A few months back I penned an article focusing on the upside that new media has presented the boxing industry. I encouraged athletes and fans alike to embrace new media (Twitter, Facebook, Ustream, YouTube, etc.) and realize the potential these outlets possess to help keep the fistic flame alight while traditional media continues to sweep boxing under the rug. While I wrote almost exclusively about new media’s upside, I only scratched the surface when describing the potential dangers that it presents athletes — citing an ill-advised tweet by Andre Berto calling women “motherf***ers” after Edwin Valero killed his wife, then himself.

However, last week, with one ten minute racist and homophobic rant, Floyd Mayweather exemplified the dangers that new media presents to athletes.

“We’re going to cook that little yellow chump…Once I stomp the midget, I’ll make that motherf***er make me a sushi roll and cook me some rice,” Mayweather said about the Filipino Congressman, Pacquiao.

He continued, “Step your game up, f****t…That mother f***er Pacquiao, he can’t speak no English…Mother f***er signed with two companies. Look it up. And then this mother f***er with Nike only got 70 Gs. How stupid can a mother f***er be? Reebok gave me a million dollars for three weeks. I wore Reebok s**t for a week for a million dollars. This mother f***er’s name is Emmanuel. He got a fake name, taking power pellets.”

The following day Mayweather issued an apology in which he claimed he was just “having fun.”

The National Federation of Filipino Americans Association rejected Mayweather’s apology and issued a powerful statement condemning PBF’s “uneducated” remarks.

“This disgusting diatribe against Pacquiao is a racial slur against all Filipinos and Filipino Americans and an embarrassment not only to the boxing community, but to all Americans,” said Greg Macabenta, the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (NaFFAA) national chairman in a statement.

In addition to the backlash Mayweather has received from the Filipino community, there are also various petitions circulating online aimed at alerting adidas and Reebok that the companies stand to lose customers if they do not reprimand their client.

When thinking of the dangers new media presents public figures, I could only think of one analogy. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

Similar to the way that guns can serve as collector’s items as opposed to weapons, new media can be used as a promotional tool, or a platform to broadcast hateful messages. Unfortunately for Mayweather, he logged onto Twitter to direct fans to his Ustream page where they witnessed a cringe-worthy tirade against Pacquiao and all Filipinos.

While the immediate reaction was and still is one of disgust, it is not necessarily one of shock. Mayweather’s narcissistic attitude has been well-documented, whether it be through interviews, news stories, or even HBO’s 24/7. He lives a lavish lifestyle and flaunts his money and material items whenever he gets the chance. Since new media removes traditional communication barriers between public figures and the general populous, it is the responsibility of the public figure to create his or her own filter,and understand the raw access that new media provides.. New media websites such as Twitter allow individuals to broadcast messages without anyone telling them what to do or say. All who participate in social media websites are responsible for their own words and actions — anything that is written or said can potentially reach millions of eyes and ears.

The less-than-humble Mayweather occasionally allows for a sneak peek into his lavish lifestyle by posting pictures on his Twitter page. By doing so, he also exposes his disconnect with the world around him — especially to boxing fans, who have historically been a blue-collar group.

In the past two weeks alone, Mayweather has posted pictures of himself standing next to his Cadillac golf cart, a picture of himself holding a luxurious watch in front a briefcase full of banded $100 bills (which until then I only thought existed in movies), and a picture of himself posing in front of a large portrait of…HIMSELF.

Considering that most users of new media are teenagers and young adults, Mayweather’s narcissism along with that of celebrities and athletes from other sports, can have a profound impact on the impressionable youth in America and abroad. For example, here are some of the comments on the Mayweather’s twitter pictures:

“Everything you own is the greatest, just like you.”

“You always have stacks of money in your hands.”

“I’m trying to be just like you when I grow up.”

According to Leonard C. Groopman, M.D. and Arnold M. Cooper, M.D.’s work on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, two potential triggers for the disorder are “excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic feedback” and “being praised for perceived exceptional looks or talents by adults.”

Further, board certified physician and addiction medicine specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky (from Loveline and VH1’s Celebrity Rehab fame) co-authored a book with Dr. S. Mark Young, titled The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism Is Endangering Our Families And How To Save Them.

In the book, Dr. Pinsky writes, “I can’t help but conclude that there are many more individuals suffering from unhealthy levels of narcissism than there are patients diagnosed with narcissism as a psychological disorder…Another reason Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) can be difficult to diagnose is that narcissism, even at NPD levels, doesn’t stop people from attaining positions of power, wealth, or prestige. Narcissists often develop attractive or persuasive social skills to help them maintain the persona they have constructed to get what they want from the world.”

Pinsky continues with a revealing fact, “Any challenge to a narcissist’s unrealistic self-image is likely to provoke rage, disdain, denial or other protective behaviors, as the individual struggles to protect the pseudo-self at all costs.”

Perhaps the backlash and disappointment aimed at Mayweather after he refused to accept Pacquiao’s latest challenge humbled Mayweather a bit and made him resort to taking cheap-shots and name-calling.

Whatever the reason for Mayweather’s rant — whether he truly believes the things he said or if he was just “having fun” — it all can be traced back to a lack of filter – a lack of filter that is a common trait found in most narcissists.

When you feel that you don’t have to answer to anyone, you are more willing to speak what is on your mind. Most of the time, new media can act as a positive vehicle for the athletes that use it — giving them the opportunity to share their story and connect with fans on a human level — without managers and publicists intervening. For the most part, boxers on Twitter have understood and embraced this concept. I hope to see more boxers join new media sites and allow fans to interact with them on levels that were nonexistent even five years ago.

I further hope that Mayweather’s rant on Ustream won’t discourage other athletes from joining new media websites, as I truly believe it can be integral part of boxing’s future. In addition, I think it is important to take what Mayweather says with a grain of salt. You can make of it what you want, but I’ll stick to my gun analogy.

Similar to guns, the potential for new media to be used as both a force of good and evil exists. However, it is important to remember that new media doesn’t harm people, narcissistic people exposed by new media harm people.

You can take Dr. Drew Pinsky’s Narcissistic Personality Test here. The average score for non-celebrities is 15. www.jimpham.com/2009/04/dr-drews-narcissism-test.html

You can follow Kyle Kinder at Twitter.com/KyleKinder

It’s easy to find a professional athlete who will talk to you about his strengths. It’s only slightly harder to find one who will tell you about his peers’ weaknesses. A professional athlete who will speak to you in good faith about his own weaknesses, though, is a rare thing.

Those were my thoughts Thursday afternoon as I walked up the Alamodome ramp to Parking Lot A. They were thoughts that came courtesy of an interview with Mexican Marco Antonio Barrera. Still under the spell of Barrera’s courteousness, friendliness and apparent openness, I was about an hour from noticing something I’d missed with Barrera.

He hadn’t told me half as much as I’d imagined.

Barrera was at Alamodome to help Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. promote Top Rank’s “Latin Fury 15,” which happens June 26 in San Antonio. Until last week, “La Furia de México” had a different Mexican in the co-main event. Jorge Arce was scheduled to fight Puerto Rican Eric Morel but sustained a fight-canceling gash in sparring. That meant Barrera’s match with Brazilian lightweight Adailton De Jesus acquired a new importance and mandated his presence at a rescheduled press conference, Thursday.

Barrera, dressed in a striped charcoal suit with a raspberry-sherbet tie, arrived late and strode in the arena with his wife. He stood on stage beside Chavez and posed for pictures, looking darker and duller than usual. He spoke in the hastily acquired English he’s been using since Golden Boy Promotions decided he had crossover potential five years ago, and he told us his goal was to win a fourth world title. Then he switched to Spanish and became Barrera once more.

His upcoming match with De Jesus will add nothing to his legacy, a legacy that includes a historic trilogy with fellow Mexican Erik Morales, a legacy that will win him a first-ballot vote to the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He understands his role in this promotion; he lends his name, a famous one in Mexico, to the name of Chavez’s dad, a more-famous one in Mexico.

Certain people radiate with intellectual horsepower. You find them occasionally on college campuses, rarely in corporations, and almost never in professional athletics. It is not the athlete’s place to supply such radiance, and to look for it is often a sign of envy: What kind of society values this guy a thousand times more than me?

Barrera is an exception. As you interview him in Spanish, a language he’s mastered, you feel him examining you right back. There’s no moral intent, per se; he doesn’t seem to care if you’re honest or will treat him honestly. Rather, he examines you as a rival, as though he wants you to challenge him with a question. He’s confident you can’t, of course, confident to a point that is often taken for arrogance. He shows no defensiveness.

Now that he’s done protecting the Golden Boy Promotions brand as a “partner,” he is accessible. Now that he’s temporarily under Top Rank’s banner, he is even more accessible.

Top Rank lets you put hands on its people. It understands the importance of access better than its rivals. It allows public arguments within, or even against, the media, because it understands what a younger generation of promoters has yet to learn: So long as people talk about you and your event, whatever they say, they promote your event.

Thursday, I didn’t want the interference of a translator, and I sure as hell didn’t want Barrera’s English-speaking imposter. I wanted the most eloquent prizefighter I’ve met, alone, and in Spanish. I approached the table where Barrera and his wife waited for print media to finish interviewing Chavez, shook Barrera’s hand and told him that whatever he opined of my questions, he should understand they were good-faith inquiries from someone who admired him.

“Of course,” he said, and he smiled.

I asked him why, demons, he returned. What did he hope to gain by fighting on?

“Something to prove, there is not,” he said. That sentence was about as different in Spanish as it looks in English. He didn’t say there was nothing to prove, in the double-negative way of pedestrian, if still proper, Spanish. He used an alternative emphasis.

“The open television in Mexico permits more people to see me now,” Barrera said. “People who did not, before, have the opportunity to see Barrera. There are Mexicans who know solely the Barrera from that last time.”

In 2006, just before its presidential election, Mexico passed the “Ley Federal de Radio y Televisión.” This law effectively deregulated Mexican television, in the name of bringing digital cable to the people, and eventually returned boxing to free channels. Like most deregulation ploys, though, it disproportionately enriched a very small number of people. A Mexican Supreme Court ruling in 2007 delayed its implementation. And there would be further delay in converting average Mexican cable viewers’ hardware. Barrera’s contention, then, is that very few of his countrymen were able to see him for most of his career.

Since 2007, Barrera has fought thrice. A 2008 fight happened in China. An early 2009 fight was the Mexican equivalent of an Off-Off-Broadway show, in Zapopan, Jalisco. And then there was that U.K. fight 14 months ago.

“That was a bad experience,” Barrera said, of his match with English sensation Amir Khan. It saw Barrera’s upper forehead sliced opened and bleeding freely in the first round. U.K. officials, though, allowed the fight to continue until the fifth round, at which time the result went from a no-decision to a technical-decision in Khan’s favor.

“It is an experience that I am going to erase,” Barrera said. “If a fourth championship comes along the way, good. But I return to erase that fight.”

At this point in our interview, someone handed Barrera a cell-phone with a picture of the cut. It was a scripted move, and as a script is beneath Barrera, I moved away from it:

As someone who admires you for your intellect as well as your boxing, I am nervous, if not sad, about your return, I said. Tell me how I am mistaken.

“To the contrary, friend, you are not mistaken,” Barrera said. “Boxing is filled with bad experiences. Many bad experiences.”

And when you bade farewell to “this beautiful sport” at Mandalay Bay in October of 2007?

“That was all about my promoter,” Barrera said, and he laughed. “I was not happy with my promoter, and I did that to escape them.”

The day after Barrera easily survived 12 rounds with Manny Pacquiao, never imperiling himself or Pacquiao, en route to a unanimous-decision loss, I wrote of his relationship with Golden Boy Promotions: “Barrera had become an overqualified employee in De la Hoya’s company, a guy who was too smart for the corporation, quietly resenting each new workday and the boss who caused it.”

“Exactly,” Barrera said, when I paraphrased this for him.

A better reporter would have plumbed the depths of Barrera’s resentment for his former promoter, a resentment he didn’t seem at all interested in hiding. Instead, I asked Barrera about a curious relationship he’d developed with a man whose life ended terribly last month.

On that night of your goodbye to boxing, I reminded him, you brought Venezuelan Edwin Valero on stage with you. You complimented him at length and called him a friend more than a sparring partner.

“We invited him to the city,” Barrera remembered of that training camp. “It was a friendship. A very good friendship. That night, I said he would beat Pacquiao. That was true. Unfortunately, they were never able to have that fight.”

And when he heard that Valero had murdered his wife, on April 19, before apparently committing suicide in a Venezuelan jail cell?

“I regretted it, I felt very badly,” Barrera said. “We waited to hear confirmation of the news. I regret it even now. I flee that date. But none of it surprised me. (Valero) had many psychological problems.”

I thanked Barrera and his wife, both, for being the people they have been, and for handling their celebrity with such grace.

On my way out, I stopped and spoke to Carlos Hernandez – who now resides in San Antonio – because on my way in, Jesse James Leija had told me Hernandez and Edwin Valero had trained together and been friends in Los Angeles. Few prizefighters are charismatic or likable as Hernandez. When I asked him if he were surprised by the news of Valero’s end last month, Hernandez shook his head.

“I wasn’t surprised,” Hernandez said. “But we didn’t talk about family much in the gym. We talked about other things.”

Such as?

“Venezuelan politics,” Hernandez said, and we both smiled at the oddity of such a conversation in the gym. “He was really into it.”

“Too into it,” Hernandez’s wife added.

Bart Barry can be reached at [email protected]

According to various published reports, currant WBC Lightweight champion hung himself in a jail cell just one day after confessing to stabbing his wife to death in Venezuela.

According to the Associated Press, the former lightweight champion used the sweat pants he was wearing to hang himself from a bar in the cell, said his lawyer, Milda Mora.

Valero’s 24-year-old wife, Jennifer Carolina Viera, was found dead in a hotel room halfway across the country Sunday, and police said the fighter emerged from their room telling hotel security he had killed her.

Valero was found hanging in his cell early Monday by another inmate, who alerted authorities in the police lockup in north-central Carabobo state, Federal Police Chief Wilmer Flores told reporters. He said Valero still showed signs of life when they took him down, but they were unable to save him and he died about 1:30 a.m. ET.

Last month, he was charged with harassing his wife and threatening medical personnel who treated her at a hospital in the western city of Merida. Police arrested Valero following an argument with a doctor and nurse at the hospital, where his wife was being treated for injuries including a punctured lung and broken ribs.

The Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that Valero was detained March 25 on suspicion of assaulting his wife, but his wife told a police officer her injuries were due to a fall. When the boxer arrived moments later, he forbade Viera from speaking to the police officer and spoke threateningly to the officer, prosecutors said in a statement.

A prosecutor had asked a court to keep Valero in jail, the Attorney General’s Office said. But a judge instead allowed him to remain free under certain conditions, including that he appear in court every 90 days, said Mora, his lawyer.

Mora told The Associated Press that after the incident, Valero was held for nine days in a psychiatric hospital in Merida, where he underwent police-supervised rehabilitation. She said people close to the fighter posted bail on April 7 and he was allowed to go free.

Promoter Bob Arum, the founder of Top Rank who had been promoting Valero, said the fighter had never displayed such behavior and was “very polite, well spoken, sort of funny.”

“It’s obvious now, in retrospect, that he should have been institutionalized during this period, but it’s silly to play the blame game,” Arum said. “Now, in retrospect, he clearly should have been getting help.”

Multiple published reports have been reporting that WBC Lightweight champion Edwin Valero was arrested today for the murder of his wife in Venezuela.

The Associated Press reported that Venezuelan Federal Police Chief Wilmer Flores said Valero was arrested after police found the body of his 20-year-old wife in a hotel in Valencia. Valero left the hotel room around dawn on Sunday and allegedly told security that he had killed Jennifer Viera, Flores said.

Flores told state television that police found three stab wounds on Viera’s body. He said Valero was transferred to a local police precinct, “where we are headed to take samples needed for the investigation of the case” and to question the boxer.

Prosecutors will charge Valero in the killing “in the coming hours,” the Attorney General’s Office said in a statement.

Valero’s lawyer, Milda Mora, did not immediately return telephone calls seeking comment.

The 28-year-old fighter is a household name in Venezuela and he has a huge image of President Hugo Chavez tattooed on his chest, along with the country’s yellow, blue and red flag.

His all-action style and 27-0 record — all by knockouts — earned him a reputation as a tough, explosive crowd-pleaser. Venezuelans call him “Inca,” alluding to an Indian warrior, while elsewhere he has been called “Dinamita,” or dynamite.

The former WBA super featherweight and WBC lightweight champion has been in trouble with the law before.

Last month, Valero was brought up on charges of harassing his wife and threatening medical personnel who treated her at a hospital in the western city of Merida. Police arrested Valero following an argument with a doctor and nurse at the hospital, where his wife was being treated for a series of injuries, including a punctured lung and broken ribs.

Valero entered a Venezuelan rehab center March 28 for treatment of drug and alcohol addiction, Mora said at the time. The boxer’s attorney said Viera was injured when she fell down a flight of stairs at the couple’s home while checking a water tank on the roof.

The Attorney General’s Office said Valero was detained March 25 on suspicion of assaulting his wife, but his wife told a police officer her injuries were due to a fall. When the boxer arrived moments later, he forbade Viera from speaking to the police officer, and spoke threateningly to the officer, prosecutors said in a statement.

The Attorney General’s Office said a prosecutor had asked a court to order Valero jailed but that the judge instead placed him under a restraining order that barred him from going near his wife, a condition he repeatedly violated.

The Venezuela daily El Universal also reported that Valero had been arrested recently after a neighbor called authorities and claimed the boxer struck his mother and a sister.

“I’ve never hit my little sister and much less my mother,” Valero responded at the time, in comments published by Venezuelan television station RCTV’s Web site.

Valero shot to fame when he won his first 18 fights by first-round knockout, setting a record that has since been eclipsed by Tyrone Brunson. Valero last fought in February, stopping Antonio DeMarco in an entertaining fight in Monterrey, Mexico.

Valero was involved in a motorcycle accident in 2001 that resulted in a cerebral hemorrhage, and because most jurisdictions refused to license a fighter who sustained a brain injury, he was unable to fight in the United States. The boxer wound up fighting mainly in Japan and Latin America, where he won his first title in 2006.

While Valero had little trouble in the ring, outside of it was another matter.

Along with accusations of domestic violence in Venezuela, Valero was charged with drunken driving in Texas, which is the primary reason he was denied a U.S. visa.