(We break from our regularly scheduled coverage of Floyd Mayweather vs. Miguel Cotto due to Mayweather saying some “animated… wild, over the top, bad language, wild” things.)
The good news is, Floyd Mayweather’s villainous “Money May” persona is back. That’s also the bad news.
Mayweather has been boring during his time of playing nice leading up to the Miguel Cotto fight this Saturday, but he’s also been somewhat respectful and tolerable. According to him, HBO’s 24/7 program has requested the return of Floyd Meaywather, loudmouthed asshole, so I guess he’s obliging. It must be a nightmare, to create a character from which you cannot escape.
He’s now back to accusing everyone of everything, using naughty words and tying himself into impossible logical knots. Much of it came in one session as recorded by Kevin Iole here, but Rick Reeno has had some of the dispatches we’ll rely upon here and here. We will not respond to every quote from each article, so for the full diatribes, click on those links.
“Do you do the things that you do to make you happy, or do what you do to make everybody else happy, people you don’t know?”
Floyd went deep on this one! I will lend him my college “Philosophy of Ethics” textbook if he needs it. Depending on one’s ethical theory of choice, the answer could be “everyone only ever does what makes themselves happy, even if they say their motive is to make others happy” or “the most moral act is the act that makes the greatest number of people happy,” or there’s some stuff in there about obligations, and so forth. As we’ll see, Floyd’s own answer to this gets a bit muddled.
“When my career is over, anything can happen and my health is more important than anything. I’m not saying nobody is, or nobody is not doing it. But my health is more important than anything. Guess what? When my career is over, if I’m hurt, or something is going on, because something has happened in a fight, I can’t come to you and say, ‘Yo, I need you to pay my rent for this month. I need you to pay my bills for this month. I need you to pay my car note. I need you to put my kids through school.’”
With the amount of money Floyd has made, he could put his kids through school for their entire lives, and if his health went sour, he could sell off some of his cars to still pay rent and re-put his kids through school for a second lifetime. But, yeah, I kinda agree. One’s health is pretty important. It’s a good thing he’s not saying “nobody is, or nobody is not” using performance-enhancing drugs, too. That’s not the kind of thing anyone should say, and Floyd surely wouldn’t say anything to that effect later in his rant.
“So, my health is more important. So, you’re an American, right? I’m an American. I was in the Olympics. I represented the red, white and blue. You know what the American writers should say? ‘Well, why is this guy from another country coming over here and making money [and] taking it back to his country?’ Once again, I’m feeding American citizens every day. All I ask is, give a little blood, give a little urine. That’s a crime?”
No, American writers should not ask that question. First off, Manny Pacquiao isn’t simply taking every dime made off him back to his country. There are an awful lot of Americans making money they wouldn’t be otherwise due to the Pacquiao cash machine – promoters, advertisers, casinos, beer vendors at the venues in which he fights, the people who sold him his house in California, etc. Pacquiao isn’t robbing Americans or anything and wheelbarrowing it back to the Philippines. He does take a lot of money back, though. It’s good to know that if Mayweather ever fights in the U.K., like he’s talked about, that he’ll simply leave every dollar he makes there in the U.K. Or if he ever goes on any vacations out of the country and gambles, he’ll leave all his winnings there. It’s kind of weird to insist that money made in one country MUST be left in that country, but at least we now know about Mayweather’s future plans for any cash he gets outside the United States.
“These are the American people who don’t stand behind me. They stand behind these foreigners.”
He’s talking about the media in that sentence. But it’s so obvious. Americans should stand behind every American always, and never, ever place a foreigner above a real American.
“Now you’re listening to a professional liar. Come on! Come on, man! Come on, man. Arum? Arum keeps people on his payroll. If I got to put you on my payroll, let me know. Arum is already known for doing … He’s a lawyer, so we already know he’s a professional liar.”
He’s kind of got a point here, kind of doesn’t. Does Top Rank’s Bob Arum keep journalists on his payroll? I can’t say I’ve never wondered, but nobody’s got any proof. And besides, it’s not like boxing figures need to pay people to have slavishly devoted media outlets, right, Floyd (Hype)? As for the professional liar bit: That’s fairly accurate. Most people I’ve asked about the proper role of a promoter is to lie you into believing that some card or the other is better than it is; I can’t endorse that myself, but when Arum lies, according to the consensus view of his profession, he’s just doing his job. And heaven forbid if Mayweather should ever lie, especially on the question of how negotiations are going between Mayweather and Pacquiao. As to why Mayweather said this at all, it’s because he denies that Pacquiao has agreed to Mayweather’s preferred testing regiment. I don’t know why Pacquiao, Arum and trainer Freddie Roach would say they’ll agree to it if they won’t, but you choose who you want to believe between those two camps, as it’s the word of one against the other.
“Bob Arum has been filling you all up with this bullsh*t for years and robbing fighters. He’s trying to sue [Mayweather adviser] Leonard [Ellerbe] for [featherweight boxer Yuriorkis] Gamboa, knowing that he’s been treating his fighter wrong. Knowing he’s been treating his fighter wrong. [Gamboa] came over here and all this fighter wanted to do is making a living. They’ve been treating this fighter wrong from the beginning. I’m wrong because I want to treat a fighter right? You know why? Because Don King and Bob Arum can’t see out the eyes of a fighter, because they are not a fighter. They look at it as a promoter because all they care about is the f***ing money. I care about a fighter’s well-being because I’m a f****ing fighter. I know how it is. I know how it is to have a broken rib for the rest of your life. I know how it is to piss blood.”
I don’t have the direct information to know whether Arum is or is not robbing fighters (figuratively, rather than literally, because while Arum’s had friction with fighters leaving his stable, I can’t think of any who have said he’s outright “robbing” them, complete with bandit mask and bags with “$” printed on the side of them). Floyd has made more money as a free agent than he did with Arum, anyway, but then, Arum’s promotional work laid the foundation for Mayweather’s career. We’ll see how much Mayweather, as a promoter, treats his fighters right because he’s a fighter himself. Oscar De La Hoya is a former fighter and he’s faced complaints of his own that as a promoter, he’s not treated them right. This is one of Floyd’s favorite tricks, by the way, and nobody can take it away from him. If you haven’t done the thing, according to Floyd, you can’t speak about the thing… which means, I guess, that he ought not to be able to complain about promoters who are non-fighters promoting fights. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be Arum or King.
“This is how this world is, writers are saying, ‘Floyd is scared.’ No, Floyd cares about his family. Floyd is smart. At the end of the day, Floyd is smart. My health is important. My health is more important than money. They can take all the money and my health is more important. If they say, ‘Floyd, you can live a healthy life like you is right now, or you got to walk with a limp, and walk all bent over, but you can have a lot of money for the rest of your life,’ I’d say, ‘Take it all back.’”
I’ve always thought this was an interesting tact from Mayweather. He talks all the time about how easily he’d beat Pacquiao, how terrible Pacquiao is, etc., then in the next breath talks about how someone on PEDs might cripple him. But I guess that’s not a contradiction if you’re “not saying nobody is, or nobody is not doing it.”
“You see what happened when [Mosley] was doing it. What happened to fighters when he was juicing? He was running through fighters. Then all of a sudden, guess what? I spoke on it and when I spoke on it, everybody was like, ‘Ah, Floyd’s just scared.’ Then, when you took him off of him and put him in front of me, what did he do? Got killed.”
Hmmmm, it sounds pretty strongly there, Floyd, like you were saying somebody at least WAS doing it, and, hey, in this case, Mosley once upon a time admitted to using some of the stuff. But let’s give you the benefit of the doubt. You’re saying Mosley isn’t currently doing it? I guess that would explain why he looked so crappy against Sergio Mora and Pacquiao after he fought you. But wait: Mosley didn’t have to take any advanced drug tests for those fights. Why wouldn’t he just go back on the juice and return to “running through fighters?” Is it maybe because in the fight against you he was on his last legs and has only gotten older since? Also, how did he wobble you badly twice in the 2nd round without any PEDs? He sure jeopardized your health without any assistance that time, anyhow.
“Where was Manny Pacquiao at 96? He was a pro before me. Where was he in 97? Where was he in 98? Where was he all these years? All I’m doing is just asking a question. Come on, it’s basic common sense now. And guess what, it took me years to get to here. It took me years to get here. Go back and look at the pictures. His head is small and then all of a sudden his head just grew? Come on man, stop this. Ray Charles can see this sh*t. Go back and look at the pictures and tell me this man’s head didn’t get bigger. You’re going to tell me this sh*t is all natural. Come on man, stop. I’m going up in weight but I’m not just walking through no damn fighters. This motherf***er was 106 [when he started] and he’s just walking through [Miguel] Cotto. And Cotto can’t knock down [Shane] Mosley, but he can? Come on man.”
This is pretty clearly not Floyd saying Pacquiao is “doing it.” He’s not talking about head size because people associate that with PED usage. Floyd just has a real interest in the size of people’s heads. He has a whole hallway of his mansion that’s like a museum exhibit of some of history’s biggest heads, and head growth over time, and none of it has anything to do with steroids. And when Floyd says, “You’re going to tell me this shit is all natural,” note again how Floyd himself never says explicitly in that sentence, “What Pacquiao is doing isn’t natural.” And even then, that doesn’t mean Floyd has said that “nobody is, or nobody is not, doing it.” Floyd could, for instance, believe that Pacquiao is practicing voodoo to get unnatural benefits in the ring. I’m sure the lawyers for Top Rank and Pacquiao will also assume these remarks to be totally innocent, because they are like Ray Charles. As for what Pacquiao was doing in 1996, he was really just on the start of his pro career as a teenager, around the same age you were in the midst of your amateur career. In 1998, he was winning a WBC title belt, the only organization whose belts you seem to respect.
“Jail don’t scare me. I don’t worry about that. As long as my family is OK, because I done it for my family and my loved ones. I don’t feed American citizens because I want to get praised by the media. I don’t call nobody. I do it because it’s the right thing to do. If I got it, give it to them.”
It sure seemed earlier like he was calling attention to how much he feeds American citizens. He was saying it directly to the media. Sounded like he wanted to be praised by that media, too. And is Floyd saying here that he went to jail for his family? That was nice of him. I know a lot of kids who are always, “Please, daddy, assault my momma in front of me and go to jail for me.”
