Why Floyd Mayweather Jr is the Best Athlete Ever

Boxer Floyd Mayweather, Jr., is the best athlete ever.  "Yeah, right," the doubters will scoff. They will be quick to point out that Floyd is twenty-nine years old, in mid-career for all intents and purposes and has yet to build a legacy. And, indeed, when one makes such a bold assertion as Floyd Mayweather, Jr., being the best athlete ever, as I have made, it causes an immediate gut reaction in both rabid sports fans and boxing fanatics.  As Oprah would say, it gives one a "whole lot of 'splaining to do."

First, there is the obvious objection as to why Floyd Mayweather, Jr., is not the best athlete ever, which would come from what I would call the "true sports fan." This fan is the sort of person who subscribes to every cable sports program and goes into a euphoric ecstasy during that rare alignment of the planets when football season is in full blast, basketball season is in its ascendancy and hockey season is starting. This type of fan(atic) also watches every tennis match, possibly even the ESPN spelling bees and can tell you the starting lineup and complete statistics of the 1906 Philadelphia Athletics. Sometimes this fanatic is also a boxing fan.  But usually the "true sports fan" will only watch the occasional big pay-per-view match with friends and eschews the humdrum matches offered for free, so to speak, on the major subscription channels HBO and Showtime. For this type of fan, boxing has become sort of a side dish to the main meal of football, basketball and baseball.  Many boxing fans are great sports fans in general, but hardcore boxing fans are a special breed and they tend to stand apart from the average armchair quarterbacks that cheer on the Steelers sixteen (or in their case twenty) Sundays a year.