adminappearance, his message was the same: I want to fight Floyd Mayweather Jr. next.
Guerrero had the audacity to call out the best fighter in the world even though said fighter was competing several weight divisions above him.
Few took Guerrero seriously and reporters struggled to change the topic to something more grounded when he’d bring up his desire to fight Mayweather. There was no point, the logic went, of talking and writing about a fight that was almost certainly never going to happen.
Guerrero and his team were nothing if not determined, though, and they never gave up hope. In late 2011, Guerrero’s publicist solicited reporters’ opinions about a potential Mayweather-Guerrero match, though Mayweather had no idea at the moment who Guerrero was.
“I probably had heard his name somewhere,” Mayweather said. “Probably. (Manny) Pacquiao’s name I knew. Zab Judah. But I’m in a whole new era of fighters. I’m a promoter, but if you ain’t making crazy noise — I mean, crazy, crazy noise — I probably ain’t (heard of you).”
Rest assured, though, that Mayweather has subsequently discovered plenty about Guerrero, a humble, God-fearing sort who is just crazy enough to believe he can become the first man to defeat Mayweather since Bulgarian Serafim Todorov won a hotly disputed decision at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
Mayweather will defend his WBC welterweight title against Guerrero today in a Showtime pay-per-view bout at the MGM Grand Garden in, by leaps and bounds, the most significant match of Guerrero’s career. It’s a match that is a reward for Guerrero’s seemingly unfounded faith in himself. Despite all the behind-his-back snickers, Guerrero never lost faith, not even when he was widely viewed as a hopeless romantic for thinking it was even possible to come into Mayweather’s field of vision.
“I’m all about fighting the best guys, and he was the best, so I just called him out,” Guerrero said. “I knew that if I didn’t believe in myself and tell people what I wanted, nobody was going to do it for me. I always felt that if I kept beating good guys and I kept doing things people didn’t think I could do, I’d get the fight sooner or later.” — AFP.
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