40-year-old Floyd Mayweather admitted to the media this week that his training camp has been tough so far, and as such he’s now utterly convinced that his upcoming bout with Conor McGregor on August 26th will be his last.
“I’m not the same fighter I was 21 years ago,” Mayweather said in Los Angeles. “I’m not the same fighter I was 10 years ago. I’m not even the same fighter I was two years ago. I understand that but I have that fighter’s mentality. But this will – I spoke to Al [Haymon]. Today we had a meeting and I can’t push my body [anymore]. It’s grueling. Training camp is grueling. I can’t do it anymore. It’s rough. Training camp is rough. I’m just going to the gym, working hard everyday and it’s rough. This has to be my last one.
“After taking a couple years off, I was okay but then we end up somehow making this fight happen and now I really know that this is it. Deep in my heart, this is it. I can’t.”
Mayweather went on to reveal that he’s spending much more time resting up between training sessions this time around compared to his fights in years gone by.
“I’m taking a lot of time off. I’m letting my body rejuvenate. Letting my body heal just to make sure that before I go out there to compete, whether it’s in the boxing gym or in that squared circle, I want to make sure that my body is as close to 100 percent as possible so I’ve been letting my body do a lot of resting. I’ve been doing a lot of resting this training camp whereas other training camps I really wasn’t resting as much.”
It’s hard to say how much of this is actually true and how much of it is just gamesmanship. After all, it’s beneficial to him in a number of different ways to make it seem as if he might actually be beatable after all.
After all, it may convince more fans to buy the pay-per-view if they think that McGregor has a real chance of making it a competitive fight against the aging legend, while there’s also a chance that all this talk of not being at his best might lull the Irishman into a false sense of security.
This narrative also plays in Mayweather’s favor after the fight too. If the unthinkable happens and he does lose then he can point back to the fact that he’d been saying in the build-up that he was no longer the fighter he once was, and if he wins then he gets to boast that in his prime he’d have beaten him even more convincingly.
Still, there’s likely to be some truth to Mayweather’s claims as he’s spent his entire life boxing and that inevitibly comes with a lot of wear and tear, and it’s known that he’s been dealing with hand issues for years.
How much of a factor it will be in the fight remains to be seen, but McGregor will gladly take every little advantage he can as he takes on this daunting challenge against the best boxer of his generation.
