Floyd Mayweather To Fight Again, Who Cares?
Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr. is reportedly deep in serious training for a projected comeback when boxing returns possibly under a new normal of face mask wearing crowd assembly restrictions and physical distancing.
According to inside sources, Floyd is preparing for a fight, actually return match versus either Manny Pacquiao or UFC star Conor McGregor against whom he figured in winning multi-million dollar bouts in 2015 and 2017, respectively.
Words are circulating that Al Haymon, a powerful partner of Floyd in his own boxing promotion outfit will be standing in the way of a possible Pacquiao fight versus Terence Crawford as being explored by Top Rank promoter Bob Arum. This could be the reason why Haymon suddenly showed interest in the Filipino boxing icon after almost forgetting about him after the Keith Thurman fight in July 2019.
Haymon in fact has been reported as saying that a Mayweather-Pacquiao rematch would be “a very interesting bout” to make when boxing finally returns.
Mayweather and Pacquiao established the highest grossing fight in boxing history, greatly aided by a record 4.6 million pay per view buys of their 2015 Battle of the Century confrontation that generated almost half a billion dollars in revenue. It topped the previous record of 2.4 million ppv buys set by Mayweather and Oscar de la Hoya back in 2007.
Floyd on the other hand has been mentioning the name of McGregor in some of his social media posts and it could be recalled that he has said he is always ready to give him a rematch if the money is right.
In August 2017, in his first official comeback as boxer after retiring for the second time late in 2015, Floyd took on MMA superstar McGregor in a sanctioned boxing match which generated 4.3 million ppv buys and nearly $400 million in fight revenue.
Earlier, Floyd also engaged Canelo Alvarez and Miguel Cotto in high generating pay per view bouts that grossed millions of dollars in revenues.
Per Wikipedia, Mayweather has generated approximately 24 million PPV buys and $1.67 billion in revenue throughout his career, surpassing the likes of former top PPV attractions including Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya and Manny Pacquiao.
But that was boxing back in the old normal times when paying boxing fans in the U S especially had money to burn and hence were given to fall for hyped up fights that usually failed to deliver as expected or advertised. And undoubtedly, Floyd had figured in quite of number of them.
This is now where boxing authorities, players and stakeholders are still figuring out how to best and safely bring back the fight sport while navigating through the various health risks and adverse socioeconomic impacts of the ongoing covid 19 pandemic.
Given that much of the income generated by past Floyd fights have been through the pay per view which meant that fans preferred to watch the bouts in the relative safety and comfort of their homes, his coming back to boxing under a new normal regime may not be much of a problem.
But the question is, how relevant has Floyd Mayweather remained to professional boxing under this current uncertain time?
Back two, three years ago, many boxing fans and even experts believed that only the return of Floyd could wake the sport from the stupor it underwent since his retirement.
In fact, it could be argued that the premier boxers post Floyd as Pacquiao and Canelo remained as they are not so much out of their own merits and recent accomplishments but due to their identification with Mayweather and the hope of one day being one of his prime opponents in his un-retirement and return to boxing.
But that may no longer be true today.
After being bereft of seeing big live boxing actions since February, fight fans and aficionados worldwide, especially in the USA would surely be stoked for real ring competitions, I mean REAL ring competition when boxing returns sooner or later.
They may not have an appetite to see Floyd back in the ring with his usual defensive, elusive and pot-shotting ways.
Either against an established legend as Manny Pacquiao (I think most would rather see Manny against Crawford, Errol Spence or Mikey Garcia).
Or a still non-boxer as Conor McGregor.
