It's too early for the definitive biography of the world-champion boxer Floyd Mayweather Junior to be written. He's only forty years old, and for all anyone knows. he has only reached the midpoint of his life. Boxing is filled with tragic stories (Carlos Monzon, Arturo Gatti) and peppered with successes and redemptive second acts (George Foreman). We'll have to wait and see how things shake out for Floyd.
Having said that, Tris Dixon does an able job of laying the groundwork for whoever comes after him to finish telling the story he has started telling here. Dixon didn't have unprecedented access to Mayweather, but he has done his homework, he understands the sport of boxing, and his writing is crisp and effective (his previous offering "The Road to Nowhere" is a brilliant travelogue into the lives of boxing's forgotten fighters and to the heart of the sport's darkest corners, so I already had some familiarity with him).
In "Money" Dixon uses interviews, quotes articles, and provides his own color commentary on the key fights in Mayweather's life to create an immensely readable book about the highest-paid athlete in the sport, a man worshiped for his boxing skills, and reviled for the uglier elements of his personal life, as well as the heel personality he has cultivated over the years to make himself a bankable commodity to both lovers and haters.
Dixon is fair to his subject, though those who despise Mayweather or count themselves among the legions of his die-hard fans will complain the author is being unfair, that he either used kid gloves when handling his superstar subject or that he dragged "Money's" name through the mud in order to cash in on controversy surrounding the boxer.
Putting aside the aggrieved partisans, though, the book is the first, serious book-length look at a man who, love him or hate him, dominated boxing for a decade and left the sport with his wits and his earnings to show for it, which not a lot of fighters can say. All of the contradictions are addressed in the book, the kindness and cruelty, the generous streak and the stories of burning Benjamins in the strip club. The heady family drama is also tackled head-on, starting with Floyd Mayweather Sr. using his son as a human shield to protect himself from bullets, and ending with Jr.'s uncle staggering down the Vegas Strip barely knowing his own name, after absorbing a lifetime of blows in the ring. Recommended.