For all of the Mayweathers' complicated relationships over the last four decades, one thing all of them have understood, and long been sensitive to, is the risk inherent to their sport.
Floyd Mayweather Sr., 61, always was leery of matchmakers and their motives during his days as an active fighter, and was known for turning down or pulling out of fights regularly. He fought 35 bouts and 236 rounds professionally. That pales compared to his son Floyd (46, 351) and brother Jeff (47, 338).
Roger Mayweather, with 72 fights and 516 rounds, outstripped them all.
Mayweather Sr. has seen the ravages his sport can wreak. Boxers who take a few too many are derided as "punchy." Some walk on their heels or slur their speech. Some develop tremors.
Some deterioration in cognitive and overall mental capacities occur more subtly, over time, which Mayweather Sr. said he believes his brother is experiencing.
"I'm pretty sure that's what's happening," he said. "I mean, don't get me wrong, that sugar's starting to get to him right now, too. And it's bad when everything gets to jumping on you all at one time."
If not for his nephew Stacy Mayweather — son of his sister, the late Dorothy Mayweather, and Bob Tucker, the father of former heavyweight champion Tony Tucker — Roger Mayweather would be unable to handle everyday functions, Floyd Mayweather Sr. said.
"He's the one who's been kind of helping Roger lately. He's the one who's helping Roger with whatever's going on, regardless. He's helping Roger — I just mean totally, in everything," Mayweather Sr. said.
Mayweather Sr. is the beneficiary of his son's decision to change head trainers, a role he also held from 1998-2000 before walking away in a camp dispute.
He says he doesn't believe his brother's health issues were the primary reason for the change.
"I think while my son was away (in jail), he had time to think about everything that had gone on and wanted to get back together with his daddy," he said.
Jeff Mayweather said he doesn't believe Roger Mayweather's health was the primary reason for the change, either, though he also contends that the aftermath of that 2012 jail stint was at center of it.
A since-deposed camp member, Thomas Summers, sent Floyd Mayweather a letter in jail, trying to convince the boxer to dump his entire advisory structure and enter into an exclusive boxing partnership with 50 Cent.
After that effort was rebuffed, 50 Cent suggested publicly that he was considering hiring Floyd Mayweather Sr. to train his own stable of fighters.
Not long afterward, the switch was made.
"I think it's because 50 Cent said he was going to make his daddy rich," Jeff Mayweather said. "So Floyd said, 'No, you're not,' and took him back."
But the pound-for-pound king himself said Roger Mayweather's health was a core reason for the training change.
Before his May 2013 win over Robert Guerrero, in his first fight back with his father as head trainer, Floyd Mayweather said concerns about his uncle's vision were a central consideration.
"I can't afford for somebody's vision to be bad in a big fight like this," he explained.
Jeff Mayweather said his brothers' passions as boxing trainers are starkly different. Floyd Sr. craves the spotlight, he said, while Roger prefers training young children over seasoned pros.
Himself recently diagnosed with diabetes, Jeff Mayweather is openly concerned about Roger's health. But in balancing what boxing gave to his brother against what it may have taken, he acknowledged that the gym is still the place his brother is most vibrant and engaged.
"In that boxing atmosphere, he's fine," Jeff Mayweather said. "If you ask him about boxing trivia, he's fine.
"Get him outside of there, he's clueless."
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Roger Mayweather says he doesn't notice the changes. But he admits enough other people say they do to give him pause.
"Sometimes, when I'm just by myself, I think of how many fights I had, why I did this, or why I did that," he said. "But that's because if you love something, you're going to take the risk by doing it, and I loved boxing. I took my chances."
He and his superstar nephew perform their delicately timed handpad dance daily, just like they have for most of the last 14 years. He has not been one of the cornermen permitted onto the ring apron for the last three Floyd Mayweather championship fights — those roles have gone to Floyd Sr., Leonard Ellerbe and cut man Rafael Garcia — but in gym preparation, he remains as involved as ever.
He never was the most forceful trainer or tactician when it came to his nephew anyway. He inherited the best fighter in the world. His nephew had a certain way he wanted things done and Roger went along willingly. As a fighter, Roger had frequent disagreements about his own training, and came to view the issue as a fighter's prerogative.
That's why he prefers training children.
"I like training kids because kids don't give you all that, 'Why you don't do this, why you don't do that?' because they're young," he said. "When you train an older person, the person says, 'Hey, let me do something different,' what can you say? I mean, you want to do something different, OK, let's do something different. That's just how it is.
"Even Floyd, he always questions me about why I do this, why I do that. If he wants to do something, do it. It's not a big thing to me. It's a part of boxing."
During his own career, fighting frequently also was a part of boxing, and Roger Mayweather practiced it like few others.
Even by the time he turned pro, it was uncommon for anyone to fight as many as 72 times, as he would. But in an era when the standard-bearer in Mayweather's weight divisions was Chavez, who fought 115 times, the burden to remain active came from the top.
"A person will say, 'Man, you're crazy to get beat up that much,'" Mayweather said. "I don't think about getting beat up. I think about kicking somebody else's ass."
For several reasons, largely to do with boxing's structure, medicine lags in studying the sport's effects on the brain.
A promising Las Vegas-based study, conducted by Cleveland Clinic, hopes to find ways to detect brain injuries early in boxers and mixed martial artists, and/or whether predictors may exist that can help determine predisposition to brain injury.
One confirmed result after three years of the study: The more total fights someone has, the more professional fights he has, and the longer his professional career, the greater the risk of long-term diminished cognitive functions.
"You're fighting all the time, so it's going to take something out of you, one way or the other," Roger Mayweather said. "But I can look back and say, to myself, I think I'm happy I did what I wanted to do in boxing.
"Sure, something's going to happen. Hell yeah. You may be whatever it is you're going to be, something's going to happen. One way or the other, something's going to happen. That's how it is. Something happened. I don't know what. I don't know yet. But I know it was something."
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The Professional Fighter Brain Health Study began in April 2011, administered by the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas.
Promoters in boxing and MMA help support the study, including financially, and neurologist Dr. Charles Bernick already has enlisted most of the 600-700 active and retired boxers and mixed martial artists whom he hopes to test annually in a study which could take six to 10 years, or longer, largely dependent on funding.
Brain scans have become common in many boxing jurisdictions in recent years. If a fighter has met licensing requirements faithfully, and enough past test results were available for comparisons, the sport's existing structure could provide a neurologist with enough information to warn a fighter of potential problems.
But Bernick, at a press conference this year in which he detailed some of his study's early findings, said doctors have "no ability at this time" to determine whether an athlete may be predisposed to long-term brain trauma, or even a way to detect such an injury in its early stages.
Bernick said his study hopes to achieve one or both of those objectives by finding causative links, if they exist.
"We're using MRI scanning — specialized MRI techniques, and even some common MRI techniques," Bernick said. "We're measuring blood genetics and markers in the blood. We're looking at speech. We're looking at cognition. We're looking at behavior."
The early conclusion that how often and how long someone fights "seems to be related to how someone performs on cognitive tests" may have been the most predictable, Bernick said.
Other early returns suggest there may be techniques available to determine whether brain trauma is accumulating "within a year's period," Bernick said, and that repetitive head trauma not only leads to degeneration and shrinking of brain cells but that the damage tends to affect specific areas of the brain, though those areas can vary from subject to subject.
The study also suggests that fighters face a heightened risk of brain trauma after six years as a pro.
Time, indeed, is what messes a fighter up.
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Late Saturday, 46-0 Floyd Mayweather will step into the ring once again.
He hasn't endured any knockout losses or particularly grueling wars on his pristine record. Regardless, when opening bell sounds against Marcos Maidana, some 17 years and 11 months after his pro debut, Floyd Mayweather's boxing career will usurp his Uncle Roger's for the family's longest.
He cried that day when Rocky Lockridge iced his uncle more than 30 years ago.
He was a month shy of his seventh birthday.
Boxing doesn't spare its young.
"Of course, we all love my Uncle Roger," he said. "He's a lot older now. In the boxing game, sometimes we get hit with big shots and it can have wear and tear on you in the long run. That's why I tend on being a defensive fighter."
Floyd Mayweather didn't like his performance in his final fight with his uncle as head trainer. He said he felt overtrained for the Cotto fight. He also got hit more than in most fights.
His father is a defensive specialist, and at 37, against the whirlwind Maidana, whom he defeated via majority decision in May, Mayweather already knows he'll need plenty of defense.
The uncle and nephew have had a strong bond for decades. But when confronted with the decision whether to stick with his uncle, at what he perceived as potential risk to his own career well-being, Floyd Mayweather switched back to his father as head trainer.
He hopes his uncle does the right things to keep himself healthy. Roger Mayweather had a notorious taste for sweets and junk food as a fighter — not unlike his nephew — but insists he doesn't eat sweets anymore.
"The only thing we can do is keep our fingers crossed and pray," Floyd Mayweather said. "Hopefully, everything plays out the way it should be. We want to keep him healthy. Of course, we want him to get the best treatment as possible. But sometimes, when people are a lot older, they're stuck in their ways."
Maybe that's also why the one place Roger Mayweather finds sanctuary is within the belly of the sport which may have led him to need one.
"My Uncle Roger, he's still a hell of a trainer," Floyd Mayweather said. "He does a tremendous job. It's obvious he's doing a tremendous job. We haven't lost thus far."
http://www.mlive.com/mayweather/index.ssf/2014/09/roger_mayweather_health.html
beatiful punches.
I remember watching watching the Mayweathers fight, especially Roger and some of Jeff.
