LAS VEGAS — Boxing is admirable in its primal beauty. The best fighters are ferocious athletes, tacticians with the endurance of marathon runners.
They work amid broken noses, bruised organs, and head shots that send the brain rattling from one side of its casing to the other. You hope for your man to knock the other man senseless, and the sooner the better. A right cross below the heart, a left hook, and bye-bye.
Floyd Mayweather Jr., who on Saturday will meet Manny Pacquiao in a money swamp of a championship welterweight bout, is a master of this predator’s ecosystem.