In what is shaping up to be the best fight of 2013, Floyd “Money” Mayweather (43-0) and Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero (31-1-1) will finally get the chance to square off after months of pre-fight chatter.
On Saturday, May 4, at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, the time for talk will be over. Until we get there, though, it’s important to look back and see exactly how we got to this point.
Everyone knew that Mayweather would be returning to the ring after his stay in prison, but the long and winding journey to where we are now didn’t come without its bumps and roadblocks.
Mayweather himself was one of the biggest culprits in leading the boxing world astray with who he was going to fight in the first place. After rumors surfaced that Money’s next two fights had been planned out already (h/t ESPN UK), the undefeated champion took to Twitter.
Not only did Money claim that it would not be Guerrero he squared off against on May 4, he claimed that it would instead be Devon Alexander:
Instead of fighting a relative unknown like Alexander, Mayweather and his team realized that Guerrero—a fighter coming off a huge victory over Andre Berto—would be a bigger name and a much tougher challenge:
While Guerrero has called himself a humble warrior throughout this process, he was the first to start the public trash talking with his tweet referencing Mayweather’s history of domestic abuse:
That trash talk was exchanged sparingly on Twitter for a few days until the men met face-to-face for the first time since agreeing to the fight at the Showtime commercial shoot. It was on the set that the trash talking got very real.
This trash talking incident came on the heels of the announcement that both Mayweather and Guerrero would be followed about by Showtime’s All Access crew to ensure that the pre-fight training and build was all recorded for the exciting show.
Starting in late March, Showtime began airing the series of three episodes featuring training segments, candid interviews from the fighters, their friends and their families, and of course, plenty of trash talking.
Showtime was gracious enough to make these segments public, which boxing fans can find here (Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3):
It was during the filming of these episodes that Guerrero made one of the biggest mistakes of his life by carrying a gun into John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, according to ESPN.
Not only did this arrest call the fight into question—those thoughts were drubbed almost immediately—it gave Mayweather even more fuel for his trash talking (h/t Mlive.com).
All of the pre-fight chatter came to a head at Wednesday’s press conference when Guerrero’s father took the podium and decided it was his turn to speak about Mayweather and his previous arrest record.
What followed was nothing short of epic (Warning: Language in the following video is NSFW (not suitable for work):
Now that we are just days away from the biggest fight of the year, it’s clear that while this bout was unexpected, the trash talk and storylines leading into this main event make this as intriguing of a mega fight as boxing fans will see all year.
There will be one final chance to talk at the weigh-in for Saturday’s fight, but it’s time for both men to get down to business, and they know that.
The time for talking is over; it’s going to get very serious very quickly.
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