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Photo gallery: Mayweather defeats Pacquiao with unanimous decision

 
Floyd Mayweather Jr. throws a right at Manny Pacquiao during their welterweight unification championship bout on May 2, 2015 at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. [Al Bello | Getty Images]
Floyd Mayweather Jr. throws a right at Manny Pacquiao during their welterweight unification championship bout on May 2, 2015 at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. [Al Bello | Getty Images]
Published May 3, 2015

Floyd Mayweather Jr., the 38-year-old with the baby face and the unblemished professional boxing record, beat Manny Pacquiao on Saturday night with a unanimous decision in what was considered the highest-grossing bout in history.

In a long-anticipated fight between the two dominant welterweights of the past decade, Mayweather stretched his record to 48-0 while quieting critics who thought he had spent years avoiding a showdown with Pacquiao, a 36-year-old fighter from the Philippines.

The purse, the majority of it from pay-per-view revenue from several million American households paying about $90 each to watch, was estimated to be roughly $300 million. The contract called for Mayweather to receive 60 percent, win or lose.

Inside the MGM Grand Garden Arena, Hollywood celebrities and famous athletes from scattered parts of the sports world sprinkled the crowd. The few tickets made available to the public were priced from $1,500 for seats in the top rows to $7,500 for a seat on the floor. Tickets were sold on the secondary market for $40,000 or more.

It mattered little that both men were past their primes. Efforts to put Mayweather and Pacquiao in the same ring had failed for more than five years until pent-up demand and the lure of the biggest payday in boxing history proved too much to pass on.

Mayweather said last week that he planned to retire after one more fight. A victory would push his record to 49-0, the same as Rocky Marciano's. Whether that fight would come in a rematch with Pacquiao (57-6-2) was the one question left lingering in the desert air.

Mayweather arrived as a sizable favorite. He had more to lose than Pacquiao, although he pretended he did not.

"It's just a fight to me," he said in April at his gym, a couple of miles west of the MGM Grand and the Las Vegas Strip. "One fight does not define my legacy. If that's the case, then I don't have to fight all the fights that I fought."

Most boxing observers thought that Mayweather and Pacquiao, considered the best pound-for-pound fighters in the world, would never share a ring. Tangled and contentious discussions for a fight started in earnest in late 2009, moving in fits and starts, and they were mostly stuck in boxing's usual swamp of distrust.

Pacquiao's side initially refused Mayweather's call for random drug testing. Mayweather temporarily retired. Pacquiao lost twice in 2012, the same year that Mayweather spent two months in jail for beating the mother of three of his children.

Hopes to see the two men fight faded but were revived by impressive victories by both and a depleted number of scintillating opponents.

It was not until late last year that negotiations were secretly renewed. Mayweather and Pacquiao had not been face-to-face anywhere for 13 years but found themselves seated across the court from each other at a Miami Heat basketball game in January. Mayweather approached Pacquiao (and later visited Pacquiao in his hotel room). That renewed public fascination in ways unimagined back in 2009.

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"Why don't you just say I was smart?" Mayweather said Tuesday, dismissing charges that he had hoped to avoid a fight with Pacquiao until he was left with no choice because of public pressure. "Five years ago, this was a $50 million fight for me, and it was a $20 million fight for him."

Bob Arum, the veteran promoter who negotiated on Pacquiao's behalf, agreed that the mix of time and intrigue only raised interest and money for Saturday's fight.

"It's hard for me to envision that if we had done this fight five years go, it would be as big as it is now," Arum said last month. "But that's happenstance. That is nothing that anybody should take credit for."