Start with what this video is and is not. It is not a press release: nobody in it announces that Mayweather Promotions has shut down, and nobody confirms Curmel Moton has been released. It is Fannon, solo, reading a set of signs out loud — and the signs, laid out his way, are hard to unsee. Moton, the Mayweather lightweight prospect Fannon puts at nine fights and once heard talked about as a “Tank 2.0,” has watched his career slow to a crawl: four fights in his first year by the host’s count, then three, then two, then one this year. Months ago, Fannon notes, Moton’s own father was online pleading for someone to let the kid eat — to let him have a fight.
The sighting that sets the video off is a podium in Saudi Arabia. Standing with Christian Mbilli at the Canelo-Mbilli event was Richard Schaefer — the former Golden Boy president who, as Fannon recounts it, became CEO of Mayweather Promotions right around the time Leonard Ellerbe, Floyd’s longtime friend and business associate, walked out the door. Schaefer was not with Canelo, Fannon reasons, so his only logical conclusion is that Schaefer is no longer working with Mayweather Promotions either. Add that the news of Moton’s next fight date came from Moton himself — a social media signal, not a Mayweather announcement — and Fannon lands where the title points: a great fighter running a promotional company that, in his words, is not functional beyond promoting Floyd’s own exhibitions.
His ask is not complicated. Let the kid go. Fannon points to the season boxing is actually in: Zuffa let Shakur Stevenson walk when they stopped seeing eye to eye, and Top Rank released Keyshawn Davis after he turned down the Devin Haney fight they had won on a purse bid — promoters choosing a clean release over court battles and long layoffs, in the host’s telling. Moton deserves the same door, he argues: the chance to sign with an active outfit, whether that is Top Rank, Matchroom or Golden Boy, and get back in the mix while the prospect shine is still on him. It is the same standard Fannon applied to the Shakur situation this week — freedom to negotiate beats being shelved.
Our take: Fannon’s inference is labelled as inference here because that is what the video offers, and Rnd5Media will call the shutdown real when somebody with the paperwork says it. But the underlying fact does not need a press release: a 9-fight prospect fighting once a year is a career being spent in a waiting room. Floyd Mayweather defended his own freedom as a fighter better than anyone in history. The test of Floyd the promoter is whether his fighters get a version of that same freedom — starting with a date, a card, or a release for Curmel Moton.
Video credit: Fannon Boxing.
