Where credit is due

By Bart Barry

You don’t like Floyd Mayweather. You think he’s immature. You think his trainer should be sweeping gym floors instead of doing hand pad tricks. You think his manager is a cheerleading aerobics instructor. Valid points. But it’s still time to concede that Mayweather is a special fighter.

Though he’ll never be as great as Sugar Ray Robinson, on some nights Mayweather is as good as Robinson was.

Evidence of this came Saturday night in Las Vegas when Mayweather defended his welterweight title by fighting and stopping England’s junior-welterweight champion Ricky Hatton at 1:35 of Round 10. The match was suspenseful and interesting throughout. It had lulls, as predicted. But if it occasionally lacked action, it never stopped being a fight.

It also ended emphatically with Hatton stumbling to the canvas, Referee Joe Cortez pulling Mayweather away and Hatton’s corner heaving a white towel in the ring. For many it was a sad spectacle.

One didn’t have to be a Brit to prefer Hatton’s pre-fight humility to Mayweather’s nonsensical tirades. But for all the men were outside the ring – for Mayweather’s deficit of character or Hatton’s congeniality – in the ring they were their own opposites. Mayweather was economical and precise. Hatton was overanxious and inaccurate.

But not at the beginning. Surprisingly, Hatton landed the fight’s first meaningful punch when he snapped Mayweather’s head back with a counter jab at the 0:20 mark. Then Hatton landed a left hook that almost felled Mayweather in the first round.

But boxing is about time and space and the patterns they form. Despite his want of pattern recognition outside the ring, with boxing gloves on Mayweather is a master of discerning the rhythms of men opposite him. Mayweather solved the riddle of Hatton’s attacks, early on, then started to nail him with single punches on the way in.

Hatton’s training didn’t help either. As part of its “Undefeated” promotion, HBO broadcast an hour’s worth of looped footage showing Hatton lunging at an enormous padded apparatus that hung from his trainer’s shoulders. All shouts and intensity, Hatton looked like a bulldog attacking the 75” sack.

Trouble was, when Mayweather turned his shoulders, Hatton was left to attack a target that was 14” across, and hit back. Unable to land body punches on the way in, Hatton had to mill away at Mayweather’s shoulders, back and ribs. It was aggressive but not effective.

Still, it brought to mind a helpful scorekeeping slogan: Ineffective aggressiveness beats inactivity.

And there were solid portions of every round when Mayweather was inactive. But that was by design. Where another man would panic at having an aggressor push and deliver blows to him, Mayweather rested. And raised his left elbow.

During dressing room instructions, Referee Cortez fielded concerns from the Hatton camp that their man’s mauling style would be broken too early. Cortez assured Hatton’s people he would remain fair and firm. Then Cortez went out and broke the fighters early in each clinch of the first four rounds. But he did this on Hatton’s behalf, not Mayweather’s.

See, along with tilting backwards, keeping his right hand on his cheek and parrying shots with his left shoulder, Mayweather uses a high left elbow to defend himself. He raises the elbow and leaves it there, figuring if an opponent runs into it, well, that’s the opponent’s problem. Cortez continually warned Mayweather about this tactic and broke the fighters to keep Mayweather’s elbow from slicing open Hatton’s forehead.

In the most unlikely turn of the night, then, Mayweather proved himself the more effectively dirty fighter. Afterwards it was Hatton who commented on his opponent’s roughhouse tactics. Most aficionados expected Mayweather to outbox Hatton, but did anyone expect Mayweather to outmaul him too?

Outclassed and tiring in the eighth round, Hatton traded lateral movement for relentlessness and ran directly into a right-hand lead from Mayweather. For the first time in the fight, one man was genuinely hurt. Hatton’s face slammed against Mayweather’s glove and his feet came to a bunny-hop halt underneath him. From there, Mayweather almost made the eighth stanza the last.

Hatton showed customary grit and kept attacking through the ninth round, though it was apparent he couldn’t win. Then exactly one minute into the 10th, he rushed at Mayweather. Hatton feinted to his right and started to launch a left hook. But recognizing the pattern, Mayweather stepped to Hatton’s right. Then Mayweather threw a left hook of his own.

The punch struck flush on Hatton’s jaw. While Mayweather moved easily away, Hatton went face-first into the corner’s turnbuckle, bounced off it and landed on his back. Mayweather had just knocked a fellow world champion off his feet with a single punch, while moving backwards.

Could Sugar Ray Robinson have done any better?

Hatton bravely rose from the blue mat and absorbed punishment till the fight was stopped. In doing so, he satisfied every fan who’d made the trek from Manchester to Nevada. And he did nothing to jeopardize his standing as prizefighting’s best junior welterweight.

But now Hatton should return to the pleasant climes of the M.E.N. Arena, rehabilitate his ferocious reputation and get ready for 2009. By then lightweight champ Juan Diaz will be ready to move up, and Hatton-Diaz should be a classic.

Then there’s Mayweather. Next year he can fight fellow welterweight titlist Miguel Cotto for half the money he just made fighting Hatton or go into semi-retirement and remain the Ring champion. Look for him to do the latter. He’ll wait for other marquee fighters to move up in weight or age before he fights again.

But semi-retirement won’t please him. “Money May” doesn’t have the eye for talent or charisma to be a good promoter, and his fleet of luxury cars proves he’s not much of an investor. The parasites who surround Mayweather will also begin to bleed him.

But it’s not too late for Mayweather to show some genius out of the ring. Patterns are patterns, after all.