Wanheng Menayothin is 52-0 but He’s No Mayweather

Wanheng Menayothin, born Chayaphon Moonsri, makes the 11^th defense of his WBC minimumweight title on Friday against Japan’s Tatsuya Fukuhara in Chachoengsau, Thailand, a small city that sits 30 miles from Bangkok. Manayothin, 33, will enter the ring sporting a 52-0 record, a mark that inevitably draws comparisons to Floyd “Money” Mayweather. But the comparison, it says here, is spurious. Menayothin may be an exceptional talent. One doesn’t ring up 52 wins in succession without being pretty good, even if those wins were forged against a bunch of Tijuana taxi drivers. But Menayothin ain’t no Mayweather.

To compare fighters with similar records, one must take into consideration “strength of schedule.” When one inserts this qualifier, Menayothin comes up way short. Only 34 of his 52 opponents had winning records at the time that he fought them and only 21 of those had more than 10 wins to their credit. By contrast, of Mayweather’s 50 opponents (rematches count as two), 43 entered the ring with winning records, only one of whom had fewer than 10 wins in the hopper.

A better indicator may be the winning percentage of their respective opponents:

Mayweather’s Opponents: Total Wins: 1393   Winning Percentage: 86.7 %

Menayothin’s  Opponents: Total Wins: 625     Winning Percentage: 61.2 %

Once he was established as a pro, Mayweather was reluctant to leave Las Vegas. He was the house fighter at the MGM Grand. His last 11 title fights were staged there. But Menayothin has taken parochialism to the extreme. He has yet to fight outside his native Thailand. True, it’s not his fault that there’s a very limited market for diminutive fighters from Thailand in the Western hemisphere, but if he wants to leave the sport as something more than a question mark, he needs to follow the example of Japan’s little monster Naoya Inoue and spread his wings.

Menayothin has been extended the distance in six of his 11 world title fights. Fukuhara, his upcoming opponent, lasted the limit when they fought 18 months ago. The Japanese, a southpaw who isn’t a big puncher, brings a 21-6-6 record into the rematch which was originally scheduled for March 1 and has gone through three postponements.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising given the geographic distribution of minimumweights, but the best fight out there right now for Menayothin (assuming he gets by Fukuhara) is a match with a countryman, Thammaroon Niyomtrong, aka Knockout CP Freshmart (not to be confused with another Freshmart, 49-1 bantamweight Petch CP Freshmart, who is  sponsored by the same chain of mini-supermarkets, Thailand’s equivalent of 7-11).

Niyomtrong (19-0) is far less experienced but packs a more powerful punch. A match between Menayothin and Niyomtrong/Freshmart certainly wouldn’t move the needle like Joshua-Wilder, Crawford-Spence, or even Teofimo Lopez-Devin Haney, but it would be a huge fight in Thailand.

By the way, Wanheng Menayothin is on the cusp of eclipsing another record. The great Mexican fighter Ricardo Lopez was undefeated through the first 52 fights of his pro career, going 51-0-1, a modern day record for the weight class that he took with him into retirement. If he wins on Friday, the Thai will break that mark.

Is Menayothin as good as was Lopez? Nope, but that’s a story for another day.

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