By Keith Idec
NEW YORK – The best boxer in the world promised Monday that the result of his Sept. 13 rematch against Marcos Maidana would be at least as convincing as two judges considered his performance in their first fight.
Floyd Mayweather Jr. does plan, though, to take a different approach to training these next two months for their Showtime Pay-Per-View main event at MGM Grand in Las Vegas.
“This camp is going to be totally different,” Mayweather said. “I’m going to let my body rest a lot more and I’m going to do a lot more physical training for this fight. Because it’s safe to say I’m not fighting a boxer, I’m fighting an MMA fighter.”
Mayweather (46-0, 26 KOs) continually called Maidana “dirty” Monday on the first stop of a five-city, three-day tour to promote their 12-round rematch. The undefeated five-division champion also made it perfectly clear that he has nothing against respected referee Tony Weeks, whose overall body of work Mayweather praised effusively during a roundtable discussion with reporters at the Marriott Marquis before the start of a public news conference in Times Square.
The Grand Rapids, Mich., native just feels as though Maidana (35-4, 31 KOs) more than bent the rules when they met May 3 at MGM Grand.
“A lot of things were going on in the fight that if I was the referee, I wouldn’t let happen,” Mayweather said. “But I wasn’t the referee. My job is just to fight.”
Despite that judge Michael Pernick somehow scored the Mayweather-Maidana welterweight title fight even (114-114), Mayweather doesn’t consider Maidana as good as Canelo Alvarez or Miguel Cotto, both of whom Mayweather defeated soundly.
“Is Maidana a better fighter than Canelo?,” Mayweather, 37, asked. “No. Is he a better fighter than Cotto? No. Is he a dirtier fighter? Yes, that’s safe to say. That’s the only thing that sets him apart. He wants to hold one hand, he wants to elbow. … I didn’t get a deep gash from a punch. I got a deep gash [over his right eye] from a head-butt. Low blows.
“Y’all can go look at the fight over and over again. Twenty low blows. We can go on and on. My job is to go out there and just be me, do what I do. Y’all done seen this a thousand times, over and over again. ‘This guy is going to beat me. He’s the one. He’s a young, hungry lion.’ Or, ‘He’s a veteran. He’s got 60 fights.’ Or, ‘This guy is undefeated. He’s got power.’ It’s the same thing over and over again. He’s not going to win.”
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
