Floyd Mayweather Jr. has announced that his next fight, scheduled for September 12, will be the final fight of what will then become a 49-bout, 19-year career — one that, if the next fight goes the way of the first 48, will wrap up an undefeated career, tying for the most number of fights in a career without losing.
But even though he is training for that September 12 fight already, Mayweather still has not picked an opponent for that “final” fight — and Mayweather’s trainer, who also happens to be his father Floyd Mayweather Sr., hinted on Monday that despite the welterweight champion, who is also the world’s highest paid professional athlete, making the claim that he will retire after September 12, in fact Mayweather Jr. plans to continue fighting into 2016.
As is typical of most world-class boxers, Mayweather’s training camps last eight weeks. September 12 is exactly eight weeks from this upcoming Saturday, July 18. But unless he names his opponent before Saturday, whoever that other fighter turns out to be will be at a significant disadvantage of a shortened training camp.
While British star Amir Khan has been basically pleading for the September fight with Mayweather, the champ himself has suggested that 31-year-old former champ Andre Berto or even 34-year-old Karim Mayfield — who has never won a world championship — could be occupying the opposite corner on September 12.
Unlike Khan or middleweight champ Gennady Golvkin , neither Berto nor Mayfield would be considered a threat to Mayweather, and the prospect of taking a fight that presents no real challenge has annoyed Mayweather’s father, who says that if his son plans to take an easy fight — or two easy fights — he would be better off simply retiring right now.
“Floyd told me he just wants to get a couple of easy fights,” Mayweather Sr. told the Michigan new site MLive . “My honest opinion, if he feels that way, he should get on out of the game.”
Mayweather and his family hail originally from Grand Rapids , Michigan.
The suggestion that Mayweather Jr. told his trainer dad that he plans “a couple” of fights would contradict Mayweather Jr.’s own claim that the September 12 fight — which is the last of a six-fight contract with the premium cable network Showtime — will be his last.
Mayweather, however, has announced his “retirement” on several previous occasions. Most notably, in 2008 he avoided a scheduled rematch with Oscar De La Hoya, who had lost a split decison to Mayweather the year before, by announcing that he had “decided to permanently retire from boxing.”
But Floyd Mayweather Jr. ended his “retirement” to fight an overmatched Juan Manual Marquez in 2009, and has fought eight times since then.
[Image: Al Bello/Getty Images]