Born to fight: Mayweather lives his own American dream

Even by the fight trade's explosive standards, boxing's world No 1 posts a turbulent background that probably explains his truculence and his love of a dollar. Floyd Mayweather's record label 'Philthy Rich' has yet to sign an artist but his T-shirts are available online.

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Northern Rock might care to borrow the best of their slogans: 'I got money like a bank but I'm not loaning you s***'.

Alternatively, the website shopper could choose 'I pick money over fame' or 'I was born poor but I'm going to die rich'. They would all look good in the High Street.

Shake the branches of the Mayweather family tree and it's not hard to see why the athletically-brilliant Floyd has built a fortress of cash around himself. An ESPN sports magazine writer describes him as 'the most cartoonishly self-absorbed boxer in the world'.

The same writer recalls the promoter Bob Arum trying to market the current World Boxing Council welterweight champion as a poster boy for black America.

This was in the early days of Mayweather's rampaging run to six world titles in five weight divisions and Arum's most famous client, Oscar De La Hoya, told the prodigy: 'You can be the next Sugar Ray Leonard. Keep winning and keep smiling.' De La Hoya recalled: 'I was talking, but I knew it was pointless. It was going in one ear and out the other.'

Mayweather's dysfunctional upbringing was bound to overwhelm the fantasy of him becoming the next Sugar Ray. His mother was a drug addict, who has now recovered, and he has said he saw his father sell her narcotics. An aunt was killed by drug dependency and an uncle shot Floyd Snr in the leg as he was cradling Floyd Jnr.

When the proprietor of Philthy Rich lamented 'my dream is for my daddy to be here' at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, it was because his father and trainer was serving a five-and-a-half year sentence for trafficking.

Soon after his release their partnership erupted. An attempt at reconciliation in a Las Vegas restaurant ended with Floyd Jnr saying that only patriarchal tradition had stopped him flooring his dad. The father's valediction as he left the table was: 'I can't work with someone who has such little respect.'

Cue a long estrangement and enter stage left Roger Mayweather, uncle and two-time world champion, another spectacularly volatile player in our tableau.

The history of pugilistic mayhem reserves a special page for the night Roger barrelled into the ring at the Thomas and Mack Arena to tell Zab Judah what he thought of the exceptionally low blow he had just landed on his nephew.

In came Judah's father, Yoel, to swing a fist at Roger and a free-for-all ensued. Those who were there say it was one of the most narrowly averted riots in boxing history. Result: Roger was fined his whole paycheck of $200,000 (£100,000) and suspended for a year.

As if to fill the time, he also managed to acquire a six-month jail sentence for domestic violence and was released in March of this year, by which time the fight trade was asking itself whether Floyd Snr would really be in De La Hoya's corner, plotting the downfall of his own son in May's showdown between the Golden Boy and the Pretty Boy, which Mayweather won.

Floyd Snr looked certain to remain in De La Hoya's retinue until the Golden Boy recoiled at the old man's fee of £1million. After a hastily-convened meeting in a room at the MGM Grand Hotel (Saturday's venue), Mayweather Snr re-emerged in his son's camp, with the younger man telling reporters: 'We don't always agree, but he's still my dad.'

If memory serves, the Waltons used to fall out over unchopped logs, or an errand not discharged, and then retreat to the barn to sort it out, usually with some sage intervention from grandpa Zeb or grandma Esther. This is not the Mayweather way.

The nonpareil has had his own brushes with the law. In 2005 he was given community service for a misdemeanour assault and battery in a bar, a year after being handed a one-year suspended sentence for fighting with two women, also in a bar. 'Impulse-control counselling' was another punishment. One's sympathies there are with the counsellor.

The genius in the eye of all this familial chaos is an amalgam of the vicious and the decadent, the highly dedicated (in training) and the monumentally flash.

Before the De La Hoya fight a reporter claims he heard him chanting 'shut up, bitch' as he popped his sparring partner. Belligerence is an established family tool.

In a conference call, Roger Mayweather said of Hatton: 'He's tough. He's going to come and we're going to ask him for his ass, too. When he answers that door, somebody's going to answer that door with a baseball bat, beat him across his head.'

With his 10-car garage and his $30,000 pocket roll, Floyd Jnr is an extreme example of self-advancement through inherited machismo and how could it be otherwise when gloves were laced to his hands as soon as he could stand and the doorknobs of his home served as target practice?

He says, accurately: 'America's built on controversy and money. I'm a good person. I've got a good heart and I'll give a person my light.'

But it's the darkness in his story that threatens to come for Hatton in the night.