Tucked away in a corner of Floyd Mayweather’s changing room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas is a space reserved for a black Nike duffel bag that remains with him at all times.
Safeguarded by a member of the 38-year-old boxer’s extensive entourage, and weighing in at around a stone, it’s used to transport the ‘bricks’ of cash that he likes to plough through during the course of a typical day.
Staff call it the ‘pregnant duffel’, for a simple reason: it’s always bulging with money.
Tonight, in advance of Mayweather’s long-awaited showdown with Manny Pacquiao, that bag’s contents will include five shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills, each bundle worth some $50,000 — the equivalent of roughly £31,250.
This not-so-petty cash has been set aside to finance the first couple of hours of what the famously brash fighter, who is undefeated in 47 professional bouts, confidently expects to be a raucous victory celebration.
Festivities will commence shortly after tonight’s fight has finished, at one of Sin City’s many strip clubs.
Mayweather, wearing one of his collection of gold and diamond watches, and dripping with jewellery, will — he hopes — arrive in one of the hundred supercars he has purchased from a single dealership since moving to Las Vegas 18 years ago. (Only last week, he boasted of having just spent $450,000 on a bespoke Mercedes, and a six-figure sum on a gold-plated golf buggy as a birthday present for one of his infant sons).
Once inside the strip club, where he’s expected to be joined by such friends as singers Justin Bieber (who will carry his championship belt into the ring before the fight) and Beyonce’s husband Jay-Z, he will doubtless perform another favourite trick: throwing bundles of banknotes into the air above the venue’s stage, in order to ‘make it rain’.
The atmosphere, an insider was quoted saying, will be ‘wall-to-wall money and strippers’. Local lap-dancers are expecting their biggest payday since 2008, when Mayweather and a hip-hop artist called T.I. flew hundreds of their peers to town for a ‘strip off’ competition, with a $100,000 first prize.
So it goes in the strange, vulgar world of an athlete who — thanks to stratospheric talent, and a knack for self-promotion — has succeeded in becoming the world’s highest-earning sportsman, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated $400 million fortune and earnings that last year topped $105 million.
Safeguarded by a member of the 38-year-old boxer’s extensive entourage, and weighing in at around a stone, it’s used to transport the ‘bricks’ of cash that he likes to plough through during the course of a typical day.
Staff call it the ‘pregnant duffel’, for a simple reason: it’s always bulging with money.
Tonight, in advance of Mayweather’s long-awaited showdown with Manny Pacquiao, that bag’s contents will include five shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills, each bundle worth some $50,000 — the equivalent of roughly £31,250.
This not-so-petty cash has been set aside to finance the first couple of hours of what the famously brash fighter, who is undefeated in 47 professional bouts, confidently expects to be a raucous victory celebration.
Festivities will commence shortly after tonight’s fight has finished, at one of Sin City’s many strip clubs.
Mayweather, wearing one of his collection of gold and diamond watches, and dripping with jewellery, will — he hopes — arrive in one of the hundred supercars he has purchased from a single dealership since moving to Las Vegas 18 years ago. (Only last week, he boasted of having just spent $450,000 on a bespoke Mercedes, and a six-figure sum on a gold-plated golf buggy as a birthday present for one of his infant sons).
Once inside the strip club, where he’s expected to be joined by such friends as singers Justin Bieber (who will carry his championship belt into the ring before the fight) and Beyonce’s husband Jay-Z, he will doubtless perform another favourite trick: throwing bundles of banknotes into the air above the venue’s stage, in order to ‘make it rain’.
The atmosphere, an insider was quoted saying, will be ‘wall-to-wall money and strippers’. Local lap-dancers are expecting their biggest payday since 2008, when Mayweather and a hip-hop artist called T.I. flew hundreds of their peers to town for a ‘strip off’ competition, with a $100,000 first prize.
So it goes in the strange, vulgar world of an athlete who — thanks to stratospheric talent, and a knack for self-promotion — has succeeded in becoming the world’s highest-earning sportsman, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated $400 million fortune and earnings that last year topped $105 million.
Mayweather (left) will take on Manny Pacquiao (right) in tonight's long-awaited showdown
Tonight, win or lose, he will in roughly 45 minutes of action add around $200 million to that pot, taking 60 per cent of the $300 million purse. His opponent Pacquiao, who was also born into abject poverty, and has lost just five of his 64 professional fights, will bank the remainder.
The gargantuan purse makes this the single most lucrative fight in history (little wonder that Mayweather revels in the nickname ‘money’). And its commercial appeal lies squarely in the way that both men have, in very different ways, achieved a sort of celebrity that transcends sport.
Mayweather’s take on fame is perhaps best summed up in a self-portrait he uploaded to his Twitter feed in early January.
Shot on an airport runway, it showed the boxer standing casually on the tarmac, next to his private jet and no fewer than seven of his supercars, worth a cool $15 million. ‘Welcome to my world,’ read the caption.
The boxer — raised in a Michigan slum by Floyd Snr, a former boxer turned drug dealer — has, when he’s not fighting, devoted recent years almost entirely to conspicuous consumption, much of it shared on social media, or recorded by TV cameras.
"This is the American dream - who doesn't want to be rich?"
Floyd Mayweather said...
He has an entourage, a harem of lady friends, and an appetite for luxury that might have made Marie Antoinette blush. Dividing his time between a vast home called ‘Bad Boy Mansion’ in Las Vegas and a compound in Miami, he shuttles between the two in not one, but two private jets, each worth around $40 million.
One is a Gulfstream V that he and his family use; the other, a Gulfstream 4 for his entourage, whom he calls The Money Team and includes, on the payroll, several bodyguards, two full-time masseurs, an attendant employed to carry his hand-sanitiser (he has a phobia of germs), and a personal barber.
This last employee may not have the most arduous of jobs: for several years, Mayweather’s head has always been clean-shaven.
On the clothing front, the boxer is famed for wearing his designer underpants only once, after which each pair is binned. It’s a similar story for his shoes, including $3,000 pairs of red-soled Christian Louboutin trainers. He sometimes leaves suitcases full of them behind in hotel rooms as tips for the maid.
Buying jewellery is another costly hobby. He once spent $6 million on gold and diamond accessories in a single store in New York. Twice last year, he spent six-figure sums on new watches for his 14-year-old daughter, Lyanna. She share pictures of them on Twitter, noting: ‘Time is money so my Daddy went and bought me a Rolex.’
Mayweather’s take on fame is perhaps best summed up in a self-portrait he uploaded to his Twitter feed in early January, which showed off his eight supercars
During another million-dollar shopping trip, in 2013, Mayweather was accompanied by a journalist who asked about his shopping habit. In response, the fighter removed a bank statement from his pocket.
It showed how much cash he had sitting in a current account, earning almost no interest: a cool $123 million. ‘One account, baby!’ he said.
Some of that money is spent at the gaming tables. In Las Vegas, he plays blackjack for $100,000 a hand, and recently tweeted a picture of a betting slip showing that he’d bet $1.4 million on the outcome of a single American Football game.
‘The last time I checked, this is what the American dream is,’ he said. ‘Who doesn’t want to be rich and make this kind of money?’
He may have a point, but that doesn’t exactly make Floyd Mayweather a role model. Indeed, for most of the past 15 years, a dark cloud has hung over his reputation due to a series of seven arrests or citations for domestic abuse.
Five different women have complained of assault at his hands, including Melissa Brim, a fiancee who claimed in 2002 that he had hit her with a car door and punched her in the face and neck, for which he received a suspended sentence.
In 2011, he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for assaulting Josie Harris, the mother of three of Mayweather’s four children. He got into her home, as she slept, pulled her out of bed by the hair, punched, kicked and threatened to kill her.
And as recently as last year, his ex-fiancee Shantel Jackson filed a lawsuit claiming he had during an argument ‘bent her arm, restrained her, and pointed a gun at her foot asking “which toe do you want me to shoot first?”’
Fans of Filipino boxer Pacquiao hold signs prior to the weigh-in. Festivities will commence shortly after tonight’s fight has finished at one of Sin City’s many strip clubs
Shamelessly, Mayweather has leveraged the richly deserved ‘bad boy’ reputation to his advantage, giving a string of interviews in which he expressed no remorse for the abuse of women, and at times adopting the persona of a pantomime villain.
The move might be distasteful. But it’s also highly lucrative. Indeed, many of the TV viewers stumping up to watch tonight’s fight will be doing so in the hope of witnessing the cocksure bad boy of boxing get his comeuppance.
Tonight, win or lose, he'll make $200million in 45 minutes
To this end, his opponent couldn’t be more perfect: Manny Pacquiao is a national hero in his native Philippines, with a rags-to-riches story that makes Mayweather’s pale by comparison. Yet he is also impeccably polite, and unfailingly modest.
Born in a slum, to a penniless single mother, he began fighting in the back streets of Manila as a homeless 14-year-old, for a dollar a time, before he was spotted by a local gym.
International success made him the nation’s greatest celebrity, with two platinum music albums, a TV sitcom (Show Me De Manny) and his own TV gameshow (Manny Many Prizes). His birthday is a national holiday, he has twice been elected a senator, and is so popular that a truce is called in the civil war in the south of the country whenever he fights.
He’s also a committed Roman Catholic who gives much of his earnings to charity, and keeps a Bible at hand, highlighting favourite passages with a pink highlighter.
Though Mayweather remains the bookies’ favourite to win, the match-up is duly irresistible to the public, according to Frank Warren, the doyen of British boxing promoters.
‘You have a classic bad-guy-versus-good-guy fight in which millions of people, people who don’t even watch boxing, want to see the bad guy lose,’ he tells me. ‘That helps make this the biggest fight I think we’ve seen this century.’
And the most vulgar, too
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