Pound for pound he is the best boxer and possibly fighter of our generation, his name is Floyd Joy Mayweather Junior, and this past weekend the man who calls himself ‘The Money’ successfully defeated Miguel Cotto, after once again moving up one weight class to fight in the super light middleweight division. In this series of articles we will be looking at the rise of Floyd Joy Mayweather Junior.

Born with Boxing Blood

Born in 1977, Floyd Junior was always destined to become a boxer, his father Floyd Mayweather was a boxer, his uncle Jeff and Roger were boxers, so the young Floyd was always groomed to become a boxer and so it would be, because young Floyd never really considered another career apart from boxing.

According to Floyd, his grandmother already knew that he would become a boxer as he once asked her if he should get a job and she told him to just keep boxing. The Money’s life was one of hardship and struggle while he was growing up. A 9 year-old Floyd lived with his mother in New Jersey in a small one bedroom flat, where the electricity would sometimes be cut. Young Floyd would be exposed to many situations as he would often find heroin needles in front of their yard due to his mother’s abuse of the drug.

And Floyd Senior was never at home, since he had to hustle to feed his family. According to Floyd, his father only managed to spend time with him when he had to train for boxing matches. When Floyd Senior got sent to jail for selling drugs, Floyd Junior used boxing as an escape route to channel all his, anger and frustrations into.

Boxing became his life, he even dropped out of high school to only focus on boxing because he knew that boxing was the only thing he ever wanted. The choice would start to bear fruit when Floyd enter the amateur boxing division where he boast a record of 84 wins and 6 defeats, and where he also won a couple of Golden Glove Championships. In 1996 Mayweather would win bronze medal at the Atlanta Olympics.

The King of the Super Featherweight Division

The same year of the Olympics, Floyd would start his professional career in a super featherweight bout against Roberto Apodaca, whom he knocked out in the second round. Floyd would continue to dominate the Super Featherweight division eventually winning the WBC Super Featherweight Championship in 1998 at the tender age of 21.

However this would only be the beginning of his professional boxing success in the division, as he would later go on to defeat former IBF Super Featherweight Champion Diego Corrales. Before the bout Floyd got quoted saying that, “I want Diego because I’m doing it for all the battered women across America”, in reference to the allegations that Corrales had beaten up his pregnant wife. Floyd would further stoke the fires by telling Corrales that he would beat him just like Corrales beat up “that woman”.

And so it was, Floyd Mayweather won each round of the bout, knocking Corrales down three times in the seventh round as well as two times in the tenth round. Following his victory over Corrales, Floyd would eventually defeat the IBF Super featherweight champion Carlos Hernandez in a defense of his WBC Super featherweight championship.

After this bout, the Money would have one last bout in the super featherweight division defeating the future lightweight and super featherweight champion, Jesus Chavez. By the end of 2001, Mayweather was still ranked the number one super featherweight in the world before he decided to move up one division.

Conclusion

At this point in his career Floyd had established himself as the top super featherweight boxer, so now he would go on to the lightweight division which we will cover in another article.