Floyd Mayweather, Jr. will fight Marcos Maidana on May 3rd in Las Vegas per a tweet sent out by Mayweather on his birthday. It will be Mayweather’s third fight for Showtime Boxing.
I will be fighting Marcos Maidana May 3rd on Pay-per-view Showtime/CBS http://t.co/mtj7H8WVxu pic.twitter.com/Rc2N87zcjP
— Floyd Mayweather (@FloydMayweather) February 25, 2014
Mayweather engaged with his twitter followers by asking them to go to his web site to vote for who he should fight.
Who should I fight next? Go to http://t.co/5sw7zBhXwo and vote. I’m going to let the fans decide. pic.twitter.com/Os9kFyAJj2
— Floyd Mayweather (@FloydMayweather) February 4, 2014
According to this Kevin Iole story (via Lockerdome), Khan won the unofficial fan vote.
Payout Perspective:
The “Cinco de Mayo weekend” fight has become tradition for Mayweather. Maidana as his opponent is somewhat surprising as most had Amir Khan as the frontrunner for the shot. Khan would have drawn a lot of British fans as he is from the United Kingdom. He also has argued that he would have brought in a lot of interest from the Middle East as Khan is of Pakistani descent. Yet, Mayweather chose Maidana which is likely due in part to his upset victory over Adrien Broner. Maidana, who is from Argentina, made a strong case for himself as he knocked Broner down twice and his style could bring a much more fan friendly, exciting fight than Khan.
Mayweather is master of social media strategy. He implemented the use of his followers to engage with him on twitter as to his next fight and created traffic for his own web site. Regardless of the opponents he listed on the poll, the goal of creating traffic appears to have worked.
He will always take the easy road because boxing fans are sheep.
UFC fans are drooling zombies… good thing there are less of them everyday.
They stink
It’s definitely the safer choice. I love Kid Cojones, but he won’t touch Mayweather. Khan has the reach, the speed and the straight punches that could maybe (I stress maybe) give Mayweather some trouble. I think Khan would have also been the bigger payday but I could be wrong about that. Maidana is essentially a smaller, not quite as technical and about the same hand-speed version of Canelo.
All in all, not a very interesting fight. I would actually prefer Maidana v Broner II, since that’s a fight that could go either way.
I’ll be hoping Maidana can land something big. But I won’t be paying $65 to watch it.
Good for Maidana though. It’s a big payday for a blue collar fighter who has had to be the “opponent” more than once in his career. And should he lose, he still has the Broner rematch which is a 7-figure payday.
“Maidana is essentially a smaller, not quite as technical and about the same hand-speed version of Canelo.”
…with a much smaller fanbase.
Marcos will make 50 times what Rondo “HUGE UFC ZOMBIE SUPERDTAR” Rowdy just made… sad.
The fact is both Maidana and Khan were fairly safe choices. The problem in finding an opponent that the hardcore fan will take seriously is that there are only 2 left at that weight, Pacquiao and Bradley. And both are getting ready to fight each other.
Maidana was easily the best out of the 2 choices. he’s coming off one of the best fights of last year in which he humiliated a guy who stylistically was compared to mayweather. Maidana is at the peak of his popularity right now. There is a story there that will help sell the fight.
Khan on the other hand is still trying to rebound from a pair of losses. His chin, which is made of MMA level glass would alone remove all chance of him threatening mayweather
As an aside, Khan-Maidana from Dec 2011 was a great fight and showed both pros and cons of their fighting style. If not for Khan trying to elbow Maidana and accidentally hitting the ref (pro wrestling style) and having a point deducted, Maidana may have won that fight.
Any fighter is an easy fight for Floyd! Few can even touch him. Funny how . Dana will always try to discount the Boxing template which makes a fortune, and cant seem to even come close to doing the same when he basically controls 90% of the sport of MMA. All his fighters are hand picked and other fighters worldwide are not even mentioned in UFC circles, so who are the real sheep? lol UFC fans see fighters that Dana gives them and nothing else and are too stupid to see it. So Boxing fans are sheep and UFC fans are blind sheep with Dana leading the way.