It’s that time of year again.
Floyd Mayweather Jr. announces an opponent—in this case, Argentine slugger and fellow welterweight titleholder Marcos Maidana—for a springtime Showtime pay-per-view extravaganza, and the boxing world’s self-anointed cognoscenti immediately sets social media ablaze with critique.
“It’s just another cherry pick,” shriek the “Money” bashers, while claiming the unbeaten Mayweather has done little in recent years beyond protecting the zero on the right side of his record.
Meanwhile, those who view the now 37-year-old in a light similar to which he sees himself—“The Best Ever”—view Maidana as the latest in a series of stern tests that other fighters, namely wannabe protégé Adrien Broner and former foe Victor Ortiz, have been unable to pass when given the chance.
In truth, the reality likely lies somewhere in between.
While Maidana is no Timothy Bradley or Manny Pacquiao by anyone’s estimate, neither is he totally unqualified to be sharing a stage with the consensus best fighter in the sport.
At age 30 and a decade into a pro career that began about 220 miles from his hometown of Corrientes, Maidana has been a fixture on the championship level since early 2009, when he dropped a split 12-round decision to then WBA 140-pound champion Andriy Kotelnik, then pummeled the aforementioned Ortiz into surprise premium cable surrender just four months later.
He was outpointed by Amir Khan and Devon Alexander in subsequent main event opportunities but remained relevant enough with stirring defeats of Erik Morales and Josesito Lopez, positioning himself as the heretofore unbeaten and Broner’s unlikely foil when the two met two months ago in San Antonio.
It was the stunner that occurred that night—Maidana dropped “The Problem” twice and rumbled to a wide unanimous decision—that turned him into a plausible blip on Mayweather’s big-fight radar. And it’s the straight-ahead, take-three-to-land-one approach that has at least some people out there, be they Mayweather haters or Argentine devotees, convinced he can do the same come May 3.
It’s not likely by any stretch, as evidenced by 14-to-1 odds posted on U.K.-based Bet365.com within 24 hours of the official matchup announcement. But it's also not impossible, as proven by reams of results in which seemingly invincible world-beaters were ultimately eclipsed by younger, less-shiny stars.
In fact, though his 2013 performances against bigger, stronger foes Robert Guerrero and Saul Alvarez would indicate otherwise, the continued dominance of Mayweather, who blew out candles on Monday and has been fighting for pay since 1996, becomes a less-certain proposition with each passing hour.
After all, for every 49-year-old Bernard Hopkins—though he’s still beating men young enough to be his sons—there are hundreds more like Roy Jones Jr., who went from pound-for-pound kingpin to eroded ex-champ in one night at age 35 thanks to a history changing left-hand counter from Antonio Tarver.
Just a year earlier, Jones had beaten a capable and accomplished John Ruiz while capturing token jewelry at heavyweight. Just a year later, he was on the short end of a three-fight skid that precisely no one had forecast as either imminent or likely—even at his somewhat advanced age.
Though it seems impossible in the lingering afterglow of 45 mostly clear-cut wins, the same could happen to Mayweather at any given moment, simply if his impeccably conditioned body wakes up one day bent on acting its real age rather than an age at which virtuoso performances have portrayed it.
The arms were still taut and the abs still rippled in 2004, but, at least in Jones’ case, the flawless chassis only masked subtle weaknesses—speed, reflexes and punch tolerance, among them—that a less-traveled foe was able to exploit when proximity met opportunity.
Though few would proclaim the rough-hewn Maidana is as capable a foe in 2014 as Tarver was a decade ago, it seems a no-brainer to assume he’ll be within range to land the same sort of paradigm-shifting blow at least once over the course of 36 minutes of in-ring interplay.
And if it’s indeed time for regime change on May 3, chances are it won’t be a subtle transition.
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