Floyd Mayweather still king of intrigue

Floyd Mayweather

leaves us dazzled and confused, as ever. It is what he had done to most of his 47 opponents over nearly 19 years, and now he has added

Manny Pacquiao

to the list of the damned

.

At 38, the story of the finest welterweight since Sugar Ray Leonard lives on but, after his post-fight threat to give up his three belts, it is a story invested with as much intrigue and doubt as it was beforehand. We are in limbo still.

The fight was supposed to settle the biggest argument in modern boxing. It did not quite deliver. Given their ages (Pacquiao is 36), it was not a total surprise that neither of them could sustain the quality of the exchanges or the vigour of their past over the course of 12 rounds, although there were slivers of magic from both.

Some of Mayweather’s slipping and sliding was sublime, his flat-footedness under pressure less so, and Pacquiao never quite nailed an opponent obviously too big for him to hurt to the point of stoppage.

No consensus

But there was no knockout, there were no knockdowns, no major cuts or bruises and no consensus, beyond the scorecards of the judges, that Mayweather had schooled an opponent who later revealed he went into the fight with the vestiges of a chronic injury to his right shoulder.

Having been persuaded after nearly six years of often pointless wrangling to put his precious “0” on the line, Mayweather proved he was the better fighter on the night, although the thousands of fans among a house of 16,507 who booed the verdict and his victory speech clearly were pulling for the Filipino. Sometimes Mayweather can’t win, even when he does.

Sometimes Pacquiao loses – four times in 12 visits to the MGM – when he might be considered hard done by.

Boxing, always desperate for champions to define an era, is left with a proud but weary champion. He is unbeaten yet unfulfilled.

“I might relinquish my belts,” he said a few hours after winning on all three scorecards, two of them realistic at 116-112, the third a 118-110 aberration. “Let other fighters fight for my titles.” Guardian Service