The verbal blitzkrieg has been under way for weeks now. On Wednesday, more than a month before their May 5 showdown in Las Vegas, they were at it again. Floyd Mayweather Jr. called Oscar De La Hoya greedy and ungrateful.
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“He’s a brat,” said Mayweather, who is 37-0.
De La Hoya, who’s defending his WBC junior middleweight title, thinks Mayweather is arrogant and needs a humbling experience.
“He really is a little brat,” said De La Hoya, who is 38-4.
Pre-fight hype in boxing often is just that. It’s typically mostly talk, nothing more than a predictable method of selling tickets or boosting pay-per-view sales.
But it’s not every day that opponents use the same insult to describe each other.
Brat?
Perhaps it’s a sign Mayweather and De La Hoya are running out of verbal jabs and are ready to take their fight to the ring.
Their bout, scheduled for 12 rounds at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino, figures to be one of the biggest ever, certainly for non-heavyweights.
Tickets, priced up to $2,000 for a ringside seat, went on sale Jan. 27 and sold out in three hours.
During Wednesday’s conference call, Richard Schaefer, an executive for De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions, said 10,000 of 22,000 closed-circuit seats in Las Vegas had been sold and national cable providers were going to begin taking orders for the pay-per-view ($54.95) telecast three weeks early.
Some are predicting PPV records could fall.
De La Hoya already holds the mark for a non-heavyweight bout ? his fight with Felix Trinidad in 1999 drew 1.4 million buys.
The overall record was set in 2002 when 1.9 million people paid to watch Mike Tyson fight Lennox Lewis.
On Wednesday, Mayweather and De La Hoya seemed determined to break both records ? no matter how phony or real the rhetoric.
Mayweather, who recently replaced his father, Floyd Sr., with his uncle, Roger, as trainer, said his dad nonetheless has maintained a constant presence in his camp.
The fighter said Floyd Sr., who used to train De La Hoya, recently told him De La Hoya “is a one-handed fighter” who gets tired and “will lay down.”
“Everyone knows that (expletive) ain’t real,” Floyd Jr. said of De La Hoya. “He’s a fake-ass fighter.”
Mayweather said De La Hoya and Golden Boy Promotions were so hard to work with in negotiating the purse structure for the fight that he vows never to do business with them again.
“They ain’t no different than Don King or Bob Arum,” said Mayweather, who reportedly will earn $12 million for the fight to De La Hoya’s $20 million.
As he did against Fernando Vargas and Ricardo Mayorga, De La Hoya’s response typically is to fire back.
He said he never got to know Floyd Jr. when they were stablemates at Arum’s promotional firm, Top Rank.
The only things he knew about him came from Floyd Sr. when the father was De La Hoya’s trainer.
Floyd Sr. said his son “was a bad guy who hangs around with the wrong people” and who “needs to be taught a lesson,” De La Hoya recalled.
“I remember thinking, ‘How can (Floyd Jr.) be that bad?'” De La Hoya said. “But once the press tour started, I could see what his father meant.”
