Columnist Dean Juipe: Mayweather brings it on himself

Dean Juipe

Friday, Dec. 6, 2002 | 10:05 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4084.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. came into professional boxing with a clean slate, like most everyone else.

With exceptional talent and an almost cherubic appearance, he playfully fit the mold of a baby-faced assassin. An Olympic bronze medalist in 1996 and a first-rate defensive specialist, he signed with a major promoter (Bob Arum) and let his charisma and fists come to the fore.

After a quick rise through the ranks he became a world champion, as he still is today heading into a Saturday fight with leading lightweight contender Jose Luis Castillo at Mandalay Bay.

But, at 25 years old, Mayweather is not only no longer cute, he's surly and argumentive. And because he said he's "afraid" of doing interviews because the stories often turn out "negative," he more or less spent this week in seclusion and skipped Thursday's final prefight press conference at the fight site.

However harmless, it was a poor decision on Mayweather's part. He's getting $2.4 million for the fight and the arena is not sold out, so he had a moral if not fiduciary duty to lend his presence to the event even if his heart wasn't in it.

I don't have any personal dislike for Mayweather, who lives in Las Vegas, and I can only hope that in time he'll get himself back together. But he may already be on a slippery slope that can only lead to more and more trouble.

The guy has been in so many scrapes and legal hassles that I've had to create a folder simply to keep track of them all. For comparison's sake, that's something I've only ever done for one other boxer: Mike Tyson.

Best I can tell, Mayweather has at least three legal issues currently pending, the result of hitting a man over the head with a champagne bottle; beating another man until he was unconscious and threatening that man's family with a gun; and being in a vehicle that ran the mother of one of his children off the road. (These are all "allegations," we need to note.)

An attorney, John Moran III, who is representing the man who was supposedly beaten, told me earlier this year that what's known of Mayweather's indiscretions is only the tip of the iceberg. He claims -- and states that he's not exaggerating -- that Mayweather has been involved in "hundreds" of other unlawful incidents, but that the police are too overworked to pursue them all.

Moran questions how the Nevada State Athletic Commission can even license Mayweather anymore, yet the NSAC has a valid defense in that Mayweather is not a convicted felon. But as part of the resolution on a domestic violence complaint against Mayweather that was resolved in April, it was stipulated then that he would be looking at mandatory prison time if he was convicted again of anything within seven years.

So it's easy to believe he's closer to going to jail than he is to becoming the finest lightweight in history, which had once been his goal.

Mayweather has also alienated Arum; dismissed his likeable and well-educated uncle, Jeff, from his camp; and not only dismissed his father as his trainer but exiled him from his house and had a van he had given him repossessed.

What a sweetheart.

Negativity? Everything in that vein that Mayweather sees in print about himself is solely and exclusively the result of his own sordid habits.