It all started with a dream with his father, Floyd Mayweather Senior.
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Floyd Mayweather has been known for the ‘Money’ persona for many years now, but where it all began and perhaps more importantly how the journey began and where the rise to stardom originated from, is a tale that is not told too often.
Speaking on his recent UK tour, legendary boxer Floyd Mayweather sat down with Sky Sports’ Johnny Nelson in a very candid and sincere appearance.
Referring to where the aspiration to do well in life all started, he said:
“This dream that I had all started with my father, it wasn’t just me by myself. My father, he was a fighter from Grand Rapids in Michigan, his younger brother Roger Mayweather was a fighter and his other brother Jeffrey Mayweather was a fighter, and it was just a dream come true.
He added:
I’ve always just stayed grounded, whereas you guys see the flashiness. I kept believing and kept working harder. After each victory I worked harder, and harder, and harder. It’s harder to stay at the top then to get to the top.”
Touching on the ‘Money’ nickname and mantra he adopted later in his career (for what he is known for in popular culture as) Mayweather told the audience in attendance:
“People want to be entertained. I think a lot of fighters think in today’s time that it is just about being able to fight good. It takes more than just being able to fight good. You have to have a certain appeal about yourself, a certain aura about yourself and an ability to communicate with certain individuals.”
It turns out Mayweather was also inspired by many people (monetarily) early on from his hometown and local area growing up:
“The first flashy people that you know are the people from your neighbourhood, the hustlers, the go getters. That’s what we called them – go getters.”
Staying in school was something Mayweather didn’t concentrate on at the time, as he felt it would always be there and wanted to roll the dice with his talent (which certainly payed off fiscally in the end).
Mayweather interestingly pointed out that his first taste of wealth and the good life actually came very early on at the age of 16, when his father went to prison.
A young Floyd (aged 16) was introduced to his first sponsor that turned into his first manager in a sense too, Don Hale, who used to fly Mayweather to all the big fights in Vegas first class and by the age of 20, Mayweather was already a millionaire.
Not many know that Mayweather when he started out in his early twenties, actually didn’t want people to realise that he had the type of money he had, with the ‘Money’ nickname not being unveiled as a character until many years later, eventually elevating him to marketing and business levels that very few professional fighters ever have reached.
As a certain famous rapper called Biggie Smalls once said:
“It was all a dream… I used to read Word Up Magazine.”
But for Floyd Mayweather, instead of reading magazines his dream was inspired and ultimately fulfilled through talented fists, personified by an almost super-human work ethic.
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