Tattooed strippers, a $1m watch ... and karaoke with Bieber
(An audience with Mayweather, boxing’s bling king)
THE man with the million-dollar watch is in the room and things, as usual, are getting a little weird. A British chap in a tuxedo with a £300 ticket is repeatedly yelling: ‘Hail the king, baby, hail the king.’
A small group of tattooed strippers are drumming up business for later in the evening and Chris Eubank is in another corner, unable to get away from the requests for his picture.
His photograph is trading for f ree; the other guy i s Floyd Mayweather and he’s asking for £70 a snap. Step on the red carpet, smile, move along, next. The queue is perhaps 100 deep — a conveyor belt of cash f or a man who measures everything in carats and gold sticks.
An artist wants a piece of the action and has positioned a giant painting next to the dining hall entrance. The hope, he says, is that his subject, the retired fighter who rates himself as the best in history, will walk past and sign it. Doubles the value that way. One of the strippers thinks it’s good and she’s right.
Suddenly a commotion. The pictures have stopped and the king wants his dinner. That is why we are here, on a Thursday night in the Hilton on Park Lane.
Mayweather has granted an audience to those who want to pay up to £600 to be part of it. The spit pit of boxing and the shine of wealth,lth, all under one chandeliered roofoof and all present in one intriguing, ng, extraordinary, contemptible man. an. He is one of the greats of sporting ng history, capable of earning more re than £200 million in aye arr through fighting men and capable of serving time in prison for domestic violence.
His personality is a riddle and his life is a circus, and this week has been typical in many ways. Take Wednesday, for example, two days after his £40m jet landed him in London via a trip to Belgium. ‘A close friend called from Turkey and d wanted me to come to dinner,’r,’ Mayweather tells Sportsmail.ail. ‘I told him I was very busy but he was paying a very high price. So I went to my pilots and told them, em, “Wake up, take me to Istanbul”.’ .’
Before long, the conversation h has turned to the cluster of diamonds around his neck. Mayweather rolls up his sleeve to show his watch. ‘I went to Dubai last year and this was $1m. I have a lot of timepieces I collected through the years. I am just blessed.’
The numbers on that score are boggling. His earnings from 49 fights and 49 wins were approximately £550m, he owns £14m worth of cars, including one of the two £3.3m Koenigseggs ever made. That has been bought since retirement, in which time he has spent £34,000 in one night in a Miami strip club with a 45-strong entourage, sang karaoke with Justin Bieber in Bora Bora and tookt the value of his watch collectionc alone beyond $7m. He is known to gamble more than £700,000 in a single bet. H He r e peats: ‘ I am j ust b blessed.’ And now he is in the UK se selling pictures and memories in a series of speaking eng engagements. In theory. He saw his s shows in Cardiff and Bristol canc cancelled at the start of the week week. The latter was set to be targ targeted by a domestic violence prot protest group, t hough t he organisers and entourage say that isn’t why it was scrapped. Other stops are planned for Glasgow, Sheffield, Bolton, Birmingham and, intriguingly, the Bunyan Centre in Bedford.
‘I just want to thank my UK fans,’ Mayweather says. The advertised plan for the evening in London was for Jonathan Ross to host the black-tie event. Alas, Ross was replaced by Spencer Fearon, a former fighter-turned-promoter, and Richard Blackwood does a comedy turn on stage. Ross’s r epresentatives say he was approached about a charity function but nothing was ever confirmed.
Mayweather chomps away on his dinner at the front table. An auction of his gloves and various memorabilia, with proceeds to charity, averages around the £3,000 mark. The big deal is the Q&A at the end. He emphasises that he ‘retired from the sport and the sport did not retire me’ and ‘I have put my family in a comfortable position’. He suggests the younger Mayweather would beat the older Mayweather and plugs the career of a British fighter he oversees, Ashley Theophane.
An earli er question, f r om Sportsmail on the subject of Amir Khan’s defining f i ght against Canelo Alvarez, had been met with a firm: ‘I don’t want to focus on that.’
The crowd start to get a little restless and talk among themselves. The chatter gets louder and the auctioneer returns to the stage to ask people to show some respect. Mayweather carries on for an admirable amount of time, though no anecdote can be found.
Who will take over as the king of boxing? ‘Time will tell.’ He is asked something about fighters from a previous era who might cause him trouble in a hypothetical bout. ‘I can’t really say.’
Which, of course, is a great shame on a speaking tour. The journey to the Bunyan Centre has begun.
A close friend paid a very high price for dinner with me