Saturday heavyweight world champion Wladimir Klitschko knocked out a 240-pound Italian named Francesco Pianeta, and few in the United States without an internet connection saw it, and many fewer cared, because there is no interest in Klitschko; because he is dominant his fights are too predictable. Some hours later, in a fight many more Americans knew and cared about, Floyd Mayweather dominated challenger Robert Guerrero in predictable a match as fans have paid extra to see since Mayweather’s last.
In his first event since beating Miguel Cotto a year ago by slightly more lopsided scores than he beat Guerrero, Mayweather allowed Guerrero, and pay-per viewers, six minutes of hope the fight would be entertaining and Guerrero could be competitive, and then, his paycheck cleared, Mayweather snatched all hope away, strolling to a unanimous decision and promising, as he does every year, to fight again soon – early, this time, as September.
The worst blow the Mayweather brand could sustain would be an increase in its namesake’s activity. His admirers ask to see more of him because it is the reasonable request any admirer makes any object of his affection, a request that relies upon a humility that goes: I am not observant enough to capture all your colors and luminosity on first sight and must look and look again and more closely till I have cataloged the entirety of your charms.
But the prefight Mayweather documentaries, saturating and interchangeable, revealed this: The more time you spend round Mayweather, the duller he gets. Have you ever seen so many people nodding-off, catching naps or crashed on couches, while the subject of a documentary – a subject worthy of a documentary, rather – is awake and performing? Showtime featured four or five documentaries on Mayweather, or perhaps they were two, or 47 (it’s impossible for an average mind to keep them separate), that held a revelation and a question: First, everyone falls asleep after a couple hours in Mayweather’s presence, and second, did a 36-year-old really just write his name on the steamed window of a shower door?
A Mayweather event is more spectacle than combat, more fashion art than fine art, and absolutely worth the 70 annual dollars that has become its tariff. But who that has $140 of disposable income – as opposed to money borrowed from mom – would pay it to watch the spectacle twice? It is a question Showtime unadvisedly will answer if given its druthers, one Mayweather is probably too wise to answer. An all-time great handicapper of challengers, Mayweather is too knowledgeable about boxing to find his prizefights entertaining enough to watch twice.
Were he able regularly to end his matches with violence, like he ended Ricky Hatton or even Victor Ortiz, tip the highlight-reel maker, as it were, instead of doffing his cap at B+ opponents postfight, he could work at Manny Pacquiao’s previous rate, or at least try his (right) hand at it. Therein lies the problem: Mayweather’s best punch is the potshot right – a demonstrated susceptibility to which will land you a fight with Mayweather quickest of all – but that hand is brittle a weapon as there is in our beloved sport.
A man does not strike another easily with one punch as Mayweather began to do to Guerrero with righthands in round 3 and then stop unless his hand is fragile or he wishes to carry his opponent. While either is possible when a salesman like Mayweather makes a fight with an opponent pedestrian as Guerrero, probability favors Mayweather’s history of hand problems, though Mayweather detractors are cautioned not to become hopeful about the future: His fight with Carlos Baldomir showed “Money” is still less entertaining in a one-handed fight.
Saturday’s match followed Mayweather’s three-part design; there were the studying rounds followed by the potshotting rounds followed by the uppercutting rounds. Guerrero was a relevance during the first part; Mayweather tied him up and tasted his counters and drew the perimeter in which he might creatively roam for the next half hour. After the second round, Guerrero was a target, interchangeable with Shane Mosley or Oscar De La Hoya.
Mayweather confounded Guerrero by hitting him with righthands from everywhere, hard, accurate, stinging punches Guerrero likely fancied himself walking through in training camp without fancying how impossibly far away Mayweather would be by the time Guerrero’s neurons registered the punch, without fathoming Mayweather’s head and foot would follow directly behind his glove, on a plane so confoundingly low to Guerrero’s left-cross counter they might well have been attached.
Then Guerrero was too confused to hurt Mayweather by any one punch he landed, every punch now thrown from a tentative mien that asked over and again “Is this an opening or a trap?” – then once Guerrero realized it was an opening and tried to repeat the punch, the opening was gone. To hurt Mayweather, as Mosely did, you must put all your confidence behind a punch that exploits an actual opening; it is boxing’s rarest occurrence because you are hoping, not exploiting, in the opening rounds, and by the time you are familiar enough with Mayweather’s rhythm and patterns to see an actual opening, you no longer have confidence enough to make a dent.
Part three of the Mayweather design was to drop a then-desperate Guerrero on right uppercuts the way Andre Berto did. This final phase failed only because Mayweather lacked the commitment to throw his evidently damaged right hand with the force required to position it properly for greeting Guerrero’s downrushing chin.
Mayweather is in danger now of becoming Wladimir Klitschko. He is a fighter too dominant for his own good who may be about to learn it is disproportionately easier to filch $70/year from American consumers than $140. Mayweather’s next fight will open at odds even with those that say it will not do a million buys.
Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com
