By Ian S Palmer
The world’s top-paid athlete Floyd Mayweather Jr. will enter the ring again for another huge payday this Saturday, May 3 when he takes on the hard-hitting Marcos Maidana of Argentina. The 12-round bout will be for Mayweather’s WBC and Maidana’s WBC Welterweight Titles and will take place at the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. The bout can be seen live in America on the Showtime pay-per-view network. It’s also on pay-per-view in Canada and British fans can catch all the action on Box Nation.
The undefeated Mayweather who is still arguably the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world at the age of 37, will enter the ring with a perfect record 45-0 along with 26 Kos. The 30-year-old Maidana will take a 35-3 mark with him into the bout with 31 Kos to his name. This matchup features a supreme boxing talent in Mayweather against a slugger in Maidana. However, the challenger does have some decent boxing skills to go along with his mighty power.
There’s a reason Maidana was chosen to face Mayweather here instead of Britain’s Amir Khan, and that’s because Maidana’s style is made to order for the WBC champion while Khan could be his equal as a pure boxer. Maidana’s coming off of the biggest win of his career in which he beat up on Adrien Broner, knocked him down and took a deserved unanimous decision and his title. The Argentine has improved his boxing skills, but they’re still nowhere near Mayweather’s.
Give Maidana credit for working on the basics of the sport and he no longer has to rely on knockouts to win his fights. But realistically, the only way to beat Mayweather is to stop him. The problem with that scenario is that he’s an excellent defensive fighter with a solid chin. On the other hand, Maidana has been knocked down a few times in his career, but still has a good chin, but he’s not that hard to hit and doesn’t have the fastest pair of hands around either.
Mayweather is rather economical with his punches these days and when he does throw them he may want to go to Maidana’s body. While Broner and Mayweather are a little similar in style, Maidana dropped Broner a couple of times and that helped him out on the scorecards. If he can’t do the same to Mayweather it’s going to be a huge uphill climb to try and outpoint him.
Maidana’s not an easy boxer to beat. His three losses came against Khan and Devon Alexander by unanimous decisions and a split-decision defeat to Andriy Kotelnik. Mayweather’s last outing was a majority-decision win over Saul Alvarez in October and this fight could follow a similar path.
Prediction
Mayweather has a one-inch height and three-inch reach advantage on Maidana and he’s a better boxer overall. However, anybody can go down if they’re hit right on the button. Maidana has to hurt Mayweather to beat him and this isn’t going to happen unless Floyd’s chin has weakened overnight. The last time Mayweather scored a legitimate stoppage was over Ricky Hatton back in 2007. We won’t count the controversial Ko over Victor Ortiz in 2011. Mayweather can knock you put when you don’t see the punch coming, like Hatton found out, but other than that he’s not really a heavy hitter. Expect this bout to go the distance with Mayweather taking a rather comfortable decision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMsrEA_jLyE
