Floyd Mayweather: 'Seeing my mum on drugs hurt but I pulled my family out of the struggle'

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Floyd Mayweather: 'Seeing my mum on drugs hurt but I pulled my family out of the struggle'
Floyd Mayweather reveals the childhood trauma that inspires him to be the bestBrian Doogan in Las Vegas
At the Mayweather Boxing Club, situated anonymously in China-town about a mile from the Las Vegas Strip, people are waiting to watch the best boxer in the world go to work. A burly Hawaiian security guard called JT stands near the door, effortlessly discharging his duties, while Roger Mayweather, the trainer whose task is to prepare his nephew for the 39th fight of his career, holds court a few feet away. “Don’t believe in all that Rocky Balboa bullshit,” he advises without trace of a smile. “This ain’t no movie. This ain’t gonna be no Cinderella story. Your guy is in above his head and that’s the truth. That’s the grim reality he’s facing just a week from now.”

Ricky Hatton, unbeaten in 43 bouts, is sparring a couple of miles away, building up a rhythm and a quiet rage, oblivious to the latest taunts from the Mayweather camp. “Listen, Hatton is a club fighter with a big heart, but he ain’t got no skill. Period,” the trainer asserts. “Let me tell you something, he wouldn’t have hit me with that shit when I was 37 years old. I’ve been in the ring with the guy he beat, Kostya Tszyu [against whom Hatton won the world light-welterweight title in June 2005]. I was 34 and I still had no problem with Tszyu. The judges gave him the decision, but I was fighting in his country, so what else they gonna do?

“But Hatton’s not fighting no Kostya Tszyu on December 8. He ain’t fighting no Jose Luis Castillo or all those other dudes nobody here has ever heard about. He’s fighting the best fighter in the world. Now I know he’s earnt the right because he’s a tough kid, but he’s got no skills. He hasn’t even got a f***ing jab, so what the f***’s he going to do He’s going to get exactly what’s coming to him, a good ass-whuppin’, just like the other 38 guys who climbed in the ring with my nephew.

“Don’t believe the bullshit. Hatton got this fight by beating Castillo [stopping the Mexican in the fourth round in June] but that was nothing but a f***ing hoax. Castillo crawled on the ground and made it look good, but he wasn’t getting paid enough money to get back on his feet, that’s why he stayed down. The reality is that Hatton did shit with Castillo. When my nephew fought Castillo [twice in 2002] he beat the motherf***** [in their first fight] with a torn rotator cuff and Castillo was in his prime. All that Hatton will bring is heart and guts, but skills pay the bills and intelligence wins fights. Heart and guts ain’t gonna mean shit when my nephew is beating him to every punch.”

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As propagandists go, the 46-year-old former felon, who was given a six-month prison sentence last year for committing battery on the grandmother of his infant son, has few peers. But neither has his nephew, Floyd Mayweather, not in the ring at least. At 5ft 8in and 10st 7lb, the 30-year-old WBC and Ring magazine welterweight champion is the most accomplished composite of nerve, fluid movement and ruthlessness in boxing today.

He steps out of his chauffeur-driven Lincoln Navigator SUV and glides past his uncle and the rest of the team into the gym, where several TV crews have set up to conduct a series of snappy, soundbite-laden interviews. “Hatton’s a good fighter, but he’s not on my level,” Mayweather declares with a disarming smile. “He will come out and fight his heart out, but I’m going to stick to the gameplan, maintain my composure, break him down, make the right moves, the smart moves, listen to my corner and go out and get the job done.”

It seems simple. So does everything within this cocoon of certainty that the Mayweathers have constructed in a city of chance. When Mayweather punches the pads held by his uncle, he could do so with his eyes closed, so choreographed is their routine. He moves to the heavy bag and dispenses 1,000 punches without so much as a breather, then jumps back in the ring to complete four rounds of body punching with Nate “The Snake” Jones, his former Olympic Games teammate, who wears a protector around his midriff.

“Yes sir, I want to see that beer come right up out of Hatton’s belly. Bring up the Guinness, champ,” Mayweather’s adviser and friend, Leonard Ellerbe, instructs from the corner. “Constant work, baby, constant work,” someone else shouts out from the ring apron. “Way to land those shots, Floyd. He ain’t gonna be fit to take them.” The homeboys assembled around the ring have developed their own lexicon of reassurance for the “pound-for-pound champ” as well as an incessant stream of abuse for the sparring partners who are hailed as “fresh meat” before they exit, usually with their own blood on their vests.

“There’s no play when you step in the ring with this guy,” insists Lovemore N’dou, a former IBF light-welterweight titleholder and one of Mayweather’s sparring partners. Another, Carlos Baldomir, from whom Mayweather seized the WBC and Ring magazine welterweight titles last November on points, is no longer around, having been stopped in five rounds by a flurry of spiteful punches more than a week ago. On this day, however, Mayweather’s open workout is confined predominantly to pitter-patter punching, embellished by a series of rapid-fire bursts that emphasise one of his main assets, his speed. Rafael Garcia, an assistant trainer, proudly shows the counter in his hand that he has clicked 9,791 times from the moment Mayweather threw his first punch. “We can’t let you see all of our training,” Mayweather announces as he brings the session to an end. Even virtuosos keep secrets.

If this betrays insecurity in his make-up, it has not gone unnoticed. “When he starts saying he’s the best boxer ever, disrespecting the likes of Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson and Sugar Ray Leonard, it’s a sign to me that he’s insecure,” suggests Hatton. “He needs reassurance all the time, which is why he’s surrounded by yes men.”

Flanked by his trainer, propagandist, homeboys and hench-men, Mayweather reveals further vulnerability when training is over. “My doctor says that my hands are so small and the impact [from punching] is so hard and that’s where my hand problems come from,” he says. In the most recent episode of the American TV network HBO’s documentary series, Hatton/May-weather 24/7, he goes further. “She [my doctor] thinks I shouldn’t be fighting too much more,” he confides. “My body’s tearing down, my left hand is tearing down. I never used to have hand problems. Now my right hand, my elbow, my back . . . the shit goes on and on.” Back in the gym he maintains that, in spite of all this, his “hands are fine”.

The contradictions continue. “In the opening 24/7 episode you said that you were looking for more love from your father [Floyd Sr, with whom he has had a tempestuous relationship],” I put to him.

“I didn’t say that,” he counters quickly, almost instinctively before relenting. “As a child, I just wanted to get the one-on-one time I give to my little ones [he and his girlfriend, Josie, have two boys and two girls]. That’s not asking for much.”

“You feel that you didn’t get that early in your life?”

“I went through a lot as a kid, and just to get to where I’m at is an amazing accomplishment. I grew up in a family of seven and all of us kids lived in the one bedroom. Sometimes we didn’t even have electricity. My mother was on drugs and my dad was a hus-tler [a drugs dealer] and he got shot in front of me. My mother’s brother shot him. Me and my dad were playing in front of the house and my dad picked me up [as his uncle Tony approached, holding a gun]. My dad said to him, ‘This is all I got in the world, my son, so if you’re going to kill me, shoot’. My mother says he used me as a shield to keep from getting shot.

“Anyway, he was shot in the leg. He thought he had jumped back, but when he tried to get up, he fell. He tried to get up again and he fell. He looked down and he had a hole in his leg. My dad came back and tried to get his [boxing] career off the ground, but I don’t think you can do that in a city like Grand Rapids, Michigan [where the family lived] because you’re surrounded by so many negative things.”

“Growing up in that kind of environment must have left deep psychological scars?”

“I’m just thankful my uncle Roger took me under his wing and I had some good supporters who got me to Las Vegas and the next level. But what really made me want to work hard was seeing my mother working at the old folks’ home. She had to clean them up and she struggled because all the time her back hurt. My grandmother was working too, cleaning offices at a high-rise building and I really didn’t like it. But my mom being on drugs, this hurt me a lot. I never wanted to disown my mother. She’s always been my sweetheart, my baby. When I saw her like that, man, that was too much. I was going to high school and one day I said, ‘I can’t take this no more. I need to really dedicate myself to the sport of boxing to pull my mother and my family out of this situation’.

“See, people don’t really know my story or how I feel inside. I fought to pull my family out of the struggle. People say, ‘This kid is cocky. This kid is arrogant’. But all I did was dedicate myself to what I’m doing. I kept saying to myself that no matter who was in my way, there wasn’t nobody could stop me from getting to the level I wanted to get to in order to get my family out of their predicament. When I come here [to train] I don’t think, ‘I’m getting a lot of money for this’. I’m approaching this fight like I approach every fight, like they’re trying to take food off my table and deprive my family.”

He is carrying $30,000 and the kitchen table in his home in Spanish Hills, a gated community on the west side of Las Vegas, is covered regularly in bundles of cash amounting to upwards of $60,000. Having set a pay-per-view record in the US in May when 2.4m customers each paid $50 to watch his victory over Oscar De La Hoya, Mayweather will become the first fighter to generate seven-fig-ure totals in pay-per-view sales back-to-back in the same year with next weekend’s bout. He stands to make £10m to Hatton’s £5m, confirming his cross-over appeal after he appeared on Dancing With The Stars before being voted off.

Mayweather retired immediately after his bout with De La Hoya, then made known his desire to fight Hatton when the Hitman taunted him in his postfight interview after knocking out Castillo: “You saw more action in those four rounds than you’ve had value for money in the whole of Floyd Mayweather’s career.” So is “Pretty Boy” Floyd’s motivation for boxing diminishing? Has he underestimated Hatton’s pedigree and will to win?

“Not at all,” he replies. “People misjudge me in lots of ways. ‘Making it rain’ [throwing a bundle of cash in the air] is something people see in the hip-hop world, and that’s why I pull out the money I have and flash it on TV. We don’t mean nothing bad. We don’t mean no harm and we don’t want to make it look like we’re better than anybody else. We feel we’re even.

“Everything I got, I got legally, so when I’m on TV and entertaining, I’m basically telling kids, ‘You come from the same background I come from, the urban community. You don’t have to sell drugs to become successful. Enjoy yourself and have fun’. When people come to talk to me, they can get a chance to know me, and what I’ve been through, what I fight for. I don’t go around telling people about the battered women and kids I help because of what I went through with my dad. But I hear people pass judgment all the time about what comes out of my mouth. Other great athletes go home and say, ‘I dogged him on the basketball court. He wasn’t nothing compared to me’. I just say it in public. I’m the best. It’s accepted. In boxing there ain’t no one like me, and Ricky Hatton’s about to find it out for real.”

When Mayweather gets up to leave, he passes his uncle, still holding court near the door. “If Hatton was based here, he would probably never have made it,” Roger tells a group of reporters. “You got a club fighter against the best in the world. It ain’t no contest to me.”

Showtime

Ricky Hatton meets Floyd Mayweather for the world welterweight title in Las Vegas in the early hours of next Sunday morning. The fight is live on Sky Box Office