By Dane McGuire
Freshly minted UFC Hall of Fame inductee Jose Aldo has just dropped a bombshell. He has revealed the next time he steps into a boxing ring could be against 50-0 Floyd ‘Money’ Mayweather’
The fight would be Aldo’s third pro fight as a boxer. Mayweather meanwhile has only had exhibition bouts since retiring after reaching the 50-0 mark. Aldo spoke about the status of things prior to his boxing match with former UFC rival Jeremy Stephens at Saturday’s Gamebred Boxing 4.
“Yeah, we’ve been negotiating that fight for a good while,” Aldo told reporters Thursday at the Gamebred Boxing 4 pre-fight news conference in Milwaukee through an interpreter. “Floyd already knows about the fight. I first need to think about my fight this Saturday, and then I can see what’s going to happen. But yeah, we’ve been in negotiations for a long time, and that fight could go down in Saudi Arabia.
“So yeah, it’s all true. We’re going to do the work on Saturday, and after that we’ll sit down again with everyone to book the fight.”
Aldo had a successful boxing debut, defeating Emmanuel Zambrano by unanimous decision in February in Rio de Janeiro.
“It was always a dream I had in my life, I never hid that from anyone,” he said prior to his debut. “It was always a dream. But let’s see. Everybody says I’m still young, that I have a few years [left].”
Aldo doubled down on those comments, adding:
“…I had already been training boxing for a long time, more or less since I made the drop to bantamweight,” Aldo said. “I’ve had much more emphasis on boxing. So when I stopped my (MMA) career, it’s been almost a year just training boxing. I want to see how far I can go…”
These comments follow Aldo initially revealing the two sides were talking back in February.
Mayweather faced reality television star and former MMA fighter Aaron Chalmers on Feb. 25, his sixth exhibition.
“That’s just from this exhibition,” Mayweather said. “So, it’s cool. Nine minutes, 20 million, not bad.”
Aldo had said around that time, “His side has already agreed, my side too,” Aldo told MMA Fighting’s Guilherme Cruz. “We’re now waiting for [the promoters] to get the deal done.”