By David Mayo, The Grand Rapids Press
LAS VEGAS -- Eleven years ago, in a training camp in the California desert where Floyd Mayweather prepared for his third championship fight, his father said he easily could walk away from training a budding superstar if his son’s work ethic ever deteriorated.
“As long as it stays like this,” he said proudly, as his son rat-a-tat-tatted the speed bag, “we can do this forever.”
With the arrival of another fight week, featuring Mayweather in a dangerous showdown Saturday against Shane Mosley, Floyd Mayweather Sr. -- who indeed did walk away from his job a year after that 1999 remark, to be replaced by his brother Roger -- is playing a bigger role than at any point since.
How prominent that role ultimately becomes won’t be evident until the next training camp, after a totally different fight, pitting the State of Nevada vs. Roger Mayweather.
Pending that resolution, the differences between the late 1990s and the early 2010s are stark enough.
Remote training camps long ago were abandoned in favor of a Las Vegas base, as was any thought of borrowing space in someone else’s gym.
Security personnel, once nonexistent in the Mayweather camp, have multiplied to cover all corners of Mayweather Boxing, inside and out. They congenially stop anyone they don’t recognize at the entrance. Even someone who has covered the Mayweather camp before there was such a thing has his credentials challenged.
Inside, the reason for the ramped-up security becomes clearer.
People mill around at all edges of the gym, more than for any previous Mayweather camp, all of them to participate in the periphery of boxing greatness. No one gains admission without advance approval, and no one granted such approval can take photographs without yet another level of security clearance.
Several camp members come early to perform preparatory routines. Hand-wrap specialist Rafael Garcia, among the first to arrive, meticulously tears thin tape strips. One man brings in the equipment bag and lays out workout clothing. Another ices drinks.
Roger Mayweather typically is among the last to arrive. Even the fighter himself pulls his silver Cadillac Escalade -- a modest choice, by his standards -- into his reserved space at the gym entrance before his uncle appears.
The fighter, during the hand-wrapping ritual, sticks a piece of licorice in his mouth and hands another to his son, Koraun. Throughout the workout, the rare emotion Mayweather shows will be a beaming smile whenever the oldest of his four children appears.
HBO cameras and microphones follow every move, and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency has been here five or six times -- they’ve lost count here -- for blood and urine testing, neither of which happened at the earliest Mayweather camps.
But on fight week, the focus falls solely on boxing, regardless all the attendant hubbub.
They all know the unspoken fight that looms.
Roger Mayweather, who turned 49 Saturday, faces trial in five weeks on an assault charge involving a female boxer he once trained. He vehemently denies wrongdoing.
A conviction could put him in prison for a decade. Given his six-month incarceration in 2006-07 on a similar charge, the legal situation is ominous.
At his place of business, he seems unconcerned, although that surely is not the case.
Floyd Mayweather trains as hard as ever, through the hypnotic handpad work with his, the blurring speed-bag sessions, the graceful rope-skipping drills. During a half-hour’s uninterrupted work on the heavy bag, his father watches intently, rarely speaking, though when he utters the words “Feint, feint, walk, touch,” his son obligingly double-feints, takes a sidestep and fires a body shot.
This is the work that Floyd Mayweather Sr., 11 years ago, said would keep him in his job as long as his son wanted him.
There has been no discussion of what happens if things go wrong for Roger Mayweather at trial, although the general assumption is that Mayweather Sr. would resume the role he walked away from during a dispute with his son in 2000.
Mayweather Sr. skirts the issue, merely pointing at his son and cryptically saying he will do whatever is asked, that he’s set for life -- primarily through his six years training Oscar De La Hoya -- and that fulfilling any duty his son requires wouldn’t be about money.
This fight week, one thing is certain.
Work ethic might be the only thing that hasn’t changed.
E-mail David Mayo: dmayo@grpress.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/David_Mayo
Source: mlive.com
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