The best pound-for-pound boxer in the world has announced his next opponent. The next challenger for Floyd Mayweather Jr. (43-0, 26 KO) will be southpaw Robert Guerrero (31-1-1, 18 KO). Guerrero is coming off a surprise unanimous decision victory over Andre Berto and has held five world titles in four different weight classes.
The Mayweather-Guerrero match will be contested at a weight limit of 147 pounds and Mayweather will defend his WBC welterweight championship. It will have been almost a full year since Mayweather last stepped into the squared circle against Miguel Cotto on May 5th, 2012. Since his last bout, Mayweather has spent two months in a Las Vegas jail for a misdemeanor domestic battery incident. While ring rust could be a concern for Mayweather, who will be 36 on May 4th, he has previously had layoffs of twenty-one months and sixteen months on separate occasions with no noticeable dip in performance.
Aside from Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez (41-0-1, 30 KO), who will fight fellow undefeated titleholder Austin ‘No Doubt’ Trout (26-0, 14 KO) on the undercard of the Mayweather-Guerrero pay-per-view, Guerrero is almost universally regarded as the best potential opponent for boxing’s kingpin. The biggest question is whether Guerrero’s unorthodox southpaw stance, along with his willingness to take chances, will be enough to break through Mayweather’s historically great defensive shell with any regularity. Mayweather, who has had boxing gloves on since before he could walk and has been in boxing gyms his entire life, is so naturally gifted inside the ring that his dominance almost seems effortless at times.
Guerrero, who has worked his way up from featherweight (126 pounds), will pose a stiff challenge for Mayweather as he will have a six-year age advantage and is undoubtedly in better ring shape at the moment. Mayweather currently spends his nights sitting courtside at Lakers games in between tweeting pictures of his winning betting slips, sometimes in excess of a million dollars. With Guerrero waiting in the wings, “Money” Mayweather will be making less wagers and likely shifting his focus back towards his training. Mayweather will likely be a sizeable favorite in the fight and I believe that most people would not give Guerrero much of a chance, if any, to pull off what would potentially rank as one of the larger upsets in recent boxing history.
But as supernatural author Rebecca Maizel once wrote, “Ghosts have a way of misleading you; they can make your thoughts as heavy as branches after a storm,” so we should be hesitant to sleep on Robert Guerrero. Because once the gloves are wrapped and the bell rings on May 4, anything can happen.