Will Floyd "Money Where His Houth Is" Mayweather take on Conor Mcgregor?
Remember when it was considered inappropriate to discuss private money matters in public? Floyd “Money” Mayweather, Jr. must’ve missed that memo.
In the latest edition of Money questioning an Irishman’s green, Floyd Mayweather Jr. took to Twitter to release a side by side, on-screen comparison of his and the first concurrent two- weight champion of the UFC, Conor McGregor’s, *net worth.
650 million to 2.5 million, disrespectively.
*It is important to keep in mind these figures were posted by Mayweather and have - maybe
the most important number in the Tweet - ZERO credibility.
The remarkable truth, however, behind this Tweet can be found in some simple math. Forbes has Mayweather’s net worth somewhere close to half his declaration (340 million) and McGregor’s at just over ten times what Floyd suggested (30 million). Having said that, even when multiplying McGregor’s estimate by 10, and dividing Mayweather’s in half, Floyd’s net worth is still roughly ten times more in stature.
For those who are not left-brained, math majors, simply put: Mo’ Money, No Problems.
Not for Floyd Mayweather, no matter how ridiculously inaccurate his Tweet may have been.
Which secretly... may be the genius behind it.
If we were doing ‘Yo Mama’ jokes and I said ‘Yo Mama is so fat, she got arrested at the airport for having 10 pounds of crack.’ But when the real story came out, though the numbers were a bit off, the story was still... true? That your mother was arrested at LAX for being so fat, but it was only 5 pounds of crack... That slander would be so effective, even the ‘Yo Mama’ National Joke Commission, the NJC, would strip me of my title for going too far. And before you Google it, no, there’s no such thing. Don’t lie; some of you were about to.
We Google everything.
Which is how I came to know now, what I didn’t know yesterday. That the two top grossing fighters in their respective sports had a chasm of over 300 million dollars between them. If anything, I saw them the way the average, casual sports fan did - as 1-A and 1-B. But after doing some digging, inspired by the outlandish prodding of Mayweather’s Tweet, I’ve come to find out Conor is closer to someone from Baltic Ave being asked to leave the lobby of Park Place; than asking his penthouse suite neighbor if he can borrow a couple of eggs.
Of course, Dana White, with an obvious bias as President of the UFC, wants everyone to forget that whole gap thing. Why? Because, as humans, we attribute value to price tags more than any other single variable. Not the craftsmanship, not the durability, not even the quality. Nothing dictates an object’s worth more than the object’s worth.
A $10 cup of coffee will always be perceived as a higher valued cup of Joe than the dollar Java from the corner convenient store. Unless you pour them out in unmarked, paper cups and charge 5 bucks for each. Which is exactly what Dana tried to do by offering both men
what men, staring up at the fight game’s glass ceiling, have been struggling for since the inception of champions vs challengers... Equal Pay.
We sure got it rough, don’t we boys?
Dana offered both men a fair purse of 25 million dollars each, should they square up against one other in the squared circle. The problem with such offer lies, again, in the numbers. 25 million equates to 83% of Conor’s net worth. For Floyd’s?... 7.3%.
By those accounts, for McGregor, the fight makes sense. But for Mayweather, the fight makes... cents.
Mayweather lives in Las Vegas, the hospitality and tipping capital of the world. You’re not getting him out of bed to work for less than 20%. And there’s nothing Dana White can do about it, short of increasing Mayweather’s pay, short-siding McGregor, his fighter, while simultaneously lop-siding the public perception of the two opponents’ value... in a direction opposite to his best, financial, interests.
Imagine what kind of motivation Mayweather would need, with his current bankroll, to get into the ring with McGregor and subsequently put his heath, career, and legacy at risk.
You can’t...
Because it doesn’t exist.
Which, inherently, solves the riddle as to why Mayweather keeps goading Dublin’s “Notorious.” Because he’s savvy enough to know the fight is never going to happen.
And if it doesn’t, then he’s free to talk all the sh$t he likes, being that he’ll never be caught in a situation where he’ll have to back it up.
The mouth is a powerful tool on the schoolyard when the principal is holding you back.
And though Mayweather may go down as the most successful, pound-for-pound, graceful, tactical, intelligent, and untouchable fighter in the history of prizefighting – make no mistake - he will go down...
... Should Conor land one of his Irish goodbyes.
50 Cent said in Patiently Waiting, on his take of the popular proverb, “You shouldn’t throw stones if you live in a glass house. And if you got a glass jaw, you should watch your mouth. Cause I’ll break your face.” As I said before, Mayweather is a proven champion. He, by no sense of the term, has a glass jaw. But Conor’s hands are most certainly made of stone. And anyone who’s ever laid brick knows no matter what the house is made of – advantage: stone.