Taking his seat on the dais, Floyd Mayweather Jr. looked out into the crowd. There were his friends and uncles and cut man in the front row. And there his fans, who’d snuck in. And the print reporters, radio reporters and platoon of television cameras lined them, hundreds gathered from around the world to see the most lucrative bout in the history of boxing, and its star attraction: him. Sponsored by Imagine RIT Sponsor Story
Mayweather has been candid. His fight against Manny Pacquiao on Saturday is the most defining of his career, the greatest challenge for the most talented fighter of his generation, and yet in the crowd that gathered for the final press conference in Las Vegas today, the most important figure in his boxing career, the figure that has trained him since birth and sculpted him into boxing’s Mozart was missing.
Unbelievable. After all they’ve been through, could Floyd Mayweather Sr. be late to his son’s own press conference? And with all of planet Earth watching?
“Where’s Floyd Sr.?” an organizer asked, looking into the crowd before it all started. Another organizer had the placard with his name on it, the piece of paper Big Floyd should have been sitting behind, and in the chair next to his son, Little Floyd, before the biggest moment of his career.
“Let’s just get started,” the organizer went on, and that was it. The biggest fighter of his generation, featured in the biggest fight in recent history, looked out in the crowd from like a forlorn Little Leaguer, left behind at the ball field after batting practice, waiting for his parent to show.
Perhaps it’s too late in the pre-fight hoopla to talk Mayweatherology, and much has been made over the years about Big Floyd and Little Floyd, their breakups, reunions, and the touchy subject of their relationship. Mayweather Jr. often says he doesn’t like to bring up the past, and then he does, on his own terms.
“I’ve seen my father sell my mother crack,” he wrote in an Instagram post last year. “My father went to prison at an age when I needed him most.”
As a boxing prodigy, Mayweather practically raised himself, drifting between the homes of relatives and others that helped raise him. Like most kids with ambitious parents, Mayweather Jr. was anxious to please his father-trainer, win over his love and acceptance, and even changed his birth name (it was Sinclair) to become a Mayweather, and by far the most famous and successful of all the other boxing Mayweathers combined.
Back then, when Big Floyd went to prison, Mayweather was so adamant that his dad get to witness him fight in the Olympics he famously wrote then-President Bill Clinton to have him pardoned to watch him compete.
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After father and son split up for years, Little Floyd eventually accepted his father back into his corner, as chief trainer, a move that may have satisfied his own need for reconciliation, but created a rift with Roger Mayweather, his uncle, longtime trainer and younger brother of Big Floyd. Over the years, Roger and Floyd Sr. had so many falling outs they’d nearly become estranged from each other, and when Floyd Jr. brought them all back together again, he was asking them both to accept each other.
At the press conference Wednesday, Big Floyd showed up. He was 25 minutes late. The introductions had barely begun. Shortly after he arrived, an aide whispered in Floyd’s ear. Another chair could have been brought up. A seat for the father and maker of the boxing Mozart could have been invited up to the dais, too.
It was not, and he found a seat in the crowd, with everyone else.
When it came time for him to speak, Mayweather Jr. was sparse in his remarks. He thanked the usual suspects, and when it came time to shout out his tardy father, he thanked him — but not for creating him as a boxer, or teaching him how to roll the shoulder and counterpunch. He thanked him for getting along his brother Roger, who was also not on the dais. He wasn’t even at the press conference, as far as I could tell.
And so amid the hype and history talk, Mayweather Jr. was the center of the show, and with the gaze of so many upon him, under the lid of a baseball cap and in his tracksuit he looked like he often does: alone.
