In the wake of Marcos Maidana's customized Everlast gloves being rejected by the representatives of Floyd Mayweather and eventually disallowed by the Nevada Athletic Commission, much is being speculated about those mitts which are the MX model that came in the colors of the Argentine flag. The question is, what is a customized glove and what does it entail?
According to Neil Morton the CEO of Everlast, who's company has four different styles of fight gloves, explained,"Each one of those gloves we have a tech-pack for which is technical specialization for the gloves. So when they are manufactured they are manufacture standardized. So we can simply send a tech-pack and they follow the tech-pack and those gloves are manufactured to the standards that we require."
And making custom gloves is not about the structure of the glove (such as moving around the padding to the likes of a fighter) but about the colors and logo's on them. They do this for certain select boxers who are involved in high-profile bouts, such as Miguel Cotto, who faces Sergio Martinez on June 7th and for Saul 'Canelo' Alvarez, who will takes on Erislandy Lara on July 12th.
A concept of a design is hatched, if it's approved by the fighter, it's then sent up to their graphics department.
"We then take that design and we attach it to our tech-pack which is the same for every glove and send it to the manufacturer,"explained Morton."The manufacturer will then manufacture, not just one pair -- for this particular one, six pairs of the glove -- using our standardized tech-pack."
And in this particular situation finding suitable blue leather.
Morton continued,"The gloves come in, we'll select out of the six pairs, three, randomly and we send them to Golden Boy. Golden Boy then takes those three pairs and takes them to the commission for approval as they did yesterday. It's he first time the fighters will see the gloves, the fighters selects one of the three pairs, like anyone else can. That's the process."
The MX model is the one used by Miguel Cotto when he faced Mayweather in 2012. Yesterday, a red pair of that glove was approved by the commission."So that blue glove is exactly the same as the red gloves except it has blue leather rather than red leather. That's how it works. It's very simple and we have all the paper work to back it up.''
So why were they rejected by Mayweather?
"The MX glove Cotto used when he fought Mayweather, maybe it hurt," said Morton, with a laugh."It looked like it did." But Morton understands that perhaps this is all gamesmenship."Mayweather's a master of that. Mayweather pound-for-pound is one of the greatest of all-time, he's going to use any edge that he can to ensure he's in the best position to win. But he's fought against that glove before and won."
Morton says of the MX model that is preferred by offensively inclined boxers:"That gloves a punchers glove. Maybe (Mayweather) would like a little more padding like the gloves he wears, the Grant gloves and he feels more comfortable against something that's more of a protective nature in terms of it's structure. But our gloves are approved. They've been used in Nevada many times and they've been through test processes of the WBC. They have been approved by the WBC and independently tested.
"So we're confident that the glove is what it is and there's no way they were manufactured any differently to how we manufacture hundreds and hundreds of that model that are manufactured every year for fights all over the world."
"It's part of the game, we don't get upset about it. It is, what it is," said the good-natured Morton."What I know is this, nobody can accuse us of doing anything differently for Marcos than we've done for any other fighter. It's exactly the same in terms of structure because we've got a tech-pack, we've got a paper trail."
