Floyd Mayweather, the gifted, minted king of the ring

Anything to spare that glossy, unmarked face. When a gloved fist leers towards Floyd Mayweather, he absorbs it with a hunched left shoulder and counters with a right hook. If the punches come in bunches, he goes into a swirl of lateral movement, deflecting each blow with that shoulder or a right hand raised to his cheek. Potshots are evaded with a backward feint, timed so well that you start to suspect he is given written notice of each attempt on his chin.

This is a life of milliseconds and quarter-inches. Mayweather's punching power is nothing seismic; speed and guile are what brought him 47 victories in 47 professional bouts over two decades. A sport codified by Oscar Wilde's aristocratic tormentor, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, finds its purest expression in this Rust Belt tearaway.

He is an extravagant man who fights conservatively. Manny Pacquiao, his Filipino rival, is a conservative man who fights extravagantly. On Saturday, at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, the best boxers of the 21st century will meet at welterweight for a contest that needs none of the hype engulfing it.

They are in their late thirties and peaked five years ago. But in America alone around 3m households will agree to the pay-per-view fee of approximately $100 (£19.95 in the UK). That is $300m, before any other revenue is counted. Already the richest athlete in the world, Mayweather might earn more than $100m for his evening's work. He will spend it with gaudy relish on Bugattis he hardly drives and designer clothes he might wear once, and an entourage he seemingly cannot do without. Imagine if Rome's greatest gladiator had also been its most decadent emperor.

In 1977, Floyd Joy Sinclair - his mother's surname - was born into a boxing family. It would be his only break in life. As a toddler, he was used as a human shield by his reputedly drug-dealing father during a gun attack. The assailant, who instead shot Floyd Sr in the calf and so spoilt his boxing career, was the boy's uncle. Other childhood memories include his father selling drugs to his mother, an aunt succumbing to Aids and his departure from Grand Rapids, Michigan, his home town, to New Jersey, where he shared his mother's one-bedroom apartment with several others.

There were cycles of estrangement and reconciliation with his father, whose name he eventually took. Mayweather Sr was jailed for five and a half years for drug offences while his son carved through the amateur ranks as a teenager.

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Controversial judging meant he won no more than a bronze medal at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. He turned professional soon after, signing with the Top Rank promotions company. Its boss, Bob Arum, 83, is one of the oligarchs who steer this anarchic sport. But his energies were bound up with Oscar De La Hoya, the jewel of his stable, and the young Mayweather felt undervalued as he burgeoned from prospect to star to sensation. In 2006, he bought his way out of his contract. The following year he beat De La Hoya to enter an era of dazzling riches and acclaim.

"Pretty Boy Floyd" became "Money Mayweather". He created his own promotions company. He used lurid hype and trash talk to sell pay-per-views. He posted YouTube videos of his possessions, the most beloved of which seemed to be piles of cash. Others of his generation live at the nexus of sport and capitalism - David Beckham, Roger Federer - but none with Mayweather's sheer gusto. Whether his earnings keep pace with his extravagances is a whispered question in Las Vegas, the oasis of bullion he has made his home.

This is Mayweather the Id: heedless, primal and dangerous. He compares women to cars ("If you're able to take care of 20, then you should have 20") and served jail time for domesticbattery.

Vying for control of the same smallish body - 5 feet 8 inches, 147lb - is Mayweather the cold cynic. He picks fights strategically, he spends the early rounds harvesting data on his opponent, he favours technical mastery to anything so vulgar as a knockout. He reminds us why boxing is called the "sweet science". It is trite to describe someone as a bag of contradictions: who in the world is not?

But Mayweather's internal war - calculation versus abandon - is something else.

If he beats Pacquiao, his claim to be the best pound-for-pound boxer in history will look a bit less bombastic. If he suffers defeat for the first time - and even friendly observers worry about his focus and appetite of late - 100m consolations will flood his bank account soon after. He makes and spends money like a man trying to avenge the circumstances he was born into. It is not so much gluttony as retribution. Martin Amis captures this impulse in his novel Success (1978), which could serve as the title of Mayweather's memoirs one day: "I want all that and I want all that. And I want all that and I want all that. And I want all that and I want all that."

The writer is the FT's political columnist

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