Floyd Mayweather Jr: "HBO Needs to Hire Teddy Atlas"

Last night on his Twitter account, Floyd Mayweather Jr made a suggestion to HBO about who might replace Larry Merchant:

HBO needs to hire Teddy Atlas. He's knows boxing. If anyone talks to him, thank him from me. I heard the positive stuff he said about me.

Mayweather was referencing an appearance earlier this week from Atlas on The Jim Rome Show. Here's a clip and a transcript.

Atlas: "Well, you don't get one without the other [the sucker punch without the headbutt], and this is a lot easier to figure out than who came first, or what came first, the chicken or the egg. I mean, it's pretty obvious to me at least that without the headbutt, none of this happens. So that's the worse transgression. And more importantly, is what that meant. You know, what it was really telling you. And to me, from my perspective, it was telling me very clearly he didn't want to fight. You know, this is a very physical business. It's a mental business, too, and I don't think a lot of people quite grasp that. The cerebralness, the mentality, just the psyche of a fighter. You can disintegrate as much mentally as you do physically.

"And I think that Ortiz was starting to disintegrate a little bit, starting to unravel. You've got to remember his history. This is a guy that quit in the fight against Maidana. That was his biggest fight to date, and he submitted. Something that you don't want to do in boxing, you don't wanna do in a lot of areas obviously in sports or in anything professionally. But he got submitted, he got broken down. But to his credit -- and he deserves some credit -- he came back and he won the title against Andre Berto in the most difficult way. He got off the floor, and he showed heart. He showed heart of a champion that night. So, you know, he redeemed himself.

"But he had submitted that one time against Maidana. When the fight started becoming tough, and if you were really fair about what you were seeing, it was all Mayweather. Mayweather was faster, his punches were straighter, he was slicker, he was smarter, his defense was better, and Ortiz was getting frustrated. He could not hit him, he could not use his physicality, he could not make it the kind of fight that he wanted to make it. And as he started to unravel, in that moment, I think there was no doubt that up to that point Mayweather was dominating that fight. He had controlled the fight. I think he was gonna knock him out. And I think Ortiz felt that. And I think that he started to fall apart, he headbutted him to get out of the fight.

"A lot of people are gonna say, 'What do you mean to get out of the fight?' To get out of the fight. Not much different than when you have a precedence for it -- I know it wasn't as gory, it wasn't as -- it didn't hit you as significantly, because we didn't have the details that the Tyson fight had with the biting and everything, but very similar to that. Tyson bit Holyfield. People that think that he was going back to the streets, that was his background, that he was doing it for those reasons, well, they're wrong. He was doing it for one reason. He could not handle Holyfield. And he wanted to get out of that fight. And I think it was similar here. Again, mentally, it's on a mental plane here, not just a physical plane. Ortiz was starting to fall apart, he felt the fight was getting away from him, he didn't feel at that moment he could handle it, he headbutted him, what's gonna happen? Well if he busts him open, the fight's over. If he gets disqualified, the fight's over. But he's out of the fight."