text: It is easy to understand the distaste that so many feel for Floyd Mayweather Jr. He is brash, he can be crass, and when it comes to being a braggart, he is the undisputed world champion. He is the cartoon embodiment of the excess for which his adopted home town of Las Vegas is notorious. A poor kid from Grand Rapids, Michigan, he has spent his adult life over-compensating for the deprivation he once knew. He has tossed handfuls of $100 bills into the air at a strip club and hurled wads of cash into a swimming pool so he could amuse himself by watching girls dive to retrieve them. The mouthguard he will wear during ‘The Fight of the Century’ with Manny Pacquiao at the MGM Grand on Saturday night cost $25,000 and is inlaid with a $100 bill. Floyd Mayweather Jr is boxing’s undisputed braggart - and a brilliant performer in the ring . Mayweather will take on Manny Pacquiao on Saturday in the most eagerly awaited fight of the century . Some novelists like to assign names to their protagonists that reflect their character traits or their obsessions. Mayweather has saved everyone the trouble with his chosen nickname. John Self, meet Money Mayweather. Money Mayweather reigned until the build-up to this fight began. Then, he took to referring to himself as TBE, or The Best Ever. He is better than Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson ever were, Mayweather said this week. Mayweather, it is also worth pointing out, has faced a string of accusations of violence against women and spent two months in the Clark County Detention Center in 2012 for a domestic violence conviction. Although the fight is not quite the struggle between light and darkness that Pacquiao’s supporters would have you believe, it is true that Mayweather is not exactly a gentleman hero. But in sport’s spoiled, sycophantic world where no one ever tells the genius that he is out of line, that hardly makes him unusual. A floored George Foreman feels the force of Muhammad Ali after his rope-a-dope tactic in the heat of Zaire . Sugar Ray Leonard (right) goes toe-to-toe with Thomas Hearns in their second fight in 1989 . There is a danger here, though. It lies in confusing our perceptions of Mayweather as a man with a desire to belittle his capabilities as a fighter. You might want him to lose to Pacquiao but you better accept that he probably won’t. He is as close to genius as it gets in modern boxing. He may not be The Best Ever. Debates aimed at placing that crown on one head are, essentially, specious but it is legitimate to claim that Mayweather is one of the best ever. He has fought the best fighters of his generation, Pacquiao aside, and beaten every one of them. Pacquiao’s trainer, Freddie Roach, said last week that Mayweather, 38, had ducked too many fighters to be considered the greatest even of this era. A cursory examination of Mayweather’s record does not bear that out. He has fought Diego Corrales, Jose Luis Castillo, Arturo Gatti, Sharmba Mitchell, Oscar de la Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Juan Manuel Marquez, Shane Mosley and Miguel Cotto and sent them all away broken. He has won titles at five different weights. He has fought men like Victor Ortiz and Robert Guerrero, who were supposed to be new forces in boxing, but whose limitations were exposed by Mayweather’s ringcraft. That is the great irony of his dominance of the sport these past few years. He is scorned as a great vulgarian, a gaudy show-off, boxing’s thug king, and yet more than any other modern fighter he embodies the mastery of some of its finest skills. Mayweather attacks Robert Guerrero during the his unanimous points win over his countryman . Mayweather floored Victor Ortiz in controversial fashion at the end of the fourth round . Boxing has always venerated the artist and swooned over practitioners of the sweet science and Mayweather personifies so much of what the purists admire. He does not club his foes into submission. He does not overwhelm them with savagery. He beats them with craft and cleverness. He is a wonderful technician in the mould of Willie Pep, Pernell ‘Sweet Pea’ Whitaker and Ali. The shoulder roll he uses to protect his head and body from attack is a conundrum that none of his opponents have been able to decode. He is a pugilist, not a scrapper. When Mayweather boxes, it is to put on an old-fashioned masterclass in the oft-neglected art of defensive combat. He makes himself devilishly hard to hit, and, slowly and steadily, picks off his opponent. His style has made fans of connoisseurs like the late, great fight trainer Eddie Futch. Mayweather is not a crowd-pleaser. He is too good for that. He is so skilled that it is difficult for his opponent to land effective punches. His brand of brilliance does not make for explosive action but it does make for W after W after W on his record. He has 47 of them now to go with no defeats and no draws. Mayweather has attracted criticism for his uncouth displays of his wealth on social media . Freddie Roach (right) is attemtping to force Mayweather to abandon his naturally cautious style . Roach says he has attended Mayweather fights where fans have fallen asleep from boredom. He is trying to goad Mayweather into abandoning his usual style because he knows it represents Pacquiao’s best chance — perhaps only chance — of winning. Roach is a good man and a brilliant trainer but Money Mayweather is way too smart to fall for that. I take him to win by unanimous decision. Pep’s T-shirt protest is no crime, UEFA . UEFA have a chance to claw back at least a little of the dignity and the credibility they have lost in recent years when their disciplinary panel meets on May 21 to consider whether to fine Bayern Munich coach Pep Guardiola. Guardiola committed the heinous sin of expressing an opinion about something more important than football at his press conference last Monday before Bayern’s Champions League tie with Porto. The punishment for that kind of deviancy is severe if precedent is anything to go by. Football’s twisted world fines you more heavily for wearing branded underpants than indulging in racist chanting. Guardiola wore the top demanding justice for Jorge 'El Topo' Lopez who died in a car crash at the World Cup . Jorge 'El Topo' Lopez was killed when a taxi he was travelling back to his hotel in was hit by a stolen car . Guardiola’s crime is to have worn a T-shirt highlighting unanswered issues surrounding the death of a popular and respected Argentinian sports journalist during last year’s World Cup. Jorge ‘Topo’ Lopez, who was a friend of Lionel Messi and Atletico Madrid boss Diego Simeone, was killed in a car crash in Belo Horizonte and several details of the incident are yet to be explained. So Guardiola did the right thing. He wore a shirt bearing the slogan #JusticiaParaTopo. And sure enough, his charge ‘for an incident of a non-sporting nature’ will now be judged by UEFA next month. It is strange, isn’t it, how we condemn our footballers for being one-dimensional and bemoan their lack of social conscience and say they are all spoiled little rich boys. And then as soon as they do something a bit different, as soon as they challenge us, as soon as they break free from the norm, UEFA come down on them like a ton of bricks. If they have any sense left, they will dismiss the charge against Guardiola out of hand. Arsenal's clash with Chelsea at the Emirates  has little relevance for this season’s title race. Chelsea are too far ahead for the result to matter. But it matters for next season. Arsenal, finally, are beginning to look like a team capable of fashioning a real challenge for the title again. They have improved this season despite being without three of their leading players, Jack Wilshere, Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, for much of the campaign. By winning at Manchester City and sweeping Liverpool aside, they have started to overcome psychological barriers. Beat Chelsea and another of those barriers will have been shoved out of the way. Chelsea went five points clear after beating Arsenal 2-0 in October with  Eden Hazard and Diego Costa scoring . Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho face off during the last meeting between the two sides .
target: Floyd Mayweather is brash, he can be crass, and when it comes to being a braggart, he is the undisputed world champion .
  Previously known as Money Mayweather, he took to referring to himself as TBE, or The Best Ever in the build-up to his fight with Manny Pacquiao .
  He said this week he is better than Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson ever were .
  He is scorned as a great vulgarian and yet more than any other modern fighter he embodies the mastery of some of its finest skills .
  You might want him to lose to Manny Pacquiao but you better accept that he probably won’t. He is as close to genius as it gets in modern boxing .