Mayweather Sr. embraces new beginning with son

LAS VEGAS -- In a luxurious desert living room surrounded by busts of Roman gods, Floyd Mayweather Sr. has accepted this agreement with his own mortality: The same illness that could force him out of his profession helped push him back into the arms of his beloved namesake son.

As fight week winds toward Saturday's Floyd Mayweather-Juan Manuel Marquez clash, much of the sideshow focuses on father and son, as it always has. Except the sniping is gone. All that's left is a 50-something daddy and a 30-something son, finally realizing they won't be together forever, and making their time now count.

Mayweather Sr. said he doesn't even know how the reconciliation happened. His son credits an intermediary, Thomas Smalls, for duping both sides -- telling the father the son wanted to meet, and telling the son the opposite.

That might have been the case, Mayweather Sr. conceded, without conviction.

"I think somebody was working between us, but I don't know exactly how it worked," he said. "It wasn't me reaching out. Not that I wasn't too brave to reach out, but it wasn't me who reached out. But whoever did it, whoever was in the middle of it, it's all right."

They are together in the gym, almost daily, though Monday was an exception.

While the son and his entourage shifted to Los Angeles for a day of public workout and media pomp, before today's formal arrival here and wind-down to a showdown, Mayweather Sr. sat in the home boxing built, and openly wondered when it all might end.

At the same time, he embraced a new beginning.

He credits his son for listening to and implementing his advice, while not allowing headstrong beliefs to drive a wedge between two brothers, Floyd Sr. and Roger, the latter of whom actually serves as trainer.

"Keeping the peace. That's what he's doing," Mayweather Sr. said of his son.

He fully intends to make his thoughts known. He notes that his brother "doesn't seem to have a problem with it." Roger Mayweather has said he believes the father and son should be together and seems to accept the communication without envy.

"My son is what I'm concerned with, period," Mayweather Sr. said. "It don't have nothing to do with nobody in the gym except my son. If anybody else comes along and has warm welcomes, that's fine too. My goal is for my son to win, my goal is to have a relationship with my son."

They tried this before, in 2007, when Roger Mayweather was out of camp while serving a battery sentence and Floyd Mayweather Sr. filled in briefly as trainer, before his son's career-defining win against Oscar De La Hoya.

"It's totally different," Mayweather Sr. said. "My son and I have a relationship now."

They have spent time at each other's homes -- "Just sit down and talk, chat, maybe eat a little bit, talk a little jive, that's what we do," the father said -- and have the usual disagreements without allowing them to fester.

And they help each other. The father rode to California with his son, where he got to visit his three estranged grandchildren. And when he wanted to add a second Mercedes Benz to his garage, the son called the dealer and arranged a better price. That same dealer just sued the son for failure to make payments on a repossessed car, but that's incidental to the familial relationship.

They are together again, in part because Mayweather Sr. suffers from sarcoidosis, which attacks tissue and causes lung-scarring coughing, and the son feared losing the father without healing their rift. Mayweather said the disease might force him to move back closer to home. Air conditioning exacerbates the condition. But so does heating.

As the father weighs his future, he makes up for time lost.

"Family's more important than boxing," Mayweather Sr. said. "If I don't get nothing more out of boxing than I have today, boxing's been all right with me."

Source: http://www.mlive.com/boxing/index.ssf/2009/09/mayweather_sr_embraces_new_beg.html