By Justin Cabarle: One can’t watch Floyd Mayweather Jr’s recent 12 round decision win over WBA junior middleweight champion Miguel Cotto earlier this month without noticing how much slower the 35-year-old Mayweather is compared to earlier in his career when he was lightning fast, and almost unhittable on defense. Against Cotto and Victor Ortiz, Mayweather looked like he’d lost a lot of hand speed, and his ability to move around the ring seemed to be impaired as well. Mayweather is now walking around the ring like a heavyweight instead of dancing and running around like he did during his prime.
It doesn’t look good for Mayweather if he intends on sticking around the sport for another two or three years. Unless Mayweather intends on carefully picking out beatable guys, I can see him losing if he takes on someone really good like Manny Pacquiao, Amir Khan, Erislandy Lara, Andre Berto, Mike Jones or Saul Alvarez. Those would be really tough fights for Mayweather at this juncture of his career. I can even see someone like Paul Williams beating Floyd right now. And you can forget about Mayweather facing Sergio Martinez. If Floyd takes that fight, he’ll take a beating and likely get knocked out. Mayweather won’t have the size to keep Martinez off of him and he’d likely get pole-axed by one of Martinez’s huge left hand shots. Hopefully Mayweather Jr. doesn’t take that fight because it’s not a good match-up for him..
You can expect Mayweather to continue to slow down in the next couple of years as he goes from fight to fight. I now think he needs to forget about ever fighting Pacquiao because he lost the window that he to beat the Filipino fighter. Had he taken the fight maybe four or five years ago, I think Mayweather would have beaten Pacquiao but not now. Mayweather has lost too much hand and foot speed for him to win that fight.
Mayweather getting hurt by a shot Shane Mosley was a huge warning sign that Mayweather has lost too much of his reflexes for him to beat a truly dangerous fighter like Pacquiao or Martinez. I know Mayweather probably doesn’t want to retire right now because he’s making so much money, but he’s going to need to start being much more selective in the opponents he’s choosing if he doesn’t want to take even worse beatings than he took in the Cotto fight. I see Mayweather losing his unbeaten record really soon if he continues to face quality fighters.