With the likes of Mike Tyson and Oscar De La Hoya starting to cash nice checks by exploiting the nostalgia of aging fans yearning for their youth, it’s pretty much inevitable that 44-year-old Floyd Mayweather will be coming up with something to do.
Mayweather, who hasn’t had a real fight since 2017’s win over Conor McGregor, was ahead of the highly-pushed exhibition trend, doing a New Year’s Eve “fight” with Tenshin Nasukawa in Japan at the end of 2018. More recently, he’d announced an exhibition with Logan Paul, which wound up fizzling out and not happening for whatever reason.
But Floyd appears to have something in the works, posting a photo with UFC’s Dana White and RIZIN CEO Nobuyuki Sakakibara, saying, “We’re working on a huge deal!”
Sakakibara posted the same photo (though his isn’t cropped to hide that Mayweather makes people wear covers over their shoes in his house) with the caption, “Floyd surprised me by inviting Dana over to his house during a meeting. It’s been 15 years since we have last met. You never know what people can bring you in life. I wonder what will happen from here?”
It’s possible this goes nowhere, but Mayweather has generally not been a guy who loves watching “rival” fighters have big success and get positive headlines and whatnot without him doing the same. I’m not knocking him on that, he’s a genuinely competitive guy and wants to always be the biggest star, the biggest name, the biggest attraction. If he sees people doing numbers, he’ll want to do numbers.
So we’ll see. I’m not counting on anything here, but it’s a noteworthy little development.