Floyd Mayweather vs Manny Pacquiao: Ghosts of past cast a massive shadow

It is a complicated business comparing the pampered careers of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao with the fighters from the last 60 years who have won and lost world titles at welterweight.

The fight on Saturday will generate more money than any other in boxing history and will set a cash record that lasts a long time; the only chance of it being broken any time soon will happen if Pacquiao’s tiny fists knock out Mayweather and the rematch is in November.

However, this fight is not just about the money, the towering retinue of fools surrounding both dainty bruisers or the willingness of a bloated media to accept the increasingly crass and absurd claims from the camps of two prizefighters who just happen to be in the right place at the right time. For that is exactly what this splendid fight is, and nothing more.

Mayweather said last week that he is the greatest fighter ever and he wears a trademark cap bearing the initials TBE – The Best Ever – to prove his point. His flock, a vicious gaggle of preening boys and girls capable of igniting Twitter with the threat of violence to any non-believers, jump to his every defence at the same time as retweeting pictures of little Floyd getting in and out of a Lamborghini with Justin Bieber by his side. Muhammad Ali had Elvis Presley and James Brown, Mayweather has Bieber. Go figure, as they say.

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Mayweather has fought 47 times professionally without loss and Pacquiao has won 57 of his 64 fights. At their best they could have competed with any of the welterweight world champions from the last 60 or so years.

It is redundant to consider their modern efforts as inferior, as unhelpful a marker as the delusional belief that generating cash is any true measure of brilliance in the sporting realm. Mayweather and Pacquiao are fine fighters, but they are not the best ever at welterweight.

In 1949, Sugar Ray Robinson defended his world welterweight title in front of 27,000 people in Philadelphia against Kid Gavilan, a fighting refugee from Cuba. Robinson fought 13 times that year and had won the title three years earlier in the 76th fight of a career compiled in adversity and with just one loss at that point.

Gavilan, in his first title challenge, was having his 62nd fight and had been waiting years. Gavilan stood 5ft 10in, Robinson 5ft 11in and that means they would have towered over Mayweather and Pacquiao by as many as six inches.

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Robinson soon moved to middleweight and is considered the best at that weight. When he retired in 1965, after 25 years and 202 fights, he made no claims; he just slipped away to a muddled twilight. Gavilan won the welterweight title in 1951 and, when he retired in the late 1950s, he was not even the best Cuban welterweight fighting at that time; the future world champions Luis Rodriguez, Benny Paret and Jose Napoles, who is the best Cuban boxer in history, had replaced the sad-eyed Gavilan. He managed to grub a living as part of Ali’s early entourage, a ring relic showing the young Cassius Clay, as Ali was known, how to sweetly turn a flicking jab.

Napoles is now a sick man, living in his sixth decade of exile in Mexico and performing tricks and singing for handouts, but in the 1960s and 1970s he was the world’s finest welterweight and untouchable for seven years.

Angelo Dundee worked with Napoles and he also took control of Sugar Ray Leonard’s career. I wish Dundee was still here to pass judgement on Mayweather and Pacquiao; there is a real shortage of the fight game’s icons and I miss their presence in the shadows of Las Vegas. They had a ring savvy that is totally absent from any analysis of Mayweather’s exploits, which seldom even glances back at the men in history who reigned at his weight.

It was Leonard, Tommy Hearns, Roberto Duran, Pipino Cuevas and Wilfredo Benitez who were at the centre of arguably welterweight boxing’s golden age, between 1976 and 1981. They were champions and they never made excuses, fighting each other for the right reasons when profitable alternatives existed.

Mayweather beat the Mexican Juan Manuel Marquez, who was made to fight at a stone above his previous highest weight, struggled at lightweight against Jose Luis Castillo and avoided the full and brutal welterweight Antonio Margarito. Mayweather against Cuevas or the great Puerto Rican Benitez would have been sublime fights.

Hearns, Duran and Leonard would have all beaten Mayweather at welterweight although, perhaps, in rematches the fights would have been closer. The fights would have been even bigger than Saturday’s, make no mistake, and Mayweather and Pacquiao would have been contenders. There is, however, no way that Pacquiao could ever have beaten Duran at welterweight, which was not even the Panamanian’s best weight, and I simply can’t find a way in my head for Hearns or Leonard to lose to either Mayweather or Pacquiao at welterweight.

There are many people who believe that Oscar De La Hoya, who was five years the wrong side of his prime and battling cocaine addiction, beat Mayweather in 2007 in what was a terrific fight. De La Hoya and his peers from the neglected 1990s, Felix Trinidad and Pernell Whitaker, would all start at evens with the bookies in fights against Pacquiao and Mayweather.

On Saturday, the best two welterweights from the last five or six years will finally meet in boxing’s richest prize fight to date, but please don’t think they are the best two welterweights in history.

It is a great fight – an event where sitting ringside will cost more than $200,000 – but it is not the greatest.