Mayweather says no rush to have Gervonta Davis face Vasyl Lomachenko
Floyd Mayweather is building Gervonta Davis at his own pace.
Don't hold your breath on former junior lightweight champion Gervonta Davis taking on Vasyl Lomachenko any time soon. In this conversation with FightHype, Floyd Mayweather talks about taking his time in developing the young and talented Davis and why there's no rush to have him face the #1 guy in the division. Check out some excerpts below...
"[Davis] beat three undefeated fighters in a row. Now I don't know no other fighters right now that's beat three undefeated fighters in a row. And [Vasyl] Lomacheko — he can't fight. He can't fight. One thing we're not gonna do is knock a guy that can fight. He can fight.
"But the same way you give it is the same way you gotta be able to take it. Now we know that [Guillermo] Rigondeaux was extremely small. Extremely small. So my thing is this, with all these young fighters — ya'll calling out 'Oh we wanna fight Tank'...at the end of the day, guess what? Tank has a promoter.
"Tank can come to me and say 'Floyd, this is the fight that I want.' At the end of the day I'm gonna say 'Tank, there's no rush, you're still young...You got a lot of fight left in you. You're only 22....I mean if he wanna fight until he's 36, 37, he's still got 15 years left. He okay. But if you rush and fight all the hard fights right now, you ain't gonna be able to make it to 38...
"There's no rush. If 'Bottom Rank' is the top company in boxing...we gonna pull up the paydays of these different fighters from Top Rank and then I'ma show what these guys should be getting, why they underpaid.
"...I'd rather be not be known as the #1 pound-for-pound fighter in boxing than to be getting $6-7-8 million a fight...I don't take nothing away from Lomachenko. He better stop listening to his promoter...he's been treating fighters bad for over 40 years.
"As soon as I got away from Bob Arum I instantly started making crazy money. Instantly! ...so if Lomachenko got $1.2 million and [Rigondeaux] got $400k, that's $1.6M. Well, you know, I got fighters making that. So at the end of the day, I don't got nothing against Lomachenko at all, I wish him nothing but the best.
"But don't ever let nobody put no battery in your back to pump you up to talk disrespectful about no fighter that's with me — 'cause I'm not hiding nobody. Tank wanna fight you. Tank ain't hiding from you...Tank asked me about fighting you on more than just one occasion...as a father-figure I told him 'there's no rush.'"