Everywhere I turned today, on Around The Horn and SportsCenter and Twitter and boxing websites, all the talk was of Floyd Mayweather’s adviser Leonard Ellerbe saying that Jr. would return May 5 at the MGM Grand and that “We’re looking to make the biggest fight possible and everyone knows what that fight is, the little fella,” i.e., Manny Pacquiao. My reaction to that news was: This doesn’t arouse me. I’ve been teased too long. I’m dead down there for this fight; it’s not that I don’t want it, it’s just that we’ve been talking about it since 2008, and Mayweather keeps saying he wants the fight… only to not take it, and instead invoke the possibility of it to promote whatever he’s doing next — sometimes when Pacquiao is on the verge of fighting someone else, which is the case next weekend.
But everyone’s talking about what Ellerbe said. That means we now have to talk about it, if only to tell you not to get your hopes up, friends in the world of casual boxing fandom. And it’s not as if there isn’t news here. There is information to be gleaned from all this, some of it meta. And what’s more, it might be a turn of the screw, rather than something that makes the fight more likely than before.
First, the news here if anything is that Mayweather isn’t going to have another of his long phony retirements. Even if people dislike Mayweather and don’t believe he wants the Pacquiao fight (more on that later), he still attracts a lot of fans and is one of its two big stars who fight regularly in the United States. Maybe some fans are getting sick of him not fighting Pacquiao, and there are indicators that they might be. But even under those circumstances, he often generates lots of pay-per-view buys, and anytime someone who does that kind of business announces he’ll fight, it’s news. I say it’s the news “if anything” because to trust Mayweather’s word on what he’s going to do is fool’s gold. He changes his mind all the time. Or maybe he knows what he wants to do, but says lots of different things just to keep people talking about his latest twist.
Mission accomplished this time, on saying stuff that gets people talking about him — it’s a tactic that’s worked time and time again. He’s long been using the possibility of a Pacquiao fight to sell whatever he’s doing, specifically. On the same day Pacquiao was to fight Ricky Hatton in 2009, Mayweather announced his next fight was going to be with Juan Manuel Marquez. Mayweather has also used the possibility of a Pacquiao fight to try to upstage whatever Pacquiao’s up to, which, in this case, in a bit of a parallel, will be Pacquiao fighting Marquez Nov. 12 — because Mayweather doesn’t like it when people talk about Pacquiao more than him. Then Mayweather will go back and forth on whether he intends to fight him next multiple times. Before his most recent fight with Victor Ortiz, Mayweather declared, “Pacquiao, you’re next,” then his trainer said after the Ortiz fight that Pacquiao wouldn’t be next, and now they’re back to saying Pacquiao will be next. It’s an ever-swinging pendulum of misdirection.
