Mayweather?s action, a slur on all freedom-loving people
By Eddie Alinea
PhilBoxing.com
Sun, 07 Mar 2010
If heroes are measure of society, then the events of the past months should tell us of the present moral degeneration. Five decades ago, a boxer named Sonny Liston ruled the sport and everyone feared and disliked him.
Boxing writers wrote then that he was a leg-breaker for the Mob when not breaking heads atop the ring.
Some decades later came a new Sonny Liston, a leg-breaker fighting out of New York named Mike Tyson, who took joy from the sport and replaced it with vile epithets on worldwide television, fearsome punches in the ring and utter disrespect for the people who helped him and the opponents who stood before him.
Now comes Floyd Mayweather Jr., who like Liston and Tyson was a product of environment that made him a fighting machine, unchallengeable by men. Sadly though, like the duo before him, it made him an American celebrity, a station that replaced heroism as the goal of a money-infatuated society.
Like Liston and Tyson, Mayweather, he who protects his unbeaten records by choosing his opponents while ducking those who he thinks are capable of beating him, has that flare to berate people, the last of whom was Filipino ring idol Manny Pacquiao, the only man to win seven world championships in as many weight divisions who made the mistake of negotiating with the Mayweather camp for a fight designed to become the greatest in the modern era.
From the time the matchup fell out of the sideline on the strength of Mayweather?s preposterous demand for an Olympic-style blood-testing, this blubber-mouthed pug continued issuing statements in utter disrespect of the reigning World Boxing Organization welterweight belt-holder, all of which he never substantiated.
Why, he and his father, Mayweather Sr., uncles in obvious approval of his promoters and handlers, even came out with a stupendous pronouncement that Filipino soldiers are taking performance enhancing drugs to prevent them from feeling the effect of bullets. They even added that the Philippines is a center in the production of illegal substance.
An insult, not only to Pacquiao as a Filipino, but to the entire Filipino nation as well.
The Mayweather family did not stop from there. Out of their hatred, or, as many would have it, envy, they banned a pair of Filipino journalists, including Chino Trinidad of GMA-7, from covering the press conference held in Los Angeles to hype Mayweather Jr.?s fight with Shane Mosley
If Mayweather?s camp resorted to that dirty tactic as part of selling that May 1 fight, then that tantamount to violating the journalists? basic freedom of the press guaranteed by the constitution of all democratic countries, including the United States where such freedom originated.
A slur on the entire freedom-loving people.
It took Top Rank top honcho Bob Arum to take the cudgels not only for Trinidad and the Philippine press, but for the entire lovers of freedom in the entire universe when he was quoted as saying that this crap of making up things must be put to a stop.
Arum, a Harvard law graduate, demanded that the Mayweathers, including the Golden Boy Promotions top brass Oscar De La Hoya, Richard Schaefer et al, should apologize to the entire (Filipino (nation) and the Americans for having ?treated people from another country this badly.?
"I really believe that somebody has to educate these people, and to teach them what it is to be a responsible promoter toward journalists. For Schaefer and De La Hoya to have permitted this to happen, they have to call a press conference and apologize for the entire Filipino and to the Americans for having treated people from another country this badly," Arum said.
We say amen to that.
Click here to view a list of other articles written by Eddie Alinea.
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