Floyd Mayweather Jr. is the most prominent name in boxing. He has amassed forty-seven wins without being defeated, winning world championships in five weight divisions all while hardly dropping more than a few rounds per fight. News surrounding him and his extravagant yet turbulent lifestyle are hard to avoid if you keep your finger on the pulse of modern pugilism. He is everywhere, and the more you see of him as he nears the tail-end of his career, the more you will hear of him approaching that sacred number, 49.
This is the number of wins reached by former undefeated heavyweight champion and archetype ‘great white hope’ Rocky Marciano. Marciano is still spoken about in hushed tones nearly half a century after his untimely demise in an airplane crash at the age of 45. The main reason for this is that he never lost, but he came close many times. He was slow, had poor balance and appeared uncoordinated even when in the ascendancy.
Yet, he had no quit in him, a granite jaw to match his courage, and a self-belief like no other that he could end a fight with one shot thanks to his shot-gun of a right hand. All of these qualities, good and bad, are on display in his first win over ‘Jersey’Joe Walcott in 1952. He was dropped in the first and then schooled for thirteen rounds before launching a right hand; that could have obliterated a mountain, right on the side of Walcott’s jaw. If they hadn’t moved him, Walcott would still be lying there with one arm draped over the middle rope, staring into the abyss.
That event in particular made certain of Marciano’s place in boxing folklore, the drama enough to solidify that position. People like a man who can deal with dolor and battle through towards victory. The struggle itself is the appeal, and the wars he fought with Art Henri, Willis Applegate, and Roland La Starza were symptomatic of his irrepressible hunger to win combined with his lack of conventional athleticism. Even an aged, blown-up light-heavyweight in Archie Moore dropped Marciano in the second round of their fight before being beaten from pillar to post. That fight turned out to be the latter’s final outing.
Rocky clawed his way to 49-0.
Mayweather is the polar opposite of ‘’The Rock’ from Brockton. Of all the fighters he has allowed to enter the ring against him, only a few can say they ever had him anywhere near a state of distress. Those couple of sharp right hands in round two from Shane Mosley in 2010 were the only time I’ve ever witnessed Mayweather badly shaken. His entire upper body was sloping towards the canvas when he reached forward and wrapped up Mosley’s arms in a desperate attempt to diffuse the sudden attack. It worked, and as soon as the fog cleared, almost immediately, he boxed Mosley’s head off for the remainder of the fight.
The list of champions and former champions he has beat is a murder’s row: Diego Corrales, Jose Luis Castillo, Arturo Gatti, Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Juan Manuel Marquez, Shane Mosley, Miguel Cotto and Saul Alvarez are just the names that stand out, and he dominated the lot.
This is half the problem with Mayweather. He is so superior to his contemporaries that it is almost unfair. He is a gifted specimen who has maximized his physical potential through obsessive training and implemented a style that compliments the tools at his disposal. Nowadays he prefers single shots that are lightening quick and unbelievably accurate, often leading with his right hand and jabs to the body. Everything at his own pace.
As a younger man, his speed and reflexes carried the day. He would catch shots on gloves and arms, rolling at the waist and firing combinations straight back. At lightweight and below he was something of a knockout artist which is something people forget as he went up through the weights, and the condition of his tender hands deteriorated, forcing him to adopt a more conservative offensive game. He has adapted his style and still proven to be a cut above. But we never don’t see him suffer.
I truly believe the main thing undermining Mayweather’s own claims that he is ‘TBE’ (The Best Ever, for those of you who still bother with entire phrases) is that we’ve never seen him punished. Why is Arturo Gatti still revered despite losing almost every big fight he participated in? Why is Julio Cesar Chavez seen as a god amongst men? What carried Muhammad Ali long after he was able to dance for twelve rounds? They could all take the kind of beating that would make a mere mortal fold and fire back when they needed.
This is an essential ingredient to what makes a fighter great and we’ve never seen it from Floyd Mayweather. Even in his marquee performance against De La Hoya, a razor-thin decision in his favor, wasn’t a grueling bout. The aforementioned right hands from Mosley and a bloody nose at the hands of Cotto are the only other signs of his fallibility. There may even be a few more instances I’ve failed to mention but the fact that one can recall isolated incidents like this speaks to their rarity.
Detractors of Mayweather will say that despite his impressive resume he picks and chooses the right opponents at the right time, and in some respects they have a point. Corrales was struggling hard to make the super-featherweight limit of 130 pounds when they fought in 2001. The same could be said for Saul Alvarez at light middleweight in 2013. Gatti was shot, Hatton a blown up light-welterweight, and Marquez also too small. He fought Cotto too late and ducked Paul Williams and Antonio Margarito back when they were laying waste to everybody. These accusations are especially easy to make when you consider the unprecedented control Mayweather has garnered over his own career. His fans will say “he is just too good, stop hating.”
It’s difficult to be objective about a man who arouses such fierce debate. There is some validity in the assertion he has been clever when electing his opponents, but he has also outclassed them all to such a degree that it nullifies any argument. Furthermore, you can dissect anyone’s resume if you approach it from an angle that is cynical enough. You could say Marciano was the best of a terrible crop of heavyweights in an era sandwiched between Joe Louis’s realm of the 1930’s and 40’s, and the ‘Golden Age of Heavyweights’ beginning in the 1960’s with Sonny Liston before being taken over by Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton etc, etc. If “The Rock” came along ten years later none of us would know his name.
Another of the blessed few to retire undefeated was Welshman Joe Calzaghe. His case accentuates my point. He is one of the greatest ever forged on the British Isles, ruling for a decade as WBO super-middleweight champion before unifying the division in his mid-thirties, then moving up to light-heavyweight and beating Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr. to finish off his career in style.
Not bad really. You could, however, diminish his achievements by pointing out that he only fought outside the UK on four occasions in his forty-seven victories. He waited too long to fight Hopkins and Jones, steering well clear of them in the nineties when they ruled in the United States, instead waiting for almost a decade until they were both far below their peaks. He never fought James Toney either. Calzaghe’s one saving trait though, is that he was rarely in a boring fight. He too transformed his style due to brittle hands, going from power puncher to throwing incalculable amounts of shots every round from all different angles. Please watch his fight against the admittedly overrated Jeff Lacy to see this in full-effect if you haven’t already.
When all is said and done Mayweather will undoubtedly be regarded as one of the best ever but his attempts to stake that claim solely on his undefeated record will prove futile. He can say whatever he likes, but the old adage of
“it ain’t what you do it’s the way that you do it.”
Rings very true here. Many of the best fighters in the history of the sport have all suffered multiple losses: Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Henry Armstrong, Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, Roberto Duran, Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, I don’t have enough memory on my computer to list them all. And nobody holds it against them because they all had that most admirable quality that ensures greatness; they tested themselves against the best. Losing in that circumstance is more glorious than winning with the deck stacked in your favor any day of the week.
Is he the best of the era? Almost certainly. But the points hereto made combined with the lack of a signature opponent will ultimately dent his legacy. Even if a fight with his arch-rival Manny Pacquiao can be made before either man leaves the sport, people will still say it happened too late if they are looking to tear him down. However, time as it often does, will blur the sharpness of these rebukes the further removed we are from his career, but I don’t believe he will ever be considered the greatest to ever lace on a pair of gloves.
