It is easy to understand the distaste that so many feel for Floyd Mayweather Jr. He is brash, he can be crass, and when it comes to being a braggart, he is the undisputed world champion.
He is the cartoon embodiment of the excess for which his adopted home town of Las Vegas is notorious. A poor kid from Grand Rapids, Michigan, he has spent his adult life over-compensating for the deprivation he once knew.
He has tossed handfuls of $100 bills into the air at a strip club and hurled wads of cash into a swimming pool so he could amuse himself by watching girls dive to retrieve them.
The mouthguard he will wear during ‘The Fight of the Century’ with Manny Pacquiao at the MGM Grand on Saturday night cost $25,000 and is inlaid with a $100 bill.
Some novelists like to assign names to their protagonists that reflect their character traits or their obsessions. Mayweather has saved everyone the trouble with his chosen nickname. John Self, meet Money Mayweather.
Money Mayweather reigned until the build-up to this fight began. Then, he took to referring to himself as TBE, or The Best Ever. He is better than Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson ever were, Mayweather said this week.
Mayweather, it is also worth pointing out, has faced a string of accusations of violence against women and spent two months in the Clark County Detention Center in 2012 for a domestic violence conviction.
Although the fight is not quite the struggle between light and darkness that Pacquiao’s supporters would have you believe, it is true that Mayweather is not exactly a gentleman hero. But in sport’s spoiled, sycophantic world where no one ever tells the genius that he is out of line, that hardly makes him unusual.
There is a danger here, though. It lies in confusing our perceptions of Mayweather as a man with a desire to belittle his capabilities as a fighter. You might want him to lose to Pacquiao but you better accept that he probably won’t. He is as close to genius as it gets in modern boxing.
He may not be The Best Ever. Debates aimed at placing that crown on one head are, essentially, specious but it is legitimate to claim that Mayweather is one of the best ever. He has fought the best fighters of his generation, Pacquiao aside, and beaten every one of them.
Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, said last week that Mayweather, 38, had ducked too many fighters to be considered the greatest even of this era. A cursory examination of Mayweather’s record does not bear that out.
He has fought Diego Corrales, Jose Luis Castillo, Arturo Gatti, Sharmba Mitchell, Oscar de la Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Juan Manuel Marquez, Shane Mosley and Miguel Cotto and sent them all away broken.
He has won titles at five different weights. He has fought men like Victor Ortiz and Robert Guerrero, who were supposed to be new forces in boxing, but whose limitations were exposed by Mayweather’s ringcraft. That is the great irony of his dominance of the sport these past few years.
He is scorned as a great vulgarian, a gaudy show-off, boxing’s thug king, and yet more than any other modern fighter he embodies the mastery of some of its finest skills.
Boxing has always venerated the artist and swooned over practitioners of the sweet science and Mayweather personifies so much of what the purists admire. He does not club his foes into submission. He does not overwhelm them with savagery. He beats them with craft and cleverness.
He is a wonderful technician in the mould of Willie Pep, Pernell ‘Sweet Pea’ Whitaker and Ali. The shoulder roll he uses to protect his head and body from attack is a conundrum that none of his opponents have been able to decode. He is a pugilist, not a scrapper.
When Mayweather boxes, it is to put on an old-fashioned masterclass in the oft-neglected art of defensive combat. He makes himself devilishly hard to hit, and, slowly and steadily, picks off his opponent. His style has made fans of connoisseurs like the late, great fight trainer Eddie Futch.
Mayweather is not a crowd-pleaser. He is too good for that. He is so skilled that it is difficult for his opponent to land effective punches. His brand of brilliance does not make for explosive action but it does make for W after W after W on his record. He has 47 of them now to go with no defeats and no draws.
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