Inside Mayweather vs. Pacquiao: Top Takeaways, Highlights and Episode 1 Recap

As part of the build for any major boxing fight, let alone one on the scale of Floyd Mayweather vs. Manny Pacquiao, the documentary series highlighting what both fighters go through in preparation is must-see television. 

Showtime is airing the Inside Mayweather vs. Pacquiao documentary series in four installments, starting on Saturday night, but the network gave fans an advance preview of the first episode by dropping it on YouTube early. 

You can watch the entire 24-minute premier in the video embedded below, via ShoSports.

As much fun as these series can be, the Mayweather-Pacquiao version is going to feel different. If you don't know, one of the initial hangups to making this fight happen is the fact that Mayweather and Pacquiao are signed to different sports networks. 

Mayweather has a contract with Showtime, and Pacquiao works with HBO. Since this series is airing on Showtime, it's going to feature nearly all Mayweather highlights, interviews and training with snippets of Pacquiao thrown in. 

Fear not, Pacquiao fans, as HBO is airing its own special on Saturday night titled Mayweather vs. Pacquiao At Last after the Lucas Matthysse-Ruslan Provodnikov match. 

One of the interesting parts of the premiere, as Ryan Songalia of Ring Magazine noted, is the shots of Mayweather as a 16-year-old kid:

The center piece of the Inside Mayweather vs. Pacquiao premiere episode is former boxing judge Bill Waeckerle talking about Mayweather at the 1996 Olympics, in which he won a bronze medal in the featherweight division following a controversial decision loss against Serafim Todorov. 

According to an August 1996 report from Luke Cyphers of The New York Daily News, the United States team filed a formal protest against the decision, and Waeckerle resigned from being an official:

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The outcome outraged American boxing officials. U.S. team leader Gerald Smith filed a formal protest that stated: "The USA boxer landed punches that were not counted; the Bulgarian boxer was given points without landing a punch."

The top U.S. judge in international boxing, Bill Waeckerle, last night resigned from AIBA, the sport's governing body, citing what he called "a blatant example of incompetent officiating" in Mayweather's bout. "I cannot and will not be a part of a system that is not fair to the athletes," Waeckerle said. "We need to clean house at the highest levels of amateur boxing."

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Waeckerle said in the documentary, "how unfortunate, that should have never happened" and Mayweather "should have a gold medal hanging in his corner."

Mayweather says in the piece that he didn't win a bronze medal but received it because "you can't win a bronze medal if you lost."

The episode proceeds to flash forward to where Mayweather is at today, with his own brand (TMT) and in a gymnasium filled with reporters hoping to get a look at the undefeated champion as he prepares to fight Pacquiao. 

After that, the episode moves into a Rocky IV-like montage of Mayweather chopping a tree trunk before moving into a closing montage featuring some of the lavish items Money has collected in his career, various championship belts and a slow-motion shot of him walking into the gym to train with a shirt that has 47-0 emblazoned on it. 

Speaking of Mayweather's training, Greg Bishop of Sports Illustrated broke down Pretty Boy's futuristic device known as a Cryosauna:

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It felt like a stand-up CT-scan. Only colder. The temperature continued to drop. I could feel it in my legs, a minor, inconvenient chill at first. Thirty seconds passed. The cold moved into my midsection, up toward my head. One minute, gone. The temp gauge read minus-120°. I shivered. One minute thirty seconds. My body shook. It wasn’t an unbearable cold, but it was an uncomfortable one. Two minutes. Thoughts drifted somewhere between “hang on, it’s almost over” to “maybe I should ask if I can get out.”

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Bishop also cites Doctor David Levi as noting that Kobe Bryant, a world-class athlete in his own right, is a fan of the device that basically uses freezing as a way to send "blood from your arms and legs into your core. That blood picks up enzymes and oxygen and nutrients, and as you jump out, it circulates back through your body."

Athletes are always looking for an edge, whether it's with their bodies or minds, so Mayweather's certainly not on his own trying to do whatever he can to keep in top shape. It becomes harder to do the older you get, so the 38-year-old needs to find any option available to remain a world-class fighter. 

In the end, the premiere is very much an establishing episode, showing Mayweather's roots from a young boxer who may have been given an unfair shake in the Olympics to becoming one of the biggest sports stars in the world. 

Now that fans have been given a clear look at where Mayweather came from in his career, the rest of the series can focus on building the world around this fight. There are six years of things to discuss with that and plenty of television time to focus on it. 

The only downside is this won't be a balanced look at the story about this fight because of Pacquiao's standing with HBO Sports. Other than that, it's a strong start for the series with two more episodes before the fight and a wrapup episode after May 2.