Mayweather gets attention, but at what cost? -- ESPN

By Dan Rafael, ESPN.com

Obviously, Floyd Mayweather Jr.'s unprovoked racist diatribe against Manny Pacquiao, in which he also used anti-gay language and repeated his unproven assertion that Pacquiao uses performance enhancing drugs, was disgusting.

But do you think that it was a coincidence that Mayweather made the Internet video just as Pacquiao was in the midst of the promotional tour for his fight with Antonio Margarito? Please.

Pacquiao should have been promoting a fight against Mayweather, not a dog match with a cheater. But Mayweather won't fight Pacquiao. The hateful remarks are inexcusable under any circumstance, but might be remotely fathomable had Mayweather been promoting a fight with Pacquiao. But he's not even doing that.

If he had been getting ready to fight Pacquiao, Mayweather could at least have said after the deserved uproar that his comments were just a way for him to promote the bout, even though that is a stupid way to get attention. Of course, despite Mayweather's boasts about being so smart, he's not the sharpest tool in the shed. I think he's proven that yet again. How else to explain his unnecessary tax problems and office eviction?

Fights have, unfortunately, been built on incendiary racial angles forever. But Pacquiao-Mayweather is such a significant matchup, and one that the public is desperate for, that it is not necessary to stoop to that level. But Mayweather is too dumb to understand that. He's also too dumb to realize that he's not even promoting an actual fight, since he won't sign for it. So he simply launched the attack for no reason other than that he can't live without the spotlight.

He probably figured ranting and raving, especially at a time when Pacquiao was getting a lot of play for his November fight, would give him the attention he craves.

Well, be careful what you wish for.

Mayweather got attention. A lot of attention. But it's all negative. I wonder if his mother is proud of him? How about his young children? They'll be able to watch that video someday because it will be on the Internet forever.

Seems to me that Mayweather, because he is surrounded by nobody who will hold him accountable for his actions or tell him no, thinks he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, just because he's a famous fighter who makes a lot of money when he decides to fight.

Who wants to bet though that in, say, 10 years, Mayweather will be broke? Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield made much more than Mayweather and look what happened to them. When it happens to Mayweather, at least he can always click on the video and watch himself playing childishly with piles of money.

He has earned lots of money outside the ring, working as a company spokesman for AT&T, for example, although that deal is over. But what corporation in its right mind would again associate itself with such a classless, clueless person who has become a poster child for ignorance and is the very worst of today's coddled professional athlete?

I found his apology the day after his original hate-filled video to be weak and unconvincing. He said he "was just having fun" and that he "didn't really mean it." He ended by saying, "It's all love."

Well, if that's love, I'd hate to see hate. His apology rang hollow also because it came at the end of another lengthy video, almost as an aside to the rest of the nonsense he and his posse of yes men were partaking in.

I really don't want to hear another word from Mayweather's filthy mouth until he signs the contract to fight Pacquiao.

Mayweather, who is 33 but acts more like he's 3, may someday wind up on an all-time great boxer list with the likes of Sugar Ray Robinson, Henry Armstrong, Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali. But those are all men who, unlike Mayweather, regularly stepped up to face the biggest challenges of their era.

Until Mayweather does that, the only list he'll be on forever is the one that includes those branded racists because of their foul public remarks: John Rocker, Jimmy the Greek, Don Imus, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and others.

Welcome to the club, Floyd, and enjoy your lifetime membership.

Source: espn.go.com

Floyd Mayweather Jr. has officially crossed line from fool to jerk -- Star-Ledger

By Jerry Izenberg, The Star-Ledger

‘‘You never appreciate the silence along the trail until the ass stops braying.’’
Old prospector’s words to live by

We now know that Floyd Mayweather Jr. could make a sentimental favorite out of British Petroleum. All he has to do is open his mouth. His video soliloquy posted on You Tube last week was only slightly worse than his subsequent apology.

In a single disjointed episode of babbling, he called Manny Pacquiao a whore, a yellow (in color not character) midget and a gutter noun best translated in polite circles as the lead character in Oedipus Rex (you could look that one up under the works of Sophocles). Then he mixed in a little bit of homophobia.

This scatological monologue was apparently shot in his kitchen, so the laughter of the people he pays to laugh served as a kind of Greek chorus in the background.

He topped this performance with:

‘‘That (expletive) Pacquiao can’t speak no English.’’

With that slice of ungrammatical syntax, neither does Mayweather.

So now he has become as offensive as he is boring.

You can add dumb to that.

Ever since Pacquiao instituted a defamation of character suit against Mayweather for his
boisterous charges that Pacquiao was on performance-enhancing drugs, Mayweather’s defense has been ‘‘don’t look at me, it’s the people around me who love me who are saying that.’’

But in this tirade he keeps referring to the ‘‘power pills’’ he alleges Pacquiao is on as he looks into the camera.

Brilliant.

Having made this charge to the world, he can no longer shift the screen credits to the corner men on his payroll.

There are those, offended by this ludicrous performance, who insist Mayweather should retire.
They are a little bit late.

Having twice turned down fights with Pacquiao, he already is retired. It’s just that nobody has bothered to tell him yet and don’t look for the gang at Golden Boy to break the news.

The thing that would really be appropriate here would be for Pacquiao to beat Antonio Margarito in November if he can and then retire and return to his role as a legislator in Congress in the Philippines without even acknowledging Mayweather, leaving Mayweather to explain his own self-hyped legacy that includes the undeniable fact that he twice turned down a shot at Pacquiao.

Even for someone who is a legend in his own mind, that’s a little tough to explain.

But to return to Mayweather’s smorgasbord of racism ... Unless you were isolated in a bathyscope underneath Lake Michigan, you surely know what Mayweather said, how he said it and how he butchered his own apology, hiding behind the inane explanation that he was ‘‘just having a little fun.’’

Right.

That’s what the skinheads say when they use the N-word, the KKK says when it burns a cross on the lawn of a home owned by any one of a dozen ethnicities or religions.

And Mayweather’s attempt at an apology was reminiscent of the day John Rocker, the Atlanta Braves pitcher, slandered half of Queens and then said ‘‘it may look otherwise but I’m not a racist.’’

For Mayweather it was ‘‘there isn’t a racist bone in my body.’’ If he isn’t a racist then somebody had sure better call him on the telephone and warn him that somebody posing as him made the kind of statements that generally highlight an ethnic cleansing rally.

That’s not trash-talking about a potential opponent. What it is, is garbage from Mayweather Central, a command post whose inhabitants are well known to the judiciary and law enforcement people of Clark County in Nevada.

Well that’s pretty simple stuff. Even James Carville and Dick Morris would fall off the merry-go-round trying to spin that into anything other than what it is.

None of this is very complicated.

He said what he said.

He is what he is.

When a fool feels he can say such things in public, then a fool has crossed over the line and
becomes a jerk.

His wounds are self-inflicted and his legacy grows in his own mind each time he utters his name.
It’s as phony as the character in Rostand’s “Chanticleer,” who upon his reflection in the mirror, brays:

‘‘I fall back all bedazzled at seeing myself in the mirror, knowing it is I who have made the sun to shine.’’

Give us a break, Floyd. Make your next fight in Elba. Things have been quiet there ever since Napoleon left.

Source: nj.com