Fight,boxing,watch,live,Mayweather,Victor Ortiz,Victor Ortiz vs. Floyd Mayweather Jr. live,WBC, welterweight, championship
Meet the Mayweathers. They are as familiar with a courtroom as they are with a boxing ring, from Floyd estranged for-the-umpteenth-time father, Floyd Sr, a one-time drug dealer, to his uncle and trainer, Roger, who is preparing him for his 42nd fight here on Saturday night, against Victor Ortiz.
Floyd Jr has domestic disturbance and slander cases pending; Floyd Sr is embroiled in the latter, arising from unsubstantiated claims that Manny Paquito has used performance-enhancing drugs; as is Roger who also earlier this year struck a deal with prosecutors to avoid jail for choking a female boxer he once trained.
Yet none of this tumult, remarkably, has disrupted Floyd Jr's preparation for his fight at the MGM Grand against Ortiz, the 24-year-old southpaw who holds the WBC welterweight title. Nor did it stop Roger insisting again that Paquito will not fight his nephew, whatever the public demand, until he lifts the cloud of doubt over him concerning drugs.
Trying to understand Roger, himself a fine two-weight world champion in the 80s, is the intellectual equivalent of wrestling with an octopus, so tangled are his thoughts. He does not much care for diplomatic words or what people write about him. He is a renegade with an acute boxing brain and a machine-gun mouth.
Reminded that Floyd Jr had this week repeated that he is better appreciated in the UK than in his own country, Roger replied bluntly: "Fuck the UK. Where that, England?" He paused and added: "I know they love him in the UK."
There followed a rambling monologue about "how boxing go and how people are", which boiled down to the view that people say things about others based on "shit they don't even know".
Via another rant against Paquito, probably best ignored on legal grounds, he returned to the important question of his fighter's inactivity since he turned 30 four years ago.
My nephew wasn't even fight in for nearly two years after stopping Ricky Hatton in 2007 and he came back and beat two of the best elite fighters in the world Juan Manuel Marquez and Shane Mosley, so what that tell ya?
Now, he been laid off 17 months - and he will still come back and beat the best. Most time a fighter lose, it's because of a long lay-off but my nephew been boxing since he was a baby. That's all he ever done. So he laid off, recharged and he's back because he wanna fight. You gotta wanna do something.
And would Floyd Sr - who exchanged ghetto pleasantries with his son on TV recently - be coming to the fight? "Ain't seen him," said Roger. So that's a "no"?
Cain was closer to Abel than these guys.
As for Ortiz, he also has a trainer, Danny Garcia, who doesn't play happy families. On Wednesday, Garcia publicly thanked Mayweather for bringing his brother, Robert, to town to see the fight with his boxer, Brandon Rios. It seemed Danny wanted a reconciliation with Robert, who used to train Ortiz and with whom he fell out spectacularly. Those sentiments seemed to have evaporated overnight.
On Thursday, Danny maintained that Ortiz was a good listener during a fight and followed his instructions perfectly. When it was put to him that this contradicted his brother's view of Ortiz - Robert once walked out on Ortiz mid-fight because he wouldn't follow instructions - he was not pleased.
Robert can say anything he wants. I'm not here to talk about Robert. Robert is my brother and I love him but, in this business, he's been doing bad things, so he better stay away from me. I talk to my dad and my mum, and there's nothing I can do. He's pretty mad, pretty angry. I don't know why, but that is it.
If he wants to talk to him, he need do no more than lean over the garden fence when he returns to Oxnard, California. They are next door neighbors. Danny has proffered his hand across that fence, but Danny would not shake it, and they haven't spoken in two-and-a-half years.
If boxing were less confrontational then it wouldn't be boxing. These are the cast of characters who make the sport and the business what it is, for better or worse.
There will be live coverage of Saturday night's fight on The Boxing website.
Meet the Mayweathers. They are as familiar with a courtroom as they are with a boxing ring, from Floyd estranged for-the-umpteenth-time father, Floyd Sr, a one-time drug dealer, to his uncle and trainer, Roger, who is preparing him for his 42nd fight here on Saturday night, against Victor Ortiz.
Floyd Jr has domestic disturbance and slander cases pending; Floyd Sr is embroiled in the latter, arising from unsubstantiated claims that Manny Paquito has used performance-enhancing drugs; as is Roger who also earlier this year struck a deal with prosecutors to avoid jail for choking a female boxer he once trained.
Yet none of this tumult, remarkably, has disrupted Floyd Jr's preparation for his fight at the MGM Grand against Ortiz, the 24-year-old southpaw who holds the WBC welterweight title. Nor did it stop Roger insisting again that Paquito will not fight his nephew, whatever the public demand, until he lifts the cloud of doubt over him concerning drugs.
Trying to understand Roger, himself a fine two-weight world champion in the 80s, is the intellectual equivalent of wrestling with an octopus, so tangled are his thoughts. He does not much care for diplomatic words or what people write about him. He is a renegade with an acute boxing brain and a machine-gun mouth.
Reminded that Floyd Jr had this week repeated that he is better appreciated in the UK than in his own country, Roger replied bluntly: "Fuck the UK. Where that, England?" He paused and added: "I know they love him in the UK."
There followed a rambling monologue about "how boxing go and how people are", which boiled down to the view that people say things about others based on "shit they don't even know".
Via another rant against Paquito, probably best ignored on legal grounds, he returned to the important question of his fighter's inactivity since he turned 30 four years ago.
My nephew wasn't even fight in for nearly two years after stopping Ricky Hatton in 2007 and he came back and beat two of the best elite fighters in the world Juan Manuel Marquez and Shane Mosley, so what that tell ya?
Now, he been laid off 17 months - and he will still come back and beat the best. Most time a fighter lose, it's because of a long lay-off but my nephew been boxing since he was a baby. That's all he ever done. So he laid off, recharged and he's back because he wanna fight. You gotta wanna do something.
And would Floyd Sr - who exchanged ghetto pleasantries with his son on TV recently - be coming to the fight? "Ain't seen him," said Roger. So that's a "no"?
Cain was closer to Abel than these guys.
As for Ortiz, he also has a trainer, Danny Garcia, who doesn't play happy families. On Wednesday, Garcia publicly thanked Mayweather for bringing his brother, Robert, to town to see the fight with his boxer, Brandon Rios. It seemed Danny wanted a reconciliation with Robert, who used to train Ortiz and with whom he fell out spectacularly. Those sentiments seemed to have evaporated overnight.
On Thursday, Danny maintained that Ortiz was a good listener during a fight and followed his instructions perfectly. When it was put to him that this contradicted his brother's view of Ortiz - Robert once walked out on Ortiz mid-fight because he wouldn't follow instructions - he was not pleased.
Robert can say anything he wants. I'm not here to talk about Robert. Robert is my brother and I love him but, in this business, he's been doing bad things, so he better stay away from me. I talk to my dad and my mum, and there's nothing I can do. He's pretty mad, pretty angry. I don't know why, but that is it.
If he wants to talk to him, he need do no more than lean over the garden fence when he returns to Oxnard, California. They are next door neighbors. Danny has proffered his hand across that fence, but Danny would not shake it, and they haven't spoken in two-and-a-half years.
If boxing were less confrontational then it wouldn't be boxing. These are the cast of characters who make the sport and the business what it is, for better or worse.
There will be live coverage of Saturday night's fight on The Boxing website.
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