LAS VEGAS — Exactly one month before the fight, Floyd Mayweather stood virtually nose to nose with yet another distraction last week, this one involving the man from whom he took his name. It started as good-natured ribbing — all of it with HBO’s “24/7” camera whirring and a boom microphone hovering — but quickly devolved into the two Floyd Mayweathers bellowing vile curses at each other, eyes popping, neck veins bulging, and the father stalking out while the roiling emotions within the son led him to continue the verbal fight in his dressing room, almost as if practicing lines for the next time around.
Their bickering is legend, of course.
But no one in Team Mayweather ever has seen a confrontation between them quite as nasty as this one, and when HBO’s all-access series begins this week, with re-broadcasts on CNN, viewers are sure to get another eyeful of teeming dysfunction.
Welcome to Mayweather Fight Camp No. 42, which everyone here expects to culminate the same way as the first 41 — victoriously — and what the principal deemed just another day at the office.
By the time Mayweather steps into the ring with Victor Ortiz for their Sept. 17 welterweight title fight here, he will have been idle for 16 1/2 months. He didn’t intend it that way but the right fight didn’t materialize — in other words, no progress on the Manny Pacquiao front — so it took longer than expected.
There were other issues, too.
Regardless what you think about the polarizing, 34-year-old Mayweather, his ability to fight through distractions is beyond compare, because they have been so public and personally threatening, and because he remains pristine inside the ring regardless how dire the upheaval outside.
He was asked if, given the opportunity, he would exchange his eight-figure boxing windfalls for the right to be a common citizen in a workaday job, unencumbered by legal entanglements and irrational jockeying for his attention.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s something that I ask myself a lot, though.”
