The highlight of the pay-per-view undercard – which sorely lacked in important, intriguing matches but at least ended up providing some interesting fights once they got under way – was the show opener between welterweights Said Ouali and Hector Saldivia.
Ouali went down from a right hand just 12 seconds into the bout. It was a balance knockdown from squaring up and not being ready for the shot from Saldivia. Ouali got up, and Saldivia charged forward. With Ouali in a neutral corner 65 seconds into the round, Saldivia threw and landed a right hand. But Ouali countered with a right hook that hurt Saldivia and followed with a left hand that put him down.
Saldivia never really recovered. Ouali landed another right hook a little past the round’s halfway point, putting Saldivia down for the second time. Saldivia got up but stumbled toward a corner, and the referee waved it off.
Ouali-Saldivia probably won’t be shown with this Saturday’s rebroadcast of Mosley-Mayweather, so if you want to see it, look online. It’s no Ricardo Torres-Kendall Holt 2. It’s probably not even the round of the year. But it’s worth a watch.
9. Tweet of the Week: “Its funny, but they still hand out the score sheets for fights that end in first round knockouts. Environmentalists are outraged.” – Steve Kim of MaxBoxing.com, tweeting from ringside following Ouali-Saldivia.
Kim echoed a thought many press row journalists have had when publicists pass out copies of empty scorecards for bouts that failed to last the first three minutes.
It’s still greener than the amount of gas guzzled by NASCAR.
10. Finally, let us hope and pray that Nick Charles continues to have the strength and determination that has driven him.
It was great to see Charles back on “ShoBox: The New Generation” at the end of January after nearly half a year off the air, knowing he had turned a corner on advanced bladder cancer. It was sad to know that this past Friday’s broadcast would be his last, that he was going back to battling off the ropes.
As Charles said earlier this year: “Life is about 20 percent of what happens to you and 80 percent how you react to it – traffic jam, burned toast or cancer.”
Ana el na refa na lah. Our prayers are with you, Nick.
David P. Greisman is a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. His weekly column, “Fighting Words,” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. He may be reached for questions and comments at fightingwords1@gmail.com
