By David Mayo, The Grand Rapids Press
LAS VEGAS -- For $3,000 a week, Steve Forbes agreed to help an old friend, Floyd Mayweather, prepare for the big fight, the going rate for a historically elite boxer to hire an ex-champion for a month’s worth of sparring.
The problematic point is that after a few times sparring with anyone, Mayweather figures them out.
So Forbes had a standard solution: He went to Mayweather’s father after every session and sought advice.
Forbes obviously isn’t a Mayweather, nor is he from Grand Rapids.
He has bountiful ties to both.
All three of the retired fighting Mayweathers -- Floyd Sr., Roger and Jeff -- have trained Forbes at different times in the former International Boxing Federation super featherweight champion’s career.
And during a trip home a few years ago to Portland, Ore., Forbes met a Grand Rapids woman named Valerie Smulders in a boxing class. Steve and Valerie Forbes have been married five years, have two young children together and live in Pontiac.
Although his sparring work here is done as training camp tapers towards the immediacy of an impending fight weekend, Forbes’ focus remains helping however he can for Saturday’s Mayweather-Shane Mosley showdown.
No one knows Mayweather’s fighting condition more intimately than his two primary sparring partners, the speedy, shifty Forbes, and the bigger, stronger middleweight Ishe Smith.
Last time they sparred, in 1998, Mayweather was 21 and preparing for his first world championship defense. Forbes had eight professional fights.
Almost 12 years later, Forbes said he sees noticeable differences.
“He’s actually been taking a lot of risks in this training camp, as far as really opening up his punch count and throwing a lot more punches and combinations,” he said. “It is different. Even back then, making his first defense, he was so happy to be champion, and he would throw a lot of punches back then -- but he’s throwing a lot more now. And that’s a big, big plus.”
Forbes, 33, is no workaday sparring partner. He is near the end of a once-prominent career, but at this time two years ago, he wasn’t the sparring partner for the big Cinco de Mayo fight. He was the main-eventer.
Against extreme odds favoring Oscar De La Hoya, Forbes acquitted himself well in a 12-round decision loss.
The Mayweathers’ involvement in that fight was pronounced. De La Hoya was tuning up for an anticipated rematch with Floyd Mayweather that never happened. Floyd Mayweather ordered Roger Mayweather not to work with Forbes for that very reason. Jeff Mayweather trained Forbes instead. And Floyd Mayweather Sr., after refusing to work against his son a year earlier, was back in De La Hoya’s corner.
Forbes got the fight because he had a good resume, including reaching the final of “The Contender” reality show in 2006, and because he was deemed as a minimal risk. The De La Hoya loss was part of Forbes’ current 2-5 skid -- he is 34-8 overall -- but the lessons he learned from the Mayweathers served him well.
“I was given no chance,” Forbes said. “And I thought ‘He’ll see, once we get in there, all that goes out the window.’ Yeah, I was undersized and I was a big underdog but it all helped me, because I knew, learning from those guys all those years, it was going to benefit me.”
When Forbes got involved in the first edition of “The Contender,” his wife reviewed the contracts.
Valerie Forbes was visiting friends in Portland when she met her future husband. The Northview High School graduate has an anthropology degree from the University of Michigan but, as she became more involved in the contractual aspects of that negotiation, decided to try her hand at law.
So as one career draws to a close, another begins: Valerie Forbes will graduate from Cooley Law School in August.
Steve Forbes may not be the centerpiece of this Cinco de Mayo boxing weekend, yet he played a key role, and predicted a victory by the “really good, really sharp” Mayweather.
“He’s always in good condition but he looks like he turned it up a whole, whole lot,” he said. “He’s been going for hours training. I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life."
E-mail David Mayo: dmayo@grpress.com and follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/David_Mayo
Source: mlive.com
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