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By Bart Barry–



After their Saturday welterweight match at MGM Grand, American Floyd “Money” Mayweather and Argentine Marcos “El Chino” Maidana proffered a study in contrasts as they made their ways back to their respective dressing rooms beneath the Grand Garden Arena. One man, shiny-faced and unmarked, greeted a swarming mass of exuberant countrymen. The other, shuffling slightly with face partially misshapen and flanked by enormous body guards, smiled perfunctorily at those who wished him well.

Despite prevailing by majority-decision scores, Floyd Mayweather was not the shiny-faced lad with the exuberant fans.

The idea that Mayweather would not win more than five unanimous rounds against Marcos Maidana on Saturday was one that traversed few minds. The large number of folks who attended the fight or purchased it on pay-per-view did so to support a TMT franchise we’ve been told is historic. A much smaller number of buyers invested their entertainment funds in the hopes El Chino would catch Money cold, somehow, and score a Hasim Rahman-like upset. Nobody who spent money on a ticket or telecast envisioned Maidana decisioning, in Las Vegas, the guy whose head is now more ubiquitous at MGM Grand than that golden lion’s. And yet, there were rounds not even a partial observer like judge Burt Clements could find a way to give Mayweather.

The first round is the first that comes to mind; perhaps Maidana did not sprint from his corner recklessly as he bumrushed Adrien Broner in December – and if Saturday’s main event did not restore much glimmer to “About Billions,” it did embolden those critics who quietly wonder if Mexican Saul Alvarez isn’t something of a frecklefaced fraud – but once he found Mayweather was overconfident enough in the shoulder-roll defense to let the ropes stop his backwards lean, Maidana brought the contact to Mayweather in a way no one before him has.

Part of that could be diminished reflex on Mayweather’s part, though only a tiny part of it, while much of it ought be attributed to the Charmin-soft competition Mayweather has served himself since about the time he slipped past Jose Luis Castillo in 2002; those who hit hard enough to imperil Mayweather generally have not been fast enough, and those who are fast enough generally have not hit with sufficient force. Unflappable as he is, and an unaffected demeanor during physical confrontations is Mayweather’s greatest pugilistic asset, Mayweather did not expect to be hit hard on as many different spots of his head for the rest of his career as Maidana delivered him in their second 90 seconds together.

What became suddenly apparent: Nobody in a sparring session with Floyd Mayweather since Money was about 12 years-old has attempted the clockwise-bolo thing Maidana hurled his way; were it not for Maidana’s startlingly effective jab, Mayweather would not have been speaking out of turn about Maidana had he paraphrased what Evander Holyfield once said of John Ruiz – that he was the most technically incompetent opponent he faced as a pro. Maidana solved the shoulder roll not through expertise but by overthrowing his right hand like a circus-strongman hammer; it was a physical impossibility for Mayweather to get his lead shoulder high enough and his torso tilted rightwards far enough to evade a punch that, at its apex, resembled nothing so much as Kareem’s skyhook.

Trainer Robert Garcia deserves all the credit heaped on him for Maidana’s fantastic jab, well-timed and stiff and accurate as it is, but when it comes to Maidana’s sledgefisted right, Garcia has mentored the Argentine no more than a handler who unclips the leash from an attack dog already in full froth. A camera on Garcia’s face in the opening round likely would have revealed a man both surprised and delighted by what surprise in Mayweather’s demeanor and delight in Maidana’s rabidity the landing of that first righthand brought. Mayweather’s surprise was quickly compounded when, soon after Maidana began crashing into him, Money’s go-to defensive ploy, the lead-elbow-to-opponent’s-neck shimmy, received a warning from referee Tony Weeks, whom Mayweather afterwards banished unhesitatingly from ever again officiating the otherwise high-paying exhibition matches Mayweather thought Showtime signed him up for.

There was one other surprise, too, for both Mayweather and aficionados who have followed his career often begrudgingly: The left-hook lead did not work till the championship rounds. There is not an orthodox fighter in memory, and certainly not a Latino one, whom Mayweather has been unable to tag and tag early with his springing left-hook lead; even master Juan Manuel Marquez got flattened by the punch. Maidana’s guard, though, was high and tight to his cheek, and Mayweather got nothing but right glove, when he didn’t miss both wildly and uncharacteristically.

Worse yet for Mayweather’s plans of a painfree evening was how little his potshot right dissuaded Maidana, who viewed it as a hard tariff, but not a barrier to entry like other Mayweather opponents have. Maidana expected to be hit repeatedly. It was in his contract. He hoped, but likely did not expect, to hit Mayweather repeatedly. When he found Mayweather was willing to sell him a stationary target on the ropes for the price of a flush righthand or two, Maidana became an animated buyer.

Mayweather’s best adjustment was the very return-to-fundamentals Paulie Malignaggi counseled any future Maidana opponent to employ, in the April issue of The Ring magazine. Mayweather, gloves high in the fight’s final third, preceded most of his righthands with jabs; in lieu of reinventing boxing, Money May threw straight 1-2s the exact way he learned to do as a seven-year-old in Grand Rapids, Mich., and it worked exactly as his father knew it would. Floyd Mayweather proved Saturday, as he did against Miguel Cotto in 2012, that, at his core, he is all fighter. Even his Friday protest of Maidana’s gloves was, at its inception at least, a legitimate nod to boxing’s history of illegitimate glove-tampering; what alarmed Mayweather first of all was how “broken-in” Maidana’s custom-made gloves felt.

And Sunday morning, undoubtedly, Floyd Mayweather awoke to a feeling of body-wide trauma that has led other accomplished prizefighters to pursue business ventures elsewhere.

Bart Barry can be reached at bart.barrys.email (at) gmail.com