Anyone who’s into MMA has heard Ronda Rousey’s name at least a few times recently, and even people without interest in the sport have been getting exposed to her quite regularly as she has been scoring some impressive victories, including a recent knockout in a match that lasted less than a minute in total. And while one would expect someone like Floyd Mayweather to be more familiar with Rousey’s career development than the average MMA fan, the athlete actually didn’t know about Rousey up until some time ago.
People were doubting his claims of never having heard Rousey’s name and many saw that as a blatant attempt at undermining her popularity, and Mayweather actually got some harsh criticism for the way he spoke. Recently however, he has changed his attitude significantly – he now openly admits that he knows exactly who Rousey is.
It would probably be a bit hard for him to avoid her name as well, seeing how she spoke quite harshly about her fellow fighter’s history of domestic violence and abuse in an interview that was circulated around the Internet very often. Many seemed to agree with Rousey’s views as well, while Mayweather didn’t immediately respond to those claims.
He now claims to wish nothing for the best for Rousey, and while we don’t know if he’s sincere with those words or not, it’s at least good to see that he’s making some attempt at recovering his public image. Even some of his fans seemed a bit annoyed by his behavior towards someone of a high class in his own sport, and there is no denying that Mayweather could have found himself facing even more criticism if he hadn’t made amends in the public eye.
What’s Mayweather up to now? He claims that he’s busy promoting, while his father has been training various fighters. However, while Mayweather sees himself as still being “a part of boxing”, he also admits that he’s getting older and older, and it would probably be for the best if he were to pull out from the ring for the time being.
He also talked about his strategy approaching his next fight, describing his strongly technical approach that has won him so much praise from most of his fans. While some may claim that watching Mayweather often makes for pretty boring boxing, there’s also no denying that he’s one of the best technical fighters active right now, and he definitely knows a thing or two about controlling the fight and restricting his opponents as much as possible.
His fight with Pacquiao was somewhat controversial due to the relatively low intensity of the action, but at the same time, many people familiar with the sport claimed that nobody should have expected anything different from that fight. According to them, it was clear that Mayweather was going to stick to making this as technical as possible, which often involves controlling one’s pace and taking careful, calculated swings instead of fighting wildly and randomly.
And in this regard, he definitely delivered something enjoyable to his fans. There’s also little point in arguing the final decision, and while Pacquiao’s fans were obviously disappointed by the way the fight unfolded and concluded, that’s the way the sport goes. Just because someone is highly liked doesn’t give them any guarantee for their success, and it often happens that people who invest a lot of energy/emotion into something like this could end up severely disappointed in the end.
So much show.
Mayweather likes to downplay others with pretend oblivion… he did the same towards his harshest critic in Skip Bayless of ESPN’s vastly popular First Take radio podcast… acting as if he never heard of Skip.
Prior to the coveted Pacman fight… Stephen A. Smith interviewed him at Money’s crib… Mayweather was eating McDonald’s french fries… acting all nonchalant… an obvious bravado.