Thomas Hearns Thinks Pacquiao and Mayweather Should "Just Go For It"

Back in the day there wasn't a problem to get a match made in the sport of boxing. I grew up in an era of great heavyweights with a stellar middleweight/welterweight class. Fighters had no problem taking on a megafight. You think Marvin Hagler had any second thoughts about fighting Thomas Hearns? No. It seemed that the only fighter that ducked anyone was Sugar Ray Leonard. That's another story for a different day.

Thomas Hearns fought in what is considered to be a golden age of boxing, especially the welterweight and middleweight classes. So when he hears about all this posturing and bull about why Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao won't fight, he'll say they should just "go for it".

Hearns said Mayweather and Pacquiao need to “put it all on the line and go for it.”

“We believed in taking on all comers,” Hearns said. “Every fight wasn’t necessarily a good fight, but to us we knew we had to take the fight in order to move on. If we didn’t take a fight, we couldn’t move ahead.

“We knew we had to perform because if we didn’t do that, another man would get up on us. We never wanted anybody to have the upper hand over us. You wanted to have the upper hand.”

In other words, they were willing to take on the best to be the best because that's where the big money was. Hearns believes that Mayweather and Pacquiao will settle their differences, but every time you look up one of the two are fighting someone else. Hearns wouldn't say he's disappointed but would like the two to come together.

It’s not my concern,” he said.

Hearns endured some tough losses but doesn't look back on his career with any regrets.

“If not, just think how fights would have been different,” he said. “You wouldn’t have had the chance to see all the fights you saw. You wouldn’t have had a chance to have all the thrills from seeing us fight, me and Ray Leonard and Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran. You would have never seen that.

“I thank God because God allowed that to happen in my time and I fought great fights.”

Too bad enough boxers today don't have the same mindset about taking on all comers.