Show must go on. It remains to be seen whether it will be a high-level sporting spectacle, but boxer Floyd Mayweather, 45, will fight Japanese mixed martial arts star Mikuru Asakura next September. A poster that the organization of MMA Rizin announced with great fanfare this Monday in Tokyo.
“The two athletes will fight in Japan next September, and the date and rules of the meeting will be specified later this month”, assured Nobuyuki Sakakibara, the president of Rizin, very “proud to see this fight take place”. . “I am above all an MMA fighter, and I will use this specificity to win this fight, I am impatient”, affirmed, very briefly and nonchalantly, Mikuru Asakura, 29, the Japanese fighter with sixteen victories in professional fights in MMA (including eight knockouts) for three defeats.
“I’m the best, I’ve seen all the stars (…) and I’ve broken all the records,” replied American Floyd Mayweather, known as “Money”, before describing Mikuru Asakura as “an opponent like an another, and who will do his best. At 45, the great boxing star, undefeated during his professional career (50 wins), said he wanted to “do as always: show the public what they came to see”. Perhaps it should also be seen as an opportunity to cash a new big check against a very famous man in Japan. Asakura’s YouTube channel has over 2.4 million subscribers.
Still no (second) retirement in sight
The super featherweight retired before returning in 2017 to defeat MMA star Conor McGregor. Mayweather then faced at the end of 2018 in Japan a young Japanese kickboxer, Tenshin Nasukawa, whom he had knocked down in two minutes flat. A duel worth more than nine million dollars against a man who was already part of the Rizin league.
Floyd Mayweather also recalled several times on Tuesday his fight “for fun” with the American youtubeur Logan Paul in 2021, which according to him “demands a new meeting on social networks”. We can fear the worst in view of the poor exhibition offered the first time.
Finally asked about a possible new retirement, the highest paid star of the 2010 decade in any case replied that he would retire only when he himself decided.
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