Floyd Mayweather: The thug with two jets, 100 cars and $250,000 in a duffel bag he'll blow at a strip club if he wins tonight's big fight

Tucked away in a corner of Floyd Mayweather’s changing room at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas is a space reserved for a black Nike duffel bag that remains with him at all times.

Safeguarded by a member of the 38-year-old boxer’s extensive entourage, and weighing in at around a stone, it’s used to transport the ‘bricks’ of cash that he likes to plough through during the course of a typical day.

Staff call it the ‘pregnant duffel’, for a simple reason: it’s always bulging with money.

Tonight, in advance of Mayweather’s long-awaited showdown with Manny Pacquiao, that bag’s contents will include five shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills, each bundle worth some $50,000 — the equivalent of roughly £31,250.

This not-so-petty cash has been set aside to finance the first couple of hours of what the famously brash fighter, who is undefeated in 47 professional bouts, confidently expects to be a raucous victory celebration. 

Festivities will commence shortly after tonight’s fight has finished, at one of Sin City’s many strip clubs.

Mayweather, wearing one of his collection of gold and diamond watches, and dripping with jewellery, will — he hopes — arrive in one of the hundred supercars he has purchased from a single dealership since moving to Las Vegas 18 years ago. (Only last week, he boasted of having just spent $450,000 on a bespoke Mercedes, and a six-figure sum on a gold-plated golf buggy as a birthday present for one of his infant sons).

Once inside the strip club, where he’s expected to be joined by such friends as singers Justin Bieber (who will carry his championship belt into the ring before the fight) and Beyonce’s husband Jay-Z, he will doubtless perform another favourite trick: throwing bundles of banknotes into the air above the venue’s stage, in order to ‘make it rain’.

The atmosphere, an insider was quoted saying, will be ‘wall-to-wall money and strippers’. Local lap-dancers are expecting their biggest payday since 2008, when Mayweather and a hip-hop artist called T.I. flew hundreds of their peers to town for a ‘strip off’ competition, with a $100,000 first prize.

So it goes in the strange, vulgar world of an athlete who — thanks to stratospheric talent, and a knack for self-promotion — has succeeded in becoming the world’s highest-earning sportsman, according to Forbes magazine, with an estimated $400 million fortune and earnings that last year topped $105 million.

Mayweather’s take on fame is perhaps best summed up in a self-portrait he uploaded to his Twitter feed in early January, which showed off his eight supercars
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