Once upon a time, Houston rap legend/Rap-A-Lot Records CEO James Prince served as Floyd Mayweather’s manager. The two cut ties sometime around the end of 2003, but before they did, they were allegedly involved in an incident that ended with several of Floyd Mayweather’s associates getting assaulted with baseball bats by men who may or may not have been associated with Prince.
The details surrounding the incident are still murky more than a decade later (this is one of the only accounts of it that we could find) and because of Prince’s reputation, they’ll probably always be murky. But during his appearance on ESPN’s Highly Questionable today, Bob Arum was asked about it. Arum set up a fight with Mayweather around the time that Mayweather stopped working with Prince (it was likely his November 2003 fight with Phillip N’dou, though Arum doesn’t say specifically). And according to Arum, that led to the incident in question. It also led to Arum paying Prince somewhere in the neighborhood of $600,000 on behalf of Mayweather.
Arum is a smart man, so he didn’t say too much about what allegedly happened between Mayweather and Prince on TV, especially with regards to Prince’s perceived role in it. But he did say just enough to indicate what might have taken place between the two.
“We were at dinner one night and I got a call that there was a disturbance in my gym,” Arum told Dan LeBatard and Bomani Jones. “Floyd apparently had asked us not to do a fight in October but to do it in December after James Prince’s contract with him had run out. The disturbance in my gym was that some people came over, with or without the knowledge of James Prince, and proceeded to break a couple of heads of people in Mayweather’s camp with baseball bats. So the gym was splattered with blood. Floyd came to my office the next day and he said, ‘Prince wants his money from the fight that’s coming up.’ I said, ‘Fine, if that’s what you want. I’ll write him a letter of credit.’ Floyd said, ‘Prince don’t do no letters of credit. You better send the cash.’ So I wrote a check, and I made a contract with Prince’s lawyer and he got paid the money that he said he was entitled to as Floyd’s manager.”
Arum went on to say that Prince was always very “business-like” when he worked with him, and he referred to Prince as a “man of his word.” He also said that he didn’t know whether or not Mayweather and Prince had experienced a falling out at the time. But he did say that, at the end of the day, Prince ended up getting paid roughly $600,000 for…something.
“Whether [Mayweather] was afraid or whether he was doing the right thing, that’s for Floyd to determine,” Arum said. “This was the percentage of Floyd’s purse that Prince would have been entitled to.”
You can see what else Arum had to say about Mayweather and Prince in the clip above. For what it’s worth, we found several recent interviews that feature Prince—who currently manages boxer Andre Ward—talking about how he’s on good terms with Mayweather now, but Arum’s story certainly suggests that that wasn’t always the case.
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[via Highly Questionable]
