FLOYD MAYWEATHER Jr. W12 JUAN MANUEL MARQUEZ

Ezzard Charles ranks as of my all-time favourite fighters. The 1950s heavyweight champion was a beautiful boxer. As a youngster growing up in England I never had the chance to see Charles fight on TV, but I read about the Cincinnati Cobra, and it was clear the American boxing writers didn’t appreciate him. The problem was that, while Charles had talent — more so than the contemporary writers seemed to recognise — he wasn’t involved in exciting fights. “This is bound to be a cautious fight, maybe a dreadfully dull one,” New York Times columnist Arthur Daley warned readers on the eve of Charles’s title fight with Joe Louis.

Charles entered my thoughts as I watched Floyd Mayweather Jr. outclassing Juan Manuel Marquez on Saturday’s PPV show from the MGM Grand, Las Vegas.

This was a beautiful boxing exhibition by Mayweather, but that is it was — an exhibition.

There was no drama, no suspense. From the first round it was obvious that there could only be one winner. Mayweather was too big, too fast, too strong and too good.

Despite the praise being lavished on Mayweather during the commentary, I found myself wanting a little more — I wanted to see him make a major effort to end the fight. For the first time I felt I could understand why the superb Ezzard Charles wasn't as revered as probably he should have been.

Mayweather had the opportunity, I thought, to score a spectacular victory in this fight. He had demonstrated he could hit Marquez almost at will. It seemed obvious that Marquez couldn’t hurt Mayweather — at least, not hurt him as in rocking or staggering him.

To conclude matters, though, Mayweather would have needed to have taken the fight to Marquez a bit more assertively and risked getting hit back. Risk, though, is not something that Mayweather is prepared to contemplate. Even when he was walking towards Marquez he was doing so cautiously, always poised to pull back at the threat of retaliation.

Mayweather is so classy and athletic that he is a pleasure to watch, but perhaps only up to a point. When a boxing match becomes utterly predictable it no longer becomes compelling.

I think that a Sugar Ray Leonard — not to mention a Sugar Ray Robinson — would have felt the need to have put a final flourish on the proceedings. Mayweather, though, feels no such urgency. He is content to box his way through 12 rounds, hitting and not getting hit.

Mayweather showed he could drop Marquez when he deposited the Mexican fighter on the canvas with a left hook in the second round. He had Marquez’s nose bloody and his right eye nicked and looking a bit puffy. I think that one big series of punches from Mayweather could have had referee Tony Weeks intervening. Mayweather, though, would not cross the line that would have put him in the position of possibly getting hit back.

Marquez clearly knew at a very early stage that he couldn’t win, but he had also made up his mind that he wasn’t going to let himself be stopped.

So, we had Marquez throwing enough punches to keep Mayweather in conservative mode, and Mayweather popping in the jab or quick, crisp, single hooks and right-hand leads. He made Marquez look like a sparring partner. The difference in class was wider than I had anticipated, and the bout was easier for Mayweather than I had envisaged, although I had fully expected him to win. After a 21-month absence from the ring, Mayweather looked very good indeed. Trouble was, for me, anyway, he missed the chance to look sensational.

On the supporting show, Chris John had to survive a very wobbly last round to get the deserved unanimous decision over a Rocky Juarez who again came up short in a championship challenge.

The last round showed why I made this a much closer fight than the oddsmakers had it. John, his left eye swollen and closing, looked almost out of the fight. Stating the obvious, in the days of 15-round fights, Juarez would have been a late-rounds KO winner — but the championship rounds are now 11 and 12, not 13, 14 and 15, and John was able to stay on his feet and retain his WBA featherweight title.

All credit to John, though, for piling up points with his high-punch-volume style. For the first 10 rounds it was the Indonesian boxer who was doing almost all the punching. No wonder, then, that he was feeling the pace in the last two rounds. As in the first, drawn fight between the two in Houston, Rocky’s big finishing surge came too late. The wide scores of judges Adalaide Byrd and Herb Santos were accurate reflections of the fight we witnessed but Glenn Hamada’s score that made John a one-point winner was surprising. John was the man who looked beaten up at the finish, and he was on shaky legs in the final three minutes, but surely he scored far more points than his harder hitting opponent.

In the other title fight, there was also bizarre scoring when Michael Katsidis had to settle for a split decision win over Vicente Escobedo to capture the vacant WBO interim lightweight title. Escobedo boxed well and showed gameness to withstand some fierce, fast pressure from the much stronger Aussie fighter, but to me there was only one winner — yet judge Mike Fitzgerald, from Wisconsin, had Katsidis winning only four of the 12 rounds. Thankfully the other two judges had the right fighter in front, but the odd-judge-out scoring in this and the John-Juarez bout are examples of why we are always on tenterhooks whenever a fight has to be decided by the judges.