“It is impossible to read the background on the nonfight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao without concluding that Mayweather is afraid of the Filipino congressman. Mayweather wants to retire unbeaten and wants to tell the world he is the greatest fighter of all time, but he looks more like a good fighter who picked his spots and ran from trouble at the end.–GENERAL SPORTS COLUMNIST Dan Shaughnessy, Boston Globe, on Boston.com, Sept. 2, 2010
Dan Shaughnessy is an old friend of mine, going back to the long ago when he wielded a sometimes poison but nearly always on target pen for the now defunct Washington Star.
Like me, he came into journalism as an ink-stained wretch.
Shaughnessy has been a mainstay, the power hitter or David Ortiz if you will, in The Globe’s sporting lineup for many years.
Shaughnessy eats, sleeps and breathes baseball, which is the beat from whence he came, but he also devotes ample commentary to the fate of the football Patriots and the basketball Celtics. But it’s easy to see the NBA as his second love behind MLB and the Olde Town Team (Red Sox).
So you could’ve knocked me over with a feather(weight) as I inhaled my bran loaded cereal flakes this morning and saw the above “item” near the top of his random notes column.
Funny thing is, after leaving Wednesday’s Margarito-Pacquiao presser, I was wondering what the sports media beyond the boxing division and what the general public thinks about the continuing chasm between the Mayweather and Pacquiao camps.
The masses are pounding the table for this super bout to get made and these birdbrains cannot even get together in the same office board room to discuss it. They work only by telephone and, apparently, by carrier pigeon and their “calling card” is the same as that left by the pigeons in the park.
Shaugnessy claims no boxing expertise, he doesn’t know the difference between a tainted handwrap and a tainted burrito, really.
He practically invented “the Curse of the Bambino” (Babe Ruth, who was sold from Boston to the Yankees) but I doubt that Shaugnessy has covered any boxing event since the Sugar Ray Leonard-Marvelous Marvin Hagler era.
But that’s not important.
What is important is that p.r. war between the Mayweather and Pacman camps has long been over. The continuing silence from Al Haymon, from Floyd’s shadow Leonard Ellerbe, and the occasional sputtering of the Golden Boys along with Team Pacquiao’s orchestrated public stance has created a giant wall of suspicion about Mayweather’s motives.
It’s as if Team Pacquio keeps throwing out propaganda and Team Mayweather has quit on its stool or thrown in the white towel of surrender.
Shaughnessy, like millions of others, believes Floyd walks like a duck, talks like a duck and may logically be assumed then to be ducking Manny.
I’m reminded of the old movie about mentally anguished Red Sox player Jimmy Piersall, who once climbed a backstop in a frenzy.
It was entitled “Fear Strikes Out.”
Maybe “Duckweather” can borrow the title because that is the public perception.
And you can take it from me, fans, as not only am I as honest as the midsummer day is long, I am also completely netural–like Switzerland during wartime–on the Mayweather-Pacquiao divide.
