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Grappling With HistoryFloyd Mayweather follows the Muhammad Ali career path ... by climbing into the wrestling ring?

By Dave LarzelerePosted Tuesday, April 1, 2008, at 8:07 AM ET

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Robert Weintraub argued that De La Hoya/Mayweather 24/7 was the best sports show on television. Josh Levin celebrated the power and glory of the Rocky montage. Daniel Engber asked whether win-loss records mean anything in boxing. Allen Barra explained that your couch is the best place to watch a boxing match. Nan Mooney, an amateur boxer, wrote dispatches from the Golden Gloves tournament.

Just as it did for hip-hop, this gangsta lean pushed Mayweather's fights to the top of the charts. De La Hoya/Mayweather became one of the most profitable events in pay-per-view history. The comparable success of Mayweather's bout with Ricky Hatton later in 2007 made it clear that it wasn't just Oscar who was responsible for all that cheddar. The lesson: If you want to open like Star Wars, you need a Darth Vader. The fans booed and hissed and rooted for his downfall, and just like Ali before him, Money May laughed all the way to the bank.

Less than a year later, however, Mayweather already seems trapped inside a monster of his own making. The "mo' money" vaudeville act has gotten old fast, and Mayweather doesn't seem to know what to do with it. All he does seem to know is that he wants to be a superstar of the sort that boxing hasn't known since Sugar Ray Leonard, and to achieve that, he's getting admirably creative: appearing on Dancing With the Stars, playing in the NBA Celebrity All-Star Game, regularly floating the idea that he'll turn away from boxing and pursue a career in mixed martial arts. And now Wrestlemania. It's as if he's trying to emulate both acts of the Ali drama at once—the self-conscious villainy of the Louisville Lip era and the multiplatform cartoon character of the mid-1970s for whom boxing was only a small facet of a gigantic media creation.

By the 1970s, Ali had transformed into the good guy. Thanks to a series of epic fights, the vindication of his position on Vietnam, and a genius for selling himself, the most loathed of heels became the hero of heroes and the face of a generation. To follow in those mighty footsteps, Mayweather has a long way to travel, indeed, and one has to wonder if circumstances and his own skill set ever will allow for such a metamorphosis. As a fighter, Floyd Mayweather is astonishingly gifted and deserves mention in Ali's exclusive class. But as far as charisma goes, Ali vs. Mayweather is a historic mismatch. The Greatest of All Time could play any role, going from villain to hero or clown to sage, sometimes in the space of a single rambling sentence. To this point, Mayweather hasn't demonstrated such dramatic range nor the depth and savvy it takes to emerge from a typecast villain into a full-fledged leading man.

It's a trick that not even World Wrestling Entertainment could perpetrate on its fans. In the initial promotion for Mayweather's Wrestlemania appearance, he was positioned as the noble David in a David-and-Goliath showdown, defending the honor of the popular Rey Mysterio against the 7-foot Big Show. But there was a problem with this "Floyd the Courageous," a plain fact repeated over and over again by various wrestlers and commentators—nobody likes Floyd Mayweather. In the face of this realization, the WWE brain trust, never shy about tinkering with the forces of good and evil, recast the fighter in a darker but much more familiar light: the cocky braggart with a posse of thugs.

And so it was Sunday night, the crowd roaring when it appeared that Big Show was going to finish Floyd, then booing when Floyd turned the tables and used some hastily produced brass knuckles to do the finishing himself. It was a bizarre and lackluster affair, and in that way warrants Floyd yet another comparison to Ali, whose wrestling bout with Antonio Inoki was a lifeless travesty. Of course, at that point Ali had earned himself a pass or two from the adoring public. That Mayweather wants such affection for himself is clear, but the way he's going about getting it isn't working. You'd think Mayweather, having stolen so readily from the Ali playbook, would understand that on history's stage only the bit players are bad guys. The big stars always play the good guy in the end.