AMERICA AT LARGE: Floyd Mayweather Jr made his comeback last weekend but did little to enhance his popularity

THE ‘R’ – as in racism – word was freely bandied about over the past week, in which two former presidents of the United States and one former boxing champion invoked the term in an effort to explain the seemingly inexplicable.

Jimmy Carter, an 84-year-old Georgian, set the pot to stirring when he told a television interviewer “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man”. Bill Clinton, another Son of the South, acknowledged that Carter probably had a point, noting that many of the president’s more obstreperous critics were undoubtedly harboured racial prejudices.

Their respective pronouncements on the matter happened to gain currency in proximate lockstep with those of Floyd Mayweather, Jr, who ended his 21-month hiatus from the ring by beating up an undersized, hand-picked opponent in Las Vegas on Saturday night.

Before, during, and after his sadistic exercise with Juan Manuel Marquez at the MGM Grand last weekend, the boxer formerly known as Pretty Boy (his preferred sobriquet these days is “Money”) beat his critics to the punch by lashing out at them before they could lash out at him. Two days before the Marquez fight, Money somewhat gratuitously tore into HBO’s Larry Merchant (who hadn’t even been assigned to the broadcast team for the pay-per-view telecast) and Emanuel Steward (who had). Merchant, who has covered the sport for more than half a century, “don’t know nothing about boxing,” said Mayweather, who in the same breath labelled Hall of Fame trainer Steward “an Uncle Tom”.

Two days before he would collect $10 million for thumping his diminutive Mexican foe, Money boasted: “If Floyd Mayweather was white, I’d be the biggest athlete in America”.

And, still in the ring not two minutes after he had finished the job, Mayweather expended more energy than he had in 12 rounds with Marquez when he attempted to wrestle the microphone away from HBO’s Max Kellerman.

Attempting to explain to non-Americans the passions underlying the ongoing health-care debate – or for that matter, even attempting to explain why debate exists at all – has become a trying exercise. Obama, after all, had made the issue a cornerstone of a campaign that saw him elected with what was perceived to have been a substantial mandate – and, as the president himself noted last week when queried on the Carter/Clinton pronouncements, “I think it’s important to realise that I was actually black before the election”.

The irrational nature of the opposition is even more curious since substantial numbers of the zealots come from over-65s who already receive Medicare benefits, veterans qualified for medical benefits, and federal, state, and municipal workers covered as a condition of their employment – in other words, people who already enjoy government-sponsored health care and who wouldn’t dream of relinquishing it.

Some of them might feel so entitled that they are wont to see the same advantages accrue to the underclass, and some of them no doubt harbour a philosophical distrust of ‘Big Government’, but the truth of the matter is that most of them are too stupid to know any better, and hence lend themselves to ready manipulation by the powerful drug, insurance, and medical lobbies whose stake in the status quo is enormous.

These vocal opponents have turned up with alarming regularity to disrupt public discussions and discourage debate. These nut cases tend to discourage rational discussion when they show up packing firearms to these parleys (just exercising their constitutional rights, they say), and while they may carefully avoid couching their argument in terms of the actual “N” word, that an undercurrent of racism underlies the entire process is readily apparent to anyone who cares to examine the online blogs and other rantings of this lunatic fringe.

If, on the other hand, the distasteful term has been conspicuous in its application to Mayweather’s alleged plight, it can usually be traced to a single source: Money himself. Last week, Mayweather convened a meeting with a handful of boxing writers at the MGM press room, where he complained about what he considered “unfair” treatment by the media and by the boxing public alike, pretty much all of which he ascribed to race. “If you’re rich you’re a rich nigger. If you’re poor, you’re a poor nigger. If you’re smart, you’re a smart nigger. At the end of the day, they still look at me as a nigger.”

That’s four references in 15 seconds – and it wasn’t even a lyric of the latest rap release from Philthy Rich Records – but it should be noted that only one guy in the room employed the racially-charged term, and that was Floyd Mayweather Jr.

No, for all his talent, Mayweather is never going to be universally beloved, but boxing fans don’t dislike him because he’s an African-American. They dislike him because he’s an asshole.

And all this persecution talk isn’t going to change that. On that occasion, Money specifically compared his image to that of Oscar De La Hoya, of whom he complained, “Anything he do negative, it gets swept under the rug”.

For one thing, that isn’t even true. The Fourth Estate has been fairly vigilant in chronicling Oscars out-of-the-ring shortcomings; it’s just that most of them haven’t involved guns, or himself or family members beating up women. And for another thing, last time we checked his birth certificate, De La Hoya wasn’t listed as a member of the Caucasian race, either. And while it would seem reasonable that he would look for the softest touch imaginable for his first appearance in 21 months, it was plainly insulting to our intelligence to pretend that Marquez represented anything else.

Marquez has been a gallant warrior, but he had only twice in his life fought as a lightweight. Having conducted an entire career at 130lbs, he was lured into this one by money from Money. Having contracted to fight at a 144lb catchweight, Mayweather then enhanced his advantage by coming in 2lbs over. Mayweather endeavoured to make Marquez sound like the second coming of King Kong. But in truth it was a fight he couldn’t lose and then he wanted the rest of us to bow down and tell him how clever he’d been in pulling it off.

So when Kellerman cornered him in the ring after the fight, Mayweather not only refused to discuss the weight disparity when he said: “That’s in the past.” It was at that point that he tried to take the microphone away.

“Let me talk. You do too much talking,” he told Kellerman, who showed some actual stones when he yanked the mike back.

Boxing bloggers sounded like the anti health-care crusaders as they flooded the internet in protest of the episode. Livid that their boy had for once been put in his place, Floyd’s supporters derided Kellerman for his “arrogance,” and by the next morning the ‘R’ word had become fashionable all over again.