LAS VEGAS Mayweather vs Pacquiao Live Streaming 2015, Floyd Mayweather craves more than a victory over 'reckless' Manny Pacquiao, LAS VEGAS A sign on the entry door declares, "Boxing Gym Closes At 3 p.m.," except it is on the inside, where only those who already have gained admittance can see it. It's just as well. The time is much closer to when Floyd Mayweather begins a training session than ends it, so the notion of a mid-afternoon gym closing is as ludicrous as assuming, at age 38, that Earth's greatest prizefighter is in his career twilight.
And if you're in there when the pound-for-pound king is training, it is only at his pleasure and approval anyway, for he sees all within. Mayweather interrupted a session on the sit-up bench to call over an employee last week. "A mirror is cracked over there," he said, sweat cascading down his face and dripping off his chin. "Call somebody to have it fixed tomorrow." Another camp member sidled over with a cell phone so Mayweather could check his online gambling account. Regulars at sports books here hardly bother with casinos anymore, save for re-deposits and redemptions. Wagers are placed with the click of a mobile app. Just not usually to the scale Mayweather does it. On this day, it seems everyone at Mayweather Boxing Club has taken the Minnesota Timberwolves getting 10 points from the Utah Jazz, and the score was looking good. Everyone would win, including the Timberwolves. Mayweather just would win more. On the cell phone, his account balance glared in large figures at top of the screen: $1,024,782.86. "Take everything out but leave a million in there," Mayweather told the clearly trusted employee. On May 2, the course of boxing history will change. That's when Mayweather, the unbeaten Grand Rapids native and presumed generational king of the ring, risks both of those claims in a fight five years in the making against Manny Pacquiao, in a welterweight unification in Las Vegas. Boxing never has seen anything like it. Sport never has seen anything like it. Bob Arum, who founded Top Rank Inc. and promotes Pacquiao, estimated last week that Mayweather could make $180 million and Pacquiao $120 million, once pay-per-view proceeds are counted.
The live ticket gate receipts, for something in the range of 16,000 people who will pay $1,500 to $7,500 a pop at MGM Grand Garden Arena -- and only if they know someone, because there essentially will be no public sale -- will total approximately $73 million, Arum said. That's more than 3 1/2 times the all-time record gate of $20,003,150, for Mayweather vs. Saul "Canelo" Alvarez in 2013. In a sport known for paying ham-and-egg professionals a couple hundred bucks per round, but also for lavishing ungodly single-night sums upon its finest gladiators, all previous financial measures already have been rendered insignificant by comparison to Mayweather-Pacquiao. Even if the final figure falls closer to $140-150 million, no athlete ever has earned in a year what Mayweather figures to earn in one night -- not Tiger Woods, not Cristiano Ronaldo, not LeBron James. Personal appearances, endorsements, salaries, add it all up. No one. The $370,000 McLaren parked outside the gym door notwithstanding, the man nicknamed "Money" tries to convince that money isn't the only thing anymore, nor even the biggest thing. "When you're young, you look at everything like you want nice cars, you want jewelry, you want a big house," Mayweather said. "But once you've been living like that for so long, it's not really about that anymore. It's about my children, the legacy, them getting the best education. That's what's mainly important to me. I don't worry about the fight because I know what I can do and I know what I bring to the table." Of course, he is nothing if not inconsistent, this man who admits his flaws outside the gym and notices everything inside it -- including, this day, his jewelry provider.
"He's got all the big rocks," Mayweather bellowed during a mid-rounds break, until the man was obliged to wave to onlookers. "That's where I get all my big rocks." Mayweather is 47-0 and just now facing the fight of his life, against the 57-5-2 Pacquiao, whose championships in eight weight divisions and long history as Mayweather's most desirable foil have created a perfect storm of fistic anticipation. Floyd Mayweather looks to take away what Manny Pacquiao does well Floyd Mayweather says the key isn't to focus on a fighter's weakness, but rather what he's successful at and try to take that away while in the ring. There has been all manner of debate about this fight, whether Mayweather dodged it, whether Pacquiao dodged it, whether Mayweather's boxing skills prevail, or Pacquiao's punching power does -- the latter, a reckoning which does some injustice to Mayweather's power and Pacquiao's skill, as if they aren't formidable enough to provide the winning formula. It is each man's job to discern the other's strengths, then neutralize. "A lot of guys do a lot of things wrong, but they are still successful," Mayweather said. "So I want to know what he does right, so I can take that away from him, so I can take that arsenal away from him. What I do, when I'm facing a guy, whatever he does good, I take that away from him, so he has to resort to doing something different." Forty-seven times, it has been all about winning the fight he's in and looking good in the next one for Mayweather. Sometimes, against opponents like Genaro Hernandez, and Diego Corrales, and Arturo Gatti, Mayweather has been both victorious and spectacular. In the fight to rewrite history, he craves rediscovering that intersection. "I just want to look good for myself," he said. "I want to look very impressive. I'm pretty sure he's going to bring his A-game, and it's all about excitement. I got here somehow, some way. He's a solid competitor, but very reckless, and he makes a lot of mistakes."
And there it is -- the suggestion that even in this superfight to end them all, there is an inherent gap in ring comprehension. "But he's been successful," Mayweather responded when confronted with his words. "Remember what I said -- you've got guys that make a lot of mistakes but still are successful." Floyd Mayweather chops wood as part of Manny Pacquiao training Floyd Mayweather discusses why he went back to a method of his past in order to prepare for the May 2 fight. For the fight of his life, Mayweather reached back to his distant past. He stopped chopping massive blocks of wood back in 1999 -- that is, at the time when the first rifts with his father as trainer surfaced. He did it his way for most of the years in between, with great success. A few months back, his father said that if the Pacquiao fight materialized, he wanted his son back on the wood block, chopping away. And that's exactly what happened. Some may be mental. Some certainly is developing muscles and stabilizers in a different way. But back in the day, for a young Floyd Mayweather who regularly had to clean up the wood chips in his grandmother's back yard in Grand Rapids, completing the job of cutting through a massive wood block was a training validation, a rite of passage, no different symbolically than Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky" catching a chicken. "I had to go back to where it all started," he said. "I just wanted to. Just for myself." He started at age 10, the same year as his first amateur bout, with a sledgehammer and a tire. He graduated to the ax at 14. At 22, he just stopped. Just as he had to learn to cope with the more complex pleasures his lifestyle affords him, Mayweather has found a simple pleasure in rediscovering his past during the most important moment of his lifelong boxing journey. "Things just happen and you come up with different ways to gain strength, with the new era," he said. "But I had to go back to where it all started from. "I like it a lot more. I like it. I appreciate it." David Mayo has covered Floyd Mayweather throughout the boxer's career. Contact him at
SOURCE:
http://www.mlive.com/mayweather/index.ssf/2015/03/column_floyd_mayweather_1.html