LAST week, Floyd Mayweather Jr. broke his months-long silence with a 10-minute profanity-laced racist tirade against Manny Pacquiao in Ustream.
The expletive-filled diatribe came at a time while Pacquiao is on the last leg of his three-city promotional tour for his November 13 bout with Antonio Margarito.
Mayweather alleged that Pacquiao uses performance-enhancing drugs, referred to him as a midget and said that he will make Pacquiao make him a sushi roll and cook rice for him. Mayweather also said that Pacquiao can’t speak English and that he has never seen a contract before which he didn’t like.
Now he apologizes and claims that he was “just having fun.”
“A lot of people were saying I made racist comments but anybody that knows me knows that I don’t have a racist bone in my body…I have nothing but love in my heart…Anybody affected by what I said I apologize as a man. [I was] just having fun. I didn’t mean it.” he said.
But the damage has already been done.
According to Philstar.com, Filipino-Americans have called on sports bodies and ethnic organizations as the National Boxing Association and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) “to censure Floyd Mayweather for his ‘racist and homophobic’ rant against Manny Pacquiao.”
Greg Macabenta ,head of the National Federation of Filipino American Associations, said that Mayweather’s disgusting diatribe against Manny Pacquiao “is a racial slur against all Filipinos and Filipino-Americans and an embarassment not only to the boxing community but to all Americans.”
NaFFAA expressed that Mayweather brazenly crossed the line of decency and respectability.
Trash talking is a common occurrence among fighters in boxing. The great Muhammad Ali himself was notorious for the deed and for his brash attitude. But Mayweather was way out of line with the racist attacks on his tirade, even if he claims that it was all in the name of fun.
He says he apologizes as a man. Perhaps it’s time for him to fight like a man in the boxing ring.(AJPress)
( www.asianjournal.com )
( Published September 8, 2010 in Asian Journal Los Angeles p. A6 )
