Boxing is admirable in its primal beauty. The best fighters are ferocious athletes, tacticians with the endurance of marathon runners.
They work amid broken noses, bruised organs, and head shots that send the brain rattling from one side of its casing to the other. You hope for your man to knock the other man senseless, and the sooner the better. A right cross below the heart, a left hook, and bye-bye.
Floyd Mayweather Jr, who on Sunday will meet Manny Pacquiao in a money swamp of a championship welterweight bout, is a master of this predator's ecosystem. He swings an executioner's ax and drops opponents with startling ease.
"Fighters aren't scared of each other," Freddie Roach, Pacquiao's trainer, noted. "That isn't part of the sport."
It is a reasonable bet, however, that the girlfriends, wives and children of Mayweather, a professional fighter with a body like coiled iron, view fear in a different light.
There is another face to the man known as Pretty Boy, or Money, or TBE, his acronym for The Best Ever. He is the established best fighter of his time and an established, serial batterer of women.
To take just one data point among many: At 4 am on September 9, 2010, Mayweather and a friend came into the house of Josie Harris, mother to three of his children. He was not affectionate. Mayweather questioned Harris about dating another man (Mayweather at the time was himself with another woman). He threatened to make her disappear.
Then, with those leaden fists, he struck with a champion's ferocity in the back of her head. He pulled her off the couch and twisted her left arm. All of this comes from court papers. Mayweather's preadolescent sons, Koraun and Zion, heard their mother's cries and ran into the room. Pretty Boy growled at Zion: You call 911 or run out of the house, and I'll "beat you." He also threatened to beat Koraun.
Koraun wrote a statement for the police in block letters: "I saw my dad was on my mom said go to the office he was hiting my mom."
To extrapolate an indictment of boxing from the misdeeds of a single fighter is unfair. Boxing is a naturally brutal sport; not all pugilists are naturally brutal. Some are strikingly gentle outside of the ring, and most of those men appear to carry that manner behind the closed doors of family life too.
Pretty Boy is certifiably not such a man. You drive over to the Las Vegas Justice Court and rustle through the papers of the criminal charges placed against him, and soon enough you've got enough paper to stuff a file cabinet.
Let's pull out one from August 2003, when Mayweather encountered two female friends of his girlfriend, Harris. In the argot of the criminal complaint, Mayweather "did unlawfully use force or violence" upon Kaara Blackburn "by punching said Blackburn." He did the same unto Herneatha McGill.
He pleaded guilty and got a suspended sentence in that one.
He's not so terrific to men, either. Mayweather threatened one fellow that his "homies" would come over to take care of him. Mayweather was not being solicitous. His homies, he told this man, had guns.
Another fellow made the mistake of smack-talking with Mayweather in a nightclub on the Strip. Witnesses said the talk appeared friendly until it wasn't. At this point, the man got "somewhat uncomfortable." With good reason, as it turned out. The man turned and began to walk away. Mayweather, according to the account of several witnesses, picked up a champagne bottle and brought it down on the back of the man's head.
The bottle broke. The man bled. Mayweather and his entourage rushed out the door and hailed cabs. A lot of security guards suffered unfortunate memory loss.
Ask Mayweather and he says all of this is unfair: no photographs exist, even though, yes, he took guilty pleas.
"I'm black, I'm rich, and I'm outspoken," he told Katie Couric, who conducted a strikingly credulous interview. So the question: What do those of us who will watch this fight, which could be splendid, make of this? A fan could root last year for the Baltimore Ravens and convince himself that running back Ray Rice - who hit his fiancee with a knockout punch in an elevator - was not the sum and total of his team.
The virtue of boxing is that it's mano a mano. You're not rooting for the Mayweathers; you root for Mayweather. Every boxer is more or less his own boss. The ruling bodies governing this sport are barely conscious.
Mayweather has served a wee bit of time, although his sentence suggests a bill to society paid at pennies on the dollar. He pleaded guilty after beating Harris and threatening his own sons. The judge was kindly. He sentenced the champion who beats women to 90 days. Then he postponed the sentence so that Mayweather could fight for a championship that earned him millions of dollars.
Las Vegas is endlessly forgiving.
It's easy to take the hallucinogen-tinged walk through the MGM Casino, which is thick with fight fans. You push past hefty women posing coquette style by the faux boxing ring, past young and not-so-young men laden with gold and faux gold necklaces, and wearing Mayweather gear - it's clear the boxer is a brilliant businessman. Maybe you conclude this is a bloody, ugly carnival.
I'll be there, and if the pay-per-view, ESPN, HBO/Showtime hyperventilating is to be credited with truth-telling, so will many millions of fight fans. Pacquiao and Mayweather will feint and thrust and pulp one another. One or the other might suffer a knockout.
"Manny knows that getting knocked out is part of the sport," says Roach, who once saw his man drop so stone cold to the canvas that he feared his fighter was dead.
These men don't lack for bravery in the ring.
Outside the ring is another matter entirely. Koraun spoke not long ago to USA Today about that terrible night when the greatest fighter of our time jumped atop his mother and began beating her with his fists.
"He is a coward," Koraun said of his father.
©2015 The New York Times News Service
