Saturday night at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada, WBA/WBC Unified Welterweight Champion Floyd Mayweather (48-0, 26 KOs), from Las Vegas by way of Grand Rapids, Michigan, defends his titles against interim WBA Welterweight Champion Andre Berto (30-3, 23 KOs), from Winter Haven, Florida.
Everyone likes Andre Berto. He’s a great guy. He’s a tough competitor. He is also a thrilling performer. But he seems a curious choice to be Mayweather’s opponent for this particular bout, since Floyd says this will be his final fight. If he wins tonight, and the odds are in his favor, he will have tied Rocky Marciano’s longstanding 49-0 record.
But many believe that Floyd will fight again.
Wanting to get an insider’s take on the possibility of Mayweather continuing to fight after the bout with Berto, I spoke with HBO’s Jim Lampley. He isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, which may be why God created coffee.
“I’ve said for years that I don’t think there’s any way in the world that he would stop at 49,” Lampley told me. “It doesn’t fit with the established arc of the businessman who maximizes every marketing opportunity and drives every bargain as hard as possible to get the most dollars he can possibly get out of his brilliant talents and his ability to win every fight. The step-by-step process by which it’s been built leads you to have to believe that there’s going to be a 50th fight, because the business dynamics are so obvious. He becomes a free agent. He renegotiates the contract with CBS, or he once again goes elsewhere. Whatever it’s going to be it’s at higher dollars than what’s happened before because the carrot is fight number 50 where he gets to break the Marciano record and put himself in an even better position to substantiate all those claims he likes to make about being the greatest of all time and things of that nature.”
Mayweather is the finest fighter of his generation, hands down. Defeating Pacquiao as emphatically as he did ended that debate once and for all.
“It’s never made any sense to me that he would stop after fight number 49,” continued Lampley. “However, I was just as adamant in saying that he would not fight six times within three years under the contract with CBS the way he said he would and fulfill every obligation under that contract on time the way he guaranteed that he would. I said no, that won’t happen—and it did. So maybe he’s about to confound me again by doing the inexplicable. I will say that in the fighter meetings where I sat and talked with him in a room with a lot of other people in Las Vegas before the Pacquiao fight, he volunteered those statements which have now appeared elsewhere. ‘I used to love boxing. I don’t love boxing anymore,’ and ‘I don’t like what it does to people.’ Who knows? Maybe that’s genuine. He has spent a long time in the ring doing what he does. People grow. People change over a period of time. But if you were to put a threatening instrument to my head and say, ‘Do you believe that he’s going to fight a 50th fight?’ I’d have to say the logic of the universe tells me, yes, he’s got to fight a 50th fight, or he isn’t Floyd Mayweather anymore.”
This article was penned by the author who is not related to the WBA and the statements, expressions or opinions referenced herein are that of the author alone and not the WBA.
