The most egregious example of a top-flight boxer ducking a worthy challenger happened more than six decades ago, when the one and only Sugar Ray Robinson somehow managed to avoid fighting a contender named Charley Burley.
Robinson wasn’t alone in wanting no part of Burley. Marcel Cerdan and Jake LaMotta, middleweights like Robinson, as well as Billy Conn, the Pittsburgh light heavyweight who came within six minutes of dethroning Joe Louis, also found ways to cross to the other side of the street when they saw Burley coming. Mayweather vs. Pacquiao
? WHERE: MGM Grand Garden Arena, Las Vegas ? WHEN: May 2, 9 p.m. ET ? TV: Showtime/HBO PPV
? Fight Credential: Complete fight coverage
And it was no surprise. No less an authority than Eddie Futch, who trained four of the five men who beat Muhammad Ali, called Burley “the greatest fighter I have ever seen.”
And yet, the legacy of Robinson remains as solid as ever, as do the legacies of LaMotta, Cerdan and Conn.
That is why it is almost laughable when today’s so-called boxing experts try to sell the proposition that Floyd Mayweather’s place in boxing history would be irreparably tarnished if he had not finally agreed to fight Manny Pacquiao on Saturday night.
The fact is, Mayweather’s legacy is already dented by the mere fact that it has taken this long for the fight to finally happen.
“His legacy is already written,” said Michael Silver, a boxing historian and the author of “The Arc of Boxing: The Rise and Fall of the Sweet Science.”
“The fact that he didn’t take this fight five years ago is part of his legacy,” Silver said. “It is a big part of his legacy.”
In fact, the history of ducking fights is as old as fighting itself. John L. Sullivan, the bare-knuckle champion of the late 1800s, ducked Peter Jackson on the grounds that he was opposed to fighting a black man.
Jack Johnson, the first truly modern heavyweight champion, wouldn’t get near Sam Langford after winning the title. Johnson tried to preserve his own legacy as, he thought, the only black man to wear the crown. (Langford was black, too, and Johnson feared he would lose to him.)
Jack Dempsey never fought Harry Wills — promoter Tex Rickard said he feared race riots — and Riddick Bowe dumped his title belt in the garbage rather than fight Lennox Lewis, who had stopped him in the 1988 Olympics.
Each and every one of them, however, had a legacy that survived those omissions, and so will Mayweather. The fact it took Floyd Mayweather more than five years to face Manny Pacquiao has already done enough to dent his legacy. Idris Erba/Mayweather Promotion
But what exactly is that legacy? A legacy of an immensely talented athlete — I have never seen a fighter train more intensely or look as coordinated in the ring as Mayweather in my 35 years of covering the sport — cherry-picking opponents, fighting for bogus belts offered by shady sanctioning organizations, and winning “titles” in weight classes sometimes separated by as few as five pounds.
Sugar Ray Robinson, I will remind you, beat Sammy Angott, the lightweight champion, in a non-title bout on 1941, barely a year after he turned pro. He went on to win the welterweight and middleweight titles and was on his way to winning the light heavyweight title from Joey Maxim when he collapsed due to heat exhaustion. He still held a world title in 1960 — when there were only eight world champions on all of Planet Earth — at 40 years old, after 155 fights.
This is lost on the modern boxing fan, who is constantly being fed one novice or another as a contender — or worse, a champion — by the cable TV networks who profit off selling phony title fights. (Last week, we were fed the spectacle of Bryant Jennings, with 19 pro fights and 17 amateur bouts, being served up as a worthy challenger to heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko, who is as big as, although not as good as, Primo Carnera).
Currently, there are 68 titles — four sanctioning bodies multiplied by an incredible 17 weight classes — available to fighters who could walk around calling themselves “Champ,” and that doesn’t even count the “interim” champions, the “intercontinental champions,” and the champions of Joe Blow’s Corner Bar.
That in itself waters down Mayweather’s claim as a “10-time world champion,” because while the quality of boxing has never been lower, the talent pool never sparser, it has also never been easier for just about anyone to call himself a world champion.
And that is why it is foolish to stake a claim to a diminished legacy for Mayweather on the basis of making Pacquiao wait until both of them were in their dotage as fighters.
As talented as Mayweather is — and I believe he will defeat Pacquiao by a fairly easy decision Saturday night — he belongs in the pantheon of truly great boxers about as much as Madonna belongs in the pantheon of truly great singers. Floyd Mayweather’s true legacy — if he has one at all — is that of the greatest money-maker the sport of boxing has ever known. Harry How/Getty Images
In fact, if Mayweather has any legacy at all, it is as the greatest money-maker in the history of the sport, which is as much a product of self-promotion and his era as anything else. Sugar Ray Robinson never had the benefit of pay-per-view TV, or merchandising deals, or social media, or “Dancing With the Stars.”
In that respect, Mayweather may have even surpassed Muhammad Ali, although not in the way that he thinks. He is not a fraction of the fighter Ali was — where is Mayweather’s “Thrilla in Manila” or “Rumble in the Jungle”? — but he has taken the concept laid out by Ali, that of playing the bad guy, and parlayed it into worldwide fame and fortune.
Mayweather’s career-long heel turn has far outstripped even the hatred directed at Ali for his conversion to Islam and his refusal to go to Vietnam. And unlike Ali, who became a beloved figure in the second half of his career, Mayweather seems destined to play his chosen role right to the final curtain.
That is all well and good, and a big part of the reason why he is likely to pull down $120 million for 48 minutes, or less, of work on Saturday.
Certainly, not many go to Floyd Mayweather fights to see knockouts, the way they did with Mike Tyson. He has knocked out two fighters, Ricky Hatton and Victor Ortiz, in the past decade. (Let that sink in for a moment.)
Nor do they go to see Floyd Mayweather because he is exciting. Like one of his predecessors, the equally-gifted Roy Jones Jr., Mayweather has made an art form of eliminating as much of the danger from boxing as possible while still being in an enclosed 20-foot square with another man trying to maim him. His “fights” are more like recitals, one-man shows where he generally displays his virtuosity while his opponent looks on helplessly.
People go to see Floyd Mayweather for one reason, the same reason they went to see Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali in the 1960s — to see him get beaten. Forty-seven times, Mayweather has sent his detractors home disappointed, but they will keep coming back in hopes of being there the one time he does not.
The truth is, there are not many memorable fights in the record of Floyd Mayweather, and had his career ended without a Manny Pacquiao fight in his line-by-line, his legacy would hardly have been damaged, because as it stands, it’s not all that much to begin with. Although he has been dominant, the career of Floyd Mayweather has lacked many memorable fights. Al Bello/Getty Images
Name your favorite Mayweather fight. Oscar De La Hoya? A snoozer against a much-diminished fighter. Arturo Gatti? An utterly predictable KO over a gutsy guy who was little more than a club fighter. Same goes for Hatton. Canelo Alvarez, Miguel Cotto, Marcos Maidana, Victor Ortiz? All limited in one way or another, and not a memorable moment in any of those fights. At age 38, Shane Mosley was way over the other side of the hill when Mayweather waltzed with him for 12 rounds.
Pacquiao is hardly the only fighter left for Mayweather. There are hungry young fighters between 140 and 160 pounds, like Gennady Golovkin, Lucas Mathysse, Keith Thurman, Terence Crawford and Kell Brook, who are probably much more threatening to Mayweather than is Pacquiao, a fighter who was KO’d so badly by Juan Manuel Marquez 2? years ago his own trainer feared for his well-being.
But Saturday’s fight is the one everyone wants to see, and the one too many seem to think will define Mayweather’s career, for better or worse.
But as Michael Silver said, “This is like if Ali and Frazier had finally fought, for the first time, in 1975.”
Like Mayweather-Pacquiao, that would have been a few years too late.
Ali, of course, did not need the Frazier fights to cement his legacy.
Neither does Mayweather need Pacquiao to cement his legacy, one that has already been written, although probably not the way he would have liked it to be.
