LAS VEGAS ? It is Monday afternoon, five days before the fight. Every storefront along Schiff Drive in Chinatown here has makeshift signs taped inside its windows warning Mayweather Boxing patrons not to park or loiter in front of its business.
Little to fear, though.
The parking lot is nearly empty.
So is the gym, because Floyd Mayweather himself has chosen not to work out here this afternoon ? this is the time in fight preparation when he often sneaks off for late-night work ? though you still might expect more activity than this, with the boss fighting this week, and several key undercard fighters.
Welcome to the fight nobody really wanted, save for a few who actually needed it, assuming Mayweather decides to do this again. He has vowed that isn’t the case, and that Saturday’s welterweight title fight against Andre Berto is his last, but why do this at all, except to conclude a long-term contract which enriched and now potentially constrains him?
Mayweather defends his 147-pound titles Saturday against Berto (he also has a 154-pound version), and suggestions that the very nature of this fight leaves open the door to fighting in 2016 draw responses ranging from weary to testy.
Mayweather really is tired of boxing. He really is ready to walk away. It is all quite true.
And he really is competing in a fight this weekend that leaves open the door to a reversal.
The best thing he could have done after his victory over Manny Pacquiao in May was take off a year. It was Mayweather’s fifth fight in two years. People were weary of punching the pay-per-view button. They didn’t like the fight and asking them to pony up again after Pacquiao was a challenge. Mayweather’s pay-per-view dominance has spanned most of the last eight years, much of it rooted in pining for Pacquiao. If he didn’t fight that second time this year, maybe fans actually would start to miss him.
But if he had any inkling of fighting again, he couldn’t take a year off ? not and maximize his earnings, anyway.
He would have owed Showtime a fight, and if there is any reason to fight into 2016, the biggest one for Mayweather may be the opportunity to negotiate one last time as a free agent.
To have that option at the earliest opportunity requires completing the six-fight, three-year deal with Showtime, signed in 2013 and designed to expire this year, in the prescribed period.
If you’re really retiring, why finish the contract at all? There are terms that must be met as long as the athlete competes, but no prohibition on retirement. Mayweather could have walked away after the record-shattering fight with Pacquiao, not a fight with the shopworn Berto, which is destined to produce lukewarm gate and television figures.
Granted, money enters the equation, and Mayweather has an opportunity to cash out against an opponent tenderized by losses to two fighters he already has beaten, Victor Ortiz and Robert Guerrero.
But if money is the reason for Mayweather-Berto, it isn’t as if financial temptation will just vanish in 2016.
Other than finance, fighting Berto makes no sense from a professional perspective, unless it is for the express purpose of completing a contract which only becomes restrictive if Mayweather chooses to fight again.
In that event, Mayweather needs to be free and clear.
He has been in something of this situation before, when he had a six-fight HBO contract in the early 2000s, and the structure of it constrained his competition levels. He received all the HBO money under terms of his contract with promoter Top Rank, which in turn recovered its investment principally through foreign television rights and gate receipts. Top Rank fed one in-house fighter from its stable after another to Mayweather, which controlled the matchmaking and satisfied two clients simultaneously.
Mayweather’s Showtime contract followed the same playbook, with him fighting four Golden Boy Promotions opponents in a row before severing ties and fighting Top Rank’s Pacquiao. Now, free of both, he has dipped into his own adviser Al Haymon’s stable for what he says is his career finale.
That doesn’t necessarily mean Mayweather fights again next year, even though the new MGM-AEG Arena opening in Las Vegas offers a different sort of temptation.
But it leaves open the possibility and creates the best negotiating position in the event he does.
Fighters like Amir Khan, Kell Brook, Keith Thurman and Danny Garcia might have been better choices than Berto, but they had their chances to step up as consensus picks for the fight and haven’t done so. Fighting them, like fighting Berto, serves no broader purpose, and if you’re fighting to get rid of a contract, you do it via the path of least resistance.
You do it with Berto.
Even if Mayweather fights in 2016, the emergence of a suitable opponent could be an issue, because the only reason to continue at that point is for huge financial windfalls.
There are only three noteworthy possibilities, all extremely fragile: A rematch with Pacquiao; the winner of November’s Saul “Canelo” Alvarez-Miguel Cotto fight; and Gennady Golovkin.
Golovkin faces one overarching problem, his lack of broad-based appeal with casual fans. Hardcore fans understand the middleweight title-holder could be a real risk for Mayweather, but those fans buy fights anyway. You don’t have to sell to that market. Broad-based pay-per-view success requires getting the casual fan to buy, and Golovkin lacks that cachet.
A Pacquiao rematch probably still does 2 million-plus pay-per-view buys domestically. But it requires Mayweather Promotions and Top Rank working together again, which was a study in tedium the first time, and perhaps untenable.
The Alvarez-Cotto winner would have great appeal, even if both already have lost to Mayweather. An Alvarez victory would require Mayweather Promotions and Golden Boy to work together again, which also could prove untenable, particularly with Golden Boy embroiled in a federal lawsuit alleging antitrust violations by Mayweather’s adviser Haymon. But if Cotto wins, he fights for Jay Z’s Roc Nation, a negotiation which could prove much easier to facilitate, and Mayweather could fight for the lineal middleweight title. Mayweather-Cotto also was a better fight than Mayweather-Alvarez a year later, and since their 2012 fight, Cotto has reunited with trainer Freddie Roach, which could add another layer of intrigue to a Mayweather rematch.
Mayweather, at 38, may be finished after Saturday night. He may retire of his own volition, or because a suitable opponent doesn’t emerge for 2016 who isn’t named Pacquiao, or both.
But when you insist you’re retiring after a fight that appears to be a bet-hedging action to eliminate a contract, you raise sincerity suspicions.
Mayweather and Pacquiao really will walk away from boxing in the near future. That so much discussion about the sport still centers around them leaves open the question of what the sport will do when they really are gone, when that parking lot outside Mayweather Boxing is empty for a different reason.
