Boxing, the ultimate exercise in chaos management, might have been invented for Floyd Mayweather Jr and his eccentric family.
Meet the Mayweathers. They are as familiar with a courtroom as they are with a boxing ring, from Floyd’s estranged for-the-umpteenth-time father, Floyd Sr, a one-time drug dealer, to his uncle and trainer, Roger, who is preparing him for his 42nd fight here on Saturday night, against Victor Ortiz.
Floyd Jr has domestic disturbance and slander cases pending; Floyd Sr is embroiled in the latter, arising from unsubstantiated claims that Manny Pacquiao has used performance-enhancing drugs; as is Roger who also earlier this year struck a deal with prosecutors to avoid jail for choking a female boxer he once trained.
Yet none of this tumult, remarkably, has disrupted Floyd Jr’s preparation for his fight at the MGM Grand against Ortiz, the 24-year-old southpaw who holds the WBC welterweight title. Nor did it stop Roger insisting again that Pacquiao will not fight his nephew, whatever the public demand, until he lifts the cloud of doubt over him concerning drugs.
Trying to understand Roger, himself a fine two-weight world champion in the 80s, is the intellectual equivalent of wrestling with an octopus, so tangled are his thoughts. He does not much care for diplomatic words or what people write about him. He is a renegade with an acute boxing brain and a machine-gun mouth.
Reminded that Floyd Jr had this week repeated that he is better appreciated in the UK than in his own country, Roger replied bluntly: “Fuck the UK. Where that, England?” He paused and added: “I know they love him in the UK.”
There followed a rambling monologue about “how boxing go and how people are”, which boiled down to the view that people say things about others based on “shit they don’t even know”.
Via another rant against Pacquiao, probably best ignored on legal grounds, he returned to the important question of his fighter’s inactivity since he turned 30 four years ago.
“My nephew wasn’t even fightin’ [for nearly two years after stopping Ricky Hatton in 2007] and he came back and beat two of the best elite fighters in the world [Juan Manuel Marquez and Shane Mosley], so what that tell ya?
