By Jim Price: Responding to a mass swarm of negative responses from boxing fans who are seemingly gleeful about unbeaten Floyd Mayweather Jr. going to jail today to start serving his 87-day jail term in Las Vegas, Nevada, WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward took the occasion to speak up in defense of Mayweather on his twitter page.
Ward said “I know a lot of people are happy Floyd is going to jail today, but guilty or not this is nothing to be happy or parade about. Some will attempt to twist what I said about Floyd, but I don’t condone wrong of any kind. What is wrong is gloating over a man’s failure.”
This is so true. There are a lot of bitter people out there who are unhappy with Mayweather because he’s not faced Manny Pacquiao in a mega bout. There are also people who just don’t like the man because of his success and his blunt personality. They want to see him suffer, and this 87-day jail term has made some of these people very happy for some reason. But it’s not something to be happy about if you’re a boxing fan, because Mayweather is a huge part of the sport and is arguably the number #1 fighter in the world in terms of popularity. Pacquiao is popular as well, but I think we just saw in Mayweather’s last fight against Miguel Cotto that he’s second to none in attracting fans to his pay per view bouts.
Mayweather has a lot of options available for him once he finishes serving his time in jail. He can make a lot of money in a rematch with Miguel Cotto or he can take on Saul Alvarez, Pacquiao or Sergio Martinez. The Pacquiao fight is likely an undoable one because of the Filipino star insisting that he deserves a 50-50 stake on the financial split. Mayweather doesn’t agree and he’s got his recent 1.5 million PPV buys for his fight against Cotto as proof in his mind that Pacquiao doesn’t deserve a 50-50 deal.