Why Floyd Mayweather's lackluster ‘finale’ doesn’t spell doom for boxing

There is really no opponent Floyd Mayweather could have chosen for what he says will be his final bout on Sept. 12 who would have been greeted with excitement or satisfied the majority of boxing fans.

The only one who could possibly have generated large-scale enthusiasm as a Mayweather opponent was Gennady Golovkin, the WBA and interim WBC middleweight champ and one of boxing’s best finishers.

By Tuesday, however, when Mayweather announced that he’d face Andre Berto at the MGM Grand in a Showtime pay-per-view bout, Golovkin had already signed to face David Lemieux in October.

Mayweather is 38, and wasn’t going up to middleweight at this stage of his career. It was never realistic, and many boxing people, even those unaffiliated with Mayweather, say not fighting Golovkin was a wise move.

So Mayweather’s choices were really limited to welterweights and, perhaps, super welterweights.

He could have chosen a rematch with either Miguel Cotto, whom he defeated in 2012, or Canelo Alvarez, whom he bested in 2013. They are, though, well down the road toward negotiating a fight with each other for Cotto’s WBC middleweight championship.

And then there were the welterweight options such as Keith Thurman, Tim Bradley, Amir Khan, Shawn Porter, Jessie Vargas or Kell Brook.

There would have been widespread complaints about any of them.

In choosing Berto, he selected perhaps the worst option, picking the guy who has done the least. Berto has hit the lottery without a single notable victory over an elite fighter.

There was, predictably, widespread consternation among hardcore boxing fans about the selection, and they took to social media in droves to complain. They indicated they preferred either the Cotto-Alvarez pay-per-view, which is expected to be Nov. 21, or the Golovkin-Lemieux pay-per-view, which will be on Oct. 17, to Mayweather-Berto.

It also raises the question in the minds of some about the health of boxing if there is such a unanimous dislike for the final bout of the sport’s biggest star.

It makes sense, on the surface, because certainly Mayweather generates more boxing talk than any other fighter.

But it misses a larger point.

Just think back to about 10 years ago. On Nov. 19, 2005, Mayweather fought Sharmba Mitchell in Portland, Ore., on HBO in what would turn out to be his last non-pay-per-view fight.

In his debut at welterweight, Mayweather was his usual excellent self and stopped Mitchell, a former 140-pound world champion, in the sixth round.

At that point, Mayweather was clearly the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, though he was far from a unanimous choice. But it was laughable to regard him as boxing’s biggest attraction, as he clearly is today.

He had made his pay-per-view debut a few months earlier with a one-sided destruction of Arturo Gatti in Atlantic City, N.J. The bout sold well, hitting 369,000 sales, but it didn’t hint at the titanic figures Mayweather would eventually produce.

He’s fought 13 times on pay-per-view since the Mitchell fight. He’s surpassed 900,000 sales 11 times, gone over a million eight times, bettered two million three times and set the record in May when his bout with Manny Pacquiao sold 4.4 million.

When Mayweather left the Rose Garden after dispatching of Mitchell that night in 2005, though, no one could reasonably have expected what was to come.

And so the Berto fight, however distasteful fans may find it, isn’t the end of boxing as a major sport.

Boxing is uniquely star-driven. It was carried by Jack Dempsey in the 1920s, Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson in the 1940s, Robinson and Rocky Marciano in the 1950s, Muhammad Ali in the 1960s and 1970s, Sugar Ray Leonard and Mike Tyson in the 1980s, Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya in the 1990s, and De La Hoya and Mayweather in the 21st century.

Boxing suffered greatly during the Great Depression, which meant there wasn’t really an iconic star who carried the sport during the 1930s, even though there were many outstanding fighters competing in that era.

What Mayweather’s rise in the last 10 years proves is that there is always someone – always – who will come along and be the face of the sport.

Mayweather has been that face largely since he defeated De La Hoya in 2007 in a bout that set a record at the time with 2.5 million pay-per-view sales.

Since taking the throne, he’s angered many because of his refusal to yield on his beliefs. He’s fought whom he wanted when he wanted, and didn’t yield to pressure from fans or media.

He could have faced Shane Mosley in the late 1990s or early 2000s, when some believed that Mosley was the superior fighter. They didn’t meet, though, until 2010, when Mosley’s best days were long behind him.

Mayweather didn’t jump divisions like, say, Leonard, Thomas Hearns, De La Hoya or Pacquiao did. He began at super featherweight, and has fought most of his career at welterweight. He’s resisted calls to go up in weight to face a seemingly unbeatable foe like Leonard did against Marvin Hagler.

But for every fan Mayweather turned off and lost with those decisions, it’s likely he brought two or three news ones in. He marketed himself to the hip-hop crowd in urban markets, which boxing promoters had long ignored.

He’s going to end his career with close to a billion dollars in career earnings, and may get there if he opts to fight beyond this year. That’s an incomprehensible amount of money for any athlete, particularly one in a sport like boxing, which isn’t one of the major ones in the U.S.

So Mayweather will listen to the catcalls and complaints about his choice of Berto and smile, because he’s going to walk away with yet another eight-figure payday.

But when he finally exits, boxing will hardly face its doom.

A new mega-star will emerge. The frontrunner, fairly obviously, is Alvarez. Maybe it will be Golovkin, or my favorite young fighter to watch, the incomparable Felix Verdejo.

It might be Deontay Wilder or Terence Crawford or Thurman or Errol Spence Jr. or someone not even remotely on the radar at this point.

It’s uncertain who it’s going to be who eventually takes Mayweather’s chair as the sport’s biggest star.

Just know that someone will emerge, just like Mayweather did after 2005, and claim that mantle.

Boxing will even survive the Mayweather-Berto fight.

It always does.