BOXING/World welterweight title fight/Floyd Mayweather v Ricky Hatton:Charles Arthur (Pretty Boy) Floyd, a Depression-era Oklahoma bank robber and murderer, was romanticised as a sort of Robin Hood of the Great Plains by, among others, Woody Guthrie. (Guthrie's composition Pretty Boy Floyd included a line, Some will rob you with a six-gun/ and some with a fountain pen, that could have been a paean to a boxing promoter.)
In the 73 years since Pretty Boy's demise, every American whose misfortune it was to have been christened Floyd has at some point in his life answered to the name "Pretty Boy", but Floyd Mayweather jnr makes the unique claim that his nom de ring has nothing to do with the outlaw.
"My amateur team-mates gave me that name," insists Pretty Boy Floyd the boxer. "I got the nickname because when my fights finished, I never came out cut or bruised."
At 30 - the age of the original Pretty Boy when he was gunned down in a 1934 FBI ambush - Mayweather has won world titles in five weight classes and is widely considered the world's most accomplished pound-for-pound boxer.
In the process of defeating 38 of 38 professional opponents, he has earned upwards of $100 million (€68 million) in the ring - a figure that could swell by another $20 million when the receipts from tonight's blockbuster fight against Ricky Hatton are tallied. And he isn't shy about letting you know it.
As viewers of HBO's 24/7 promotional series learned last spring, Mayweather routinely walks around with $30,000 in flash-cash in his pockets. "I got money longer than train smoke," boasts Mayweather. "I been riding Bentleys since the 90s."
He has suggested his nickname be replaced by "Money May", and when he founded his rap-music label, he called his firm "Philthy Rich Records".
Although Philthy Rich has yet to produce a commercially successful album, Pretty Boy's connections in the world of gangsta rap run deep: when he fought Oscar De La Hoya last May he was escorted into the ring by the entertainer 50 Cent, who serenaded the crowd with his rendition of Straight to the Bank.
That he is universally admired as a boxer has not translated into personal popularity. When he preceded his training camp for the Hatton fight with a stint on the television programme Dancing with the Stars he was summarily voted off by the viewers.
And while just 3,000 of Hatton's British compatriots will be among the 17,000 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena tonight, it is a safe bet that at least half the audience would consider a Hatton upset a triumph of justice.
In the ring, Mayweather has not tasted defeat since his controversial loss to the Bulgarian Serafim Todorov in the featherweight semi-final of the 1996 Atlanta Games. He turned pro that October, and two years later won his first world championship, at 130lb, by stopping the Mexican champion Genaro Hernandez.
He has subsequently won titles at lightweight (from Jose Luis Castillo in 2002), light welterweight (knocking out Arturo Gatti in 2005), and welterweight (Zab Judah, 2006), and this May outpointed De La Hoya for the WBC light middleweight title, a belt he relinquished in order to maintain the 147lb championship he will defend against Hatton tonight.
Along the way, Mayweather has kept his name in the news outside the ring as well. He pleaded no contest to assault charges after putting his boot to a bouncer in a 2004 Michigan bar-room fight, and later that year was convicted of misdemeanour battery for punching two women at a Las Vegas nightclub. He was also arrested, but later acquitted, on domestic violence charges brought by a former girlfriend.
And the odd part of it is that Pretty Boy may be the most normal member of his family. These Mayweathers are a case study in dysfunction. Pretty Boy's father, Floyd snr, was a useful welterweight of the 1970s who lasted into the 10th round of a 1978 fight against Sugar Ray Leonard.
Things began to fall apart for Floyd once he began to train on cocaine, and the demise of his ring career was further hastened when he was shot by a drug dealer named Tony Sinclair, the brother of Pretty Boy's mother. (The bullet struck him in the leg. Uncle Tony's aim may have been thrown off when his target used the infant Floyd jnr as a shield.)
In 1994, Floyd snr received a five-year sentence for cocaine trafficking. Two years later, Mayweather jnr wrote a letter to Bill Clinton, unsuccessfully imploring the president to let his father out long enough to watch him box in the Olympics.
It is probably significant that for all his transgressions, Floyd snr was awarded custody of the boy who became Pretty Boy. Junior's mother, a crack addict named Deborah Sinclair, was deemed an even less fit parent.
Although Floyd snr trained his son for a time (and has continued to train many top-flight boxers, including, for a time, De La Hoya), the two no longer speak. Roger Mayweather, who began to work with Pretty Boy when his elder brother was in jail, has trained him for several years.
Roger, who billed himself as "the Black Mamba", was once the WBC junior welterweight champion. In a scrum in the ring after a 1988 title fight I saw him punch Lou Duva, his opponent's then-66-year-old trainer.
In 2006, Roger received a one-year suspension from the Nevada State Athletic Commission for his part in a brawl that erupted after Floyd jnr's win over Judah - though the suspension was somewhat moot since Uncle Roger was soon doing six months in the pokey for beating up the grandmother of his infant son.
"I fought from the bottom to the top," Mayweather jnr reminded a gathering of reporters in Las Vegas last week. "Ricky Hatton never saw his father being shot. He never saw his mom on drugs or his father in prison."
At press conferences and in his adversary's presence, Mayweather has been respectful toward Hatton, but in a remarkably profane, self-involved, four-minute rant recorded at the Philthy Rich studios he dismissed tonight's adversary as "a faggot motherf***** from England".
The snippet is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi3LrdjXXGM. If you're going to play it on your home computer, get the kids out of the room first.
