FLOYD MAYWEATHER has a reached a point in life where, as he has frequently said, he can’t buy anything more because he already has pretty much everything you could want. It wasn’t always like that.
“Me and my seven siblings used to live in a one bedroom apartment. No lights, no heat. But I kept believing. I kept working hard. Kept dedicating myself and I always knew 2-24-77 a star was born,” he said.
“We don’t look up to the guys on TV. We look up to the guys that’s in our neighbourhood, the drug dealers and the pimps and the hustlers and the gangsters. That’s who we looked up to. But once you get to a certain level and you surpass them, we start looking at the billionaires and say you know what I want what he got. You surpass a certain level and you move to a whole other level.”
There were key lessons he had to learn along the way. “I got a tonne of money at a young age, 19, 20 years old. You want everything. You want every car, every house, but it’s a process and that’s what I learned when I signed with Al Haymon. It’s a process. The world wasn’t built in a day. I got my mind on business and once I got my mind on business, I continued to work hard inside the ring but I was making smart financial moves on the outside. I didn’t want to end up like a lot of other sports celebrities or other celebrities. I wanted to have something when my career was over and I also wanted to still have that same lifestyle,” he said.
He adds, “I think a lot of fighters in today’s time, they slack. They’re 8-0 and they think they’re a world champion.”
While Mayweather retired after beating Andre Berto, he has made it increasingly clear that will return to the ring to fight UFC fighter Conor McGregor. He has been in the gym training with Gervonta Davis, a world champion Mayweather promotes. One suspects he would also be ready to fight himself this year. “Of course I’m going to be there day in and day out because I care about the well-being of my fighter. I care about the well-being of a fighter. Before I even made my first million I would have fought for free, because of my love of the sport,” Floyd said. “I didn’t start a promotional company to take advantage of fighters. I started a promotional company to try to help fighters accomplish what they want to accomplish in the sport of boxing.”
He insists it does not make him long to return to boxing. “Being in the gym, I don’t miss it at all. I’m there to help him. I want to see if I can push this fighter to surpass me and break every record. That’s the goal,” he said. “Not just this fighter, but any fighter that’s with our company. If we can push that fighter to become a pay-per-view star and a household name, that’s what we’re here to do. Records are made to be broken.”
