Floyd Mayweather should be ashamed of relationship with Chechen dictator

LAS VEGAS – Floyd Mayweather has two shticks – I’m rich and I’m great – and a thousand varieties of each. The superstar boxer is a relentless self-promoter whose innate marketing genius made him one of the game’s greatest attractions.

And though he’s now retired – yes, it says here, for good, at 50-0 and a Hall of Fame spot awaiting in 2022 – he still occasionally needs to feed the beast.

That desire to keep his name in the headlines, to have people talk about him, is where this talk came up that the UFC would somehow pay him $1 billion for three or four mixed martial arts fights.

Rest assured that’s not happening, but it never hurts to toss it out there and allow the public to run with it, as happened when he posted a video on Instagram that was recorded on FightHype and discussed the, ahem, possibility of a career in MMA.

Have no doubt Mayweather would have been great – one of the best ever – had he chosen to go into mixed martial arts when he was young. The guy is a fighter, through and through, and had he learned MMA from an early age, we would be talking about him now as one of the great MMA fighters ever rather than one of the greatest boxers ever.

But it’s not happening now, not at nearly 41 years old, with millions in the bank and hundreds of fighters who would love nothing more than to be the one to get their hands, and legs and elbows and knees, on him in an MMA fight.

It’s part of the job and it’s what he does.

The second part of his job is constantly reinforcing the notion that he’s rich. He spent a long time during his Instagram chat talking about his cars and the cars he bought for his trusted employees.




Since his retirement, there are no $250 million paydays coming in every few months, so he earns additional cash where he can. One of the ways he does is by making appearances, as so many athletes and celebrities do.

But Mayweather has made a very poor choice this time. He posted a video on his Instagram of Chechen dictator Ramzan Kadyrov, a thug who has been accused of murder, kidnapping and political oppression. He’s anti-gay and reportedly had a plan in place to kill and torture homosexuals in Chechnya. He didn’t have to do it, he said, because there are no gays in the Russian republic.

The United Nations Human Rights Council released a statement in April which, according to a report in The New York Times said, “These are acts of persecution and violence on an unprecedented scale in the region and constitute serious violations of the obligations of the Russian Federation under international human rights law.

“The arrested men are subjected to physical and verbal abuse, torture including with electric shocks, beatings, insults and humiliations. They are forced to give contact details of other gay people and threatened with having their sexual orientation disclosed to their family and community — a move which could put them at risk of ‘honor killings.’ ”

Kadyrov is also not a supporter of women’s rights. He believes in polygamy and when he was criticized roundly for his views on social media, his advice to men was to “lock them in, do not let them go out and they will not post anything,” according to The Times.

Kadyrov is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which should be enough to make any American wary of him. But Kadyrov has created a propaganda machine and he uses fighters – boxers and mixed martial artists alike – to help sanitize his image and present an acceptable public-facing appearance.

He’s flown numerous fighters, including Mayweather and ex-heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, as well as MMA stars such as Chris Weidman, Frank Mir, Frankie Edgar, Fabricio Werdum and Khabib Nurmagomedov, to Chechnya and paid them money to take photographs with him so as to use them as propaganda tools.

Source:Sports.yahoo