Why 2014 Was the Worst Year of Floyd Mayweather's Career
Floyd Mayweather stood next to Showtime’s Steve Farhood Dec. 12 with the latest version of his high-stakes welterweight lottery underway on the network the following night, and told boxing fans exactly what they’ve been waiting to hear.
“Absolutely, I would love to fight Manny Pacquiao.”
Pop the corks, ladies and gentlemen, the big fight is finally...wait, there’s more?
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"We tried to make the fight happen years ago. We had problems with random blood and urine testing. Like I said I just want to be on an even playing field. Now he’s in a very, very tight situation—he's lost to [Juan Manuel] Marquez, he’s lost to [Timothy] Bradley. Pay-per-view numbers are down…extremely low, so he’s desperate.
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OK. Pacquiao’s lost a couple.
We’re still good, right?
“I offered you [Pacquiao] $40 million, then you didn’t want to make the fight happen. You lost twice, now you coming back begging for the same money. That’s not gonna happen.”
Drop the champagne, cut the DJ and go home, people. Nothing to see here.
Mayweather’s latest salvo is the perfect summation of what has been the most trying and difficult year of his career. The pound-for-pound king, known for his preeminence in the sport, has struggled both inside and outside of the ring.
You’re left with the sense that we’ve reached some sort of tipping point, the edge of the rabbit hole, if you will, where Mayweather remains boxing’s undisputed top attraction, but the walls have begun to close in on him. The margin of error has shrunk, and he’s feeling the heat.
The reemergence of the Pacquiao saga obviously serves as a flash point.
Kevin Iole of Yahoo Sports dedicated an entire column last week to the deafening silence that’s been policy among upper-level members of The Money Team, including Mayweather, Al Haymon and Leonard Ellerbe, when it comes to the subject of Pacquiao.
It’s based on discipline, a rigid commitment to driving the narrative—be that his “Money” moniker, TBE or the more recent "Pacquiao’s ducking me" remarks on Showtime repeated to Fighthype.com in an exclusive interview. And the narrative is exactly where he wants it to be.
Mayweather isn’t shaped by circumstances, he’s the architect. He’s the one who built his empire from the ground up, and that’s why it’s so shocking to see the near-total collapse of discipline from both the fighter and his team over the past 12-or-so months.
It started with some chipping paint.
Coming into the new year off a one-sided victory over Canelo Alvarez, Mayweather elected to pose the question of his next opponent directly to the fans via his Twitter, asking them to choose between Marcos Maidana and Amir Khan, but not Pacquiao.
When the Mayweather circus rolled into the MGM Grand in May, universal opinion was that Maidana, who got the fight despite losing the poll, had about as much of a shot as the Oakland Raiders currently do of winning the Super Bowl.
The Argentine hung tough, roughing up his foe in the early going before gassing himself and getting surgically picked apart in the second half. The fight was competitive, but most of the “controversy” over scoring was drummed up by the love-to-hate-Mayweather crowd.
But controversy, however contrived, sells in boxing. And a rematch, particularly with Khan unavailable for September, made logical sense.
Mayhem, a poorly conceived tagline in retrospect given the fight playing out as anything but, came and went just two days later without so much as a whimper.
Mayweather easily won the fight, which veteran boxing scribe Tim Smith derided, “There was no drama and nothing really to cheer about. It was a methodical, boring decision.”
Tim’s just being nice.
Both Maidana fights failed to eclipse one million buys on pay-per-view. Obviously that’s a ludicrous standard, given the overall drop in PPV numbers across the board and how much Mayweather still over-performs the opposition, but they were the lowest of his Showtime tenure.
His bout with Canelo was seen in approximately 2.2 million homes, making it the highest grossing fight in boxing history, more than both Maidana bouts combined.
A dropoff was to be expected, given the number of fans the cinnamon-haired heartthrob drew in. But that’s serious stuff, and it hits Floyd where it hurts—his wallet.
Hence the sudden willingness to get serious about Pacquiao, at least within the controlled confines of Mayweather-friendly media.
Outside of the ring, Mayweather didn’t fare much better.
If lackluster in-ring performances and falling PPV numbers were the chipping paint, promotional problems and dissension in the top ranks of The Money Team were like pipes bursting.
Mayweather long enjoyed a cozy relationship with Richard Schaefer, who until this past June was CEO of Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions. Floyd was never an official part of the outfit—he promotes himself and is managed by Haymon—but the partnership gave him a steady stream of opponents and promotional muscle at his back.
Schaefer departed in June after accusations of mishandling the company’s affairs surfaced—specifically that he was steering fighters to Haymon without first getting them under contract with GBP—leading Mayweather to pull the plug on the partnership.
But not so fast.
No Golden Boy meant no Maidana or Khan for September—despite both being managed by Haymon—and that left an already bare cupboard with the boxing equivalent of an old, dusty pack of ramen noodles left over from your college days sitting on the shelf.
Mayweather quickly dispatched Ellerbe, CEO of Mayweather Promotions, to trusted outlet Fighthype.com to clarify the remarks, telling them just a few hours after dropping the company that the move wasn’t necessarily permanent, just for the next fight.
Wrong again, Leonard.
Maidana got the fight, Golden Boy promoted, Mayweather won. And he’s highly likely to work with the company, should a Pacquiao fight not get made again next year.
But De La Hoya isn’t putting all his eggs in Floyd’s basket. Oh no. He’s all about making the biggest and best fights, even if that means competing with boxing’s one-man monopoly of PPV dominance.
Boxing’s cold war had barely even begun to thaw before the Golden Boy took Canelo, the crown jewel of his fighting stable, back across the street on an exclusive, multi-fight deal with HBO.
Before the ink was even dry on the contract, De La Hoya had not only deprived Mayweather of a potentially lucrative rematch with Canelo down the road, he set up his young protege as a direct rival to Floyd’s PPV dominance on Mexican holiday weekends.
Canelo is likely to face middleweight champion Miguel Cotto on Cinco de Mayo weekend next year, possibly freezing Mayweather out in the process.
Compounding matters are Mayweather’s suddenly rocky relations with the closest members of his team, including Ellerbe and his father/trainer Floyd Mayweather Sr.
Mayweather teased changes to The Money Team after the Maidana rematch, focusing his crosshairs on long-time confidante Ellerbe, per Ben Thompson, “I think we're just getting to a point where we're outgrowing each other. I think I just see things my way and I think he sees things in another way.”
He was angry about having to defend both his 147- and 154-pound titles in the same fight, a condition Ellerbe apparently consented to without consulting him.
The dissension ran so deep that Mayweather conceded that fans would likely see a new team in place before his next fight.
If Ellerbe got off easy, Floyd Sr. got the sharp end of the stick for guaranteeing, to Fighthype.com, that a bout between his son and Pacquiao was going to happen.
The elder Mayweather pretty much made the case that the fight was too big to pass off into the sunset without a conclusion, something that seemed to irk his son.
Floyd Jr. set the record straight, issuing a not-so-subtle warning to his father, per Ben Thompson:
"Well my father is totally wrong. Like I said before, we have people constantly being removed from the Mayweather Promotions team, Team Mayweather, and we also have people being removed from The Money Team. I want my dad to be with my team, but if he continues to go out there and speak on things that he has no knowledge about without communicating with me, then I must get a new trainer.
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And that brings us full circle, doesn’t it?
Why Pacquiao and why now?
Mayweather has a perception problem, and he knows it.
He’s facing heat from all directions. His in-ring product suffered in 2014. He’s faced substantial challenges outside the ring and within his inner circle, and he badly needs to hit the reset button heading into the new year.
Pacquiao and his side may not win the fight, should they ever meet in the ring, but they’re clearly winning the public relations battle. He and Bob Arum are the ones who have made public statement after public statement calling for the nonsense to end and a deal to be struck.
Now, in fairness to Floyd, placing all of the blame at his feet isn’t fair, either. Both men, both teams have had chances and blown them.
Yes, Pacquiao was reluctant to agree to random blood and urine testing five years ago, a condition he’s since conceded. But Mayweather’s team remains recalcitrant on the issue of money, offering terms that he pretty much knows will never fly with Pacquiao, and dredging up history, some of it ancient, as justification.
We all get it. It’s been a bad year.
But this won’t do anything to soothe those wounds.
These type of statements make for good TV—hyped as if they were something groundbreaking—but it’s fair to wonder out loud if the masses will just tune it out.
Mayweather’s fans will eat it up, and why not?
Nobody else wants to hear it. They just want the fight.
Anything else is just noise.
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