Can you imagine the future TV movies and short stories written about a possible jailhouse meeting between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather, this generation’s biggest and most divisive boxing stars?
The two would sit together and discuss life, philosophy, and religion before the talk eventually turns to boxing. Both would make impassioned arguments, making the case for why they would come away with the new millennium’s biggest prizefighting victory.
The debate would end when visiting hours were over, both fighters walking away into their own respective destinies with the Mayweather-Pacquiao question left to float in the air, forever unresolved.
The fictional meeting above could actually have taken place, at least according to Floyd Mayweather Sr.
During an interview for the “On the Ropes” boxing podcast, Floyd Sr. said that the Filipino pop culture icon and 8-division world champ approached him and inquired about visiting his son at the Clark Country Detention Center, where Floyd Jr. was serving a sentence for misdemeanor domestic battery.
“Pacquiao told me he wanted to see little Floyd, when little Floyd was in jail,” Mayweather Sr. said. “I guess he was training over there and he told me that he wanted to do see little Floyd in jail. He said he did not know if he could get in or not, and I told him I did not know if I could get in either.”
There’s no reason to think that Pacquiao pursued a possible visit any further and neither side has said anything about this topic.
The meeting, if it had happened, would’ve been a historic slice of pop culture for fight fans and a real source of debate as to what could’ve been discussed.
More than anything, the speculation and attention given to a possible jailhouse meeting between the two superstars shows that Mayweather-Pacquiao talk will forever be part of boxing’s collective consciousness, whether or not the two ever actually face each other in combat.
Pacquiao Promoter, Bob Arum’s recent statement that the mega-bout could be made as soon as April of 2013 should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, but Arum knows what the fans want, even if he’s slow to actually risk his money to deliver the goods. And there’s definitely no denying that the interest generated by boxing’s two biggest names is a driving force in the sport.
Maybe, at some point, they will meet in the ring. In the meantime, fans are left with heated debate and fictional accounts of meetings that could’ve been.
