By Ron Borges, Boston Herald
LAS VEGAS - Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Shane Mosley both fight to win, but they don’t fight for the same reasons.
The 38-year-old Mosley often talks of his boxing legacy. In the days leading up to tonight’s fight at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, he openly spoke of how beating Mayweather would not only propel him back to the top of his sport but would cement his still debatable place among the best fighters of his era.
Mayweather, on the other hand, talks incessantly of but one thing. Although he will be the first to tell you of his greatness, the back of his shirt and his refusal to pay the sanction fee to make tonight a fight for the WBA welterweight title Mosley holds tell you his fistic focus.
“MONEY MAYWEATHER” it says across his back. “PHILTHY RICH” it says on a diamond encrusted medallion he sometimes wears on nights when he wants to look like a hood ornament. The point is clear. Mayweather is more interested in economics than history.
“I go into the gyms and talk to the young fighters and I tell them the truth,” said Mayweather (40-0, 25 KOs). “When you’re an amateur the trophy is the money. When you turn professional you get a different kind of prize.
“I tell them you’re just an object. Once they’re done with you it’s over. I love fighting on the network (HBO), but they don’t love me. They love what I can do.”
What Mayweather believes he’ll do tonight, with the assistance of Mosley, is challenge the all-time pay-per-view record of 2.46 million buys, a record set when he defeated Mosley’s business partner, Oscar De La Hoya, in 2007. At $54.95 per household, that seems unlikely, but Richard Schaefer, CEO of Golden Boy Promotions, said Wednesday he believes the fight could do as many as 4 million buys, which is the kind of hyperbole normally expected of Mayweather.
Whatever it does it will be Mosley’s biggest payday. Yet while that may be Mayweather’s measuring stick, for Mosley the hurt business is not yet about business.
“This is our legacy on who’s the best fighter,” said Mosley (46-5, 39 KOs). “It’s a challenge I’m ready to take. I’m ready to go into the history books as the guy who beat Floyd Mayweather, the guy who beats everybody out there. The last guy standing.”
Mayweather is more concerned with being the guy with the highest standing pile of cash. He regularly travels The Strip with a gym bag stuffed with cash and during HBO’s 24/7 reality series on the fight, not an episode went by that he wasn’t piling up $100 bills.
Yet no one, least of all Mosley, should be fooled. At his core, Mayweather is a fighter. Tonight, he understands, he will be challenged by the quickest, hardest-punching welterweight he’s ever faced. It is a challenge for which he will be ready.
“Shane has talent,” Mayweather said. “I have a gift. No one has a chance to beat me. There’s a blue print to beat him because he’s lost five times already. Mosley has problems with boxers. He’s been dropped and wobbled on numerous occasions and now he’s facing someone sharp as a razor with two hands.
“They all talk about Shane’s strength. If we were in a weight-lifting match strength might have something to do with it, but we’re in a boxing match and I’m the best boxer in the sport. I can make anybody look like a nobody.”
That’s why he’s still counting his money, unafraid.
“All these fighters have a plan to beat Floyd Mayweather but it’s not that easy,” he said.
That’s true and the reason is he’s not just about counting his money after all. When the bell rings, he’s about fighting for it.
rborges@bostonherald.com
Source: bostonherald.com
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