Clothes don’t make this man

If it weren’t for Nate Jones, it would be tempting to dismiss Floyd Mayweather as just another loud-mouthed, pampered, super-macho professional boxer.

Mayweather gets points this fight week for knowing it was time for primping and promoting tonight’s WBC welterweight title fight against Carlos Baldomir of Argentina at the Mandalay Bay Events Center.

He knows there are two measures of a fighter -- winning, and home pay-per-view buys. Before he steps into the ring, the latter needs to take precedence over the former. Losing is one thing. Losing with fewer than 400,000 buys is a disaster.

So, as he went to his early-week TV appearances, open workouts and photo ops, he worked his boxer’s braggadocio at every stop.

Always, he says he is the best, maybe the best ever. He says he has never had a moment’s fear in the ring, nor before he stepped into one. He has not been tired during a fight, nor after one.

With boxers, it appears that if they say it often and loud enough, everybody eventually will believe it. Especially the boxer.

Still, once you meet Nate Jones and hear his story, you have a much easier time stomaching -- key word here, and we’ll get to that -- the Mayweather show.

Lots of the hype and attitude are predictable. Mayweather’s record is 36-0, with 24 knockouts. He has held titles in the sport’s various alphabet-soup sanctioning groups at lightweight, junior welterweight and welterweight (147 pounds), and now seems intent on creating a legacy on the level of Ali, Leonard and De La Hoya while, at 29, still fighting.

“All roads in boxing lead to Floyd Mayweather,” he says. “I am the face of boxing.”

He also says that among his attributes is humility. That brings to mind the axiom that, if you have to tell somebody you are humble, you aren’t.

Understandably, it is hard to be humble when everywhere you go in Mandalay, your picture is on the wall, 20 feet high; your name is projected in lights onto the walkways, and the suite they put you in has big screen TVs that also serve as entire walls.

The workout scene features a constant barrage of rap music, a red Ferrari parked outside that says “MAYWEATHER” in chrome above the license plate and the ever-present entourage of backslappers and errand boys, who wear T-shirts advertising Mayweather’s music-business endeavors, “Philthy Rich Records,” and whose ultimate job seems to be holding up his title belts at public appearances.

In the middle of this, Jones is a quiet presence.

He won a bronze medal as a heavyweight in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the same Olympics and medal as Mayweather. Jones fought 21 professional fights after that, even held a North America Boxing Assn., title, and took a 19-1 record into a fight in Reading, Pa., against Lamon Brewster on Feb. 2, 2002.

In that one, Brewster got Jones against the ropes in the second round and unleashed 20 straight blows that Jones somehow survived. In the next round, the referee stopped it.

Jones was done fighting. He says he has nerve damage in his neck. A report after the fight said that doctors advised him to stop because their tests showed “diminished speech and reflexes.”

He continued to get medical help until, he says, “Don King stopped paying the bills.”

King was Jones’ promoter during his brief pro career, and Jones says they are still friends and he understands why King cut off funds.

That meant, though, that Jones, a product of one of the worst and most dangerous housing projects in the country, Chicago’s old Cabrini-Green, had to find a new way to support his wife and five children. That was complicated by the time he’d spent in jail in the early 1990s for robbery and car theft. Felonies don’t play well on job resumes.

So Jones became a haberdasher, of sorts. He says he would drive to New York City, pick up some clothes cheap -- “wholesale” may not be quite the right term -- and go out on the streets of Chicago to sell them.

“There were times, in the winter, when I’m out there and it was so cold I couldn’t stand it,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do, but I had those kids at home.”

On one of those cold days, he got a reprieve. It was a phone call from Mayweather, who was training for a fight against DeMarcus Corley in Atlantic City, N.J., in March 2004. According to Jones, Mayweather had heard what had happened, what Jones was doing, and ordered him to get on the next flight to Atlantic City.

“We had been friends, so he checked up on me,” says Jones, adding that the friendship began when they both won national Golden Gloves titles in Milwaukee in 1994, two years after Jones’ release from prison.

“I disliked him right away,” Jones says. “He talked all the time and I told him to shut up. Then I went and saw him fight and I said, ‘Oh, my, this guy is something.’ I went and told him that. He went and watched me fight. We both won. We’ve been friends ever since.”

More recently, Mayweather had the one thing Jones needed most, employment. Jones is part of Mayweather’s training team, is paid year-round, and when it is time for a fight, comes to Las Vegas for months at a time. His contribution is unusual.

Almost every session, Jones, at 270 pounds, puts on a chest-and-stomach protector, made of hard foam and resembling baseball catching equipment, and climbs into the ring. Then, with blocking pads on his hands, and towering over the 147-pound Mayweather, he moves slowly and menacingly forward while Mayweather pounds his chest, ribs and stomach with hooks, jabs and uppercuts. Sometimes, this goes on for nearly half an hour.

Jones, who got up to 325 pounds and is now hoping to lose enough weight to try a comeback, is a human punching bag. If you saw up close the ferocity with which Mayweather hits, you would feel the need to pray for Baldomir.

Jones says he has never seen a training drill exactly like this. He says it is the creation of Leonard Ellerbe, Mayweather’s trainer, advisor and best friend, the one person on Team Mayweather who seems able to bring order out of constant chaos.

“I saw Leonard put on the pads and get dropped to his knees a couple of times,” Jones says, “and Leonard’s a strong guy. Ain’t nobody in camp but me can take it.”

The after-effects?

“I go and I sit down, and I get gas,” Jones says. “I’ve got to buy lots of Pepto-Bismol.”

So, it turns out that Mayweather, the boxer with the quick jab and the quicker tongue, the guy who wants the world to see only a tough guy, is a softy when it comes to friends. He seems uncomfortable even talking about it.

“Me and Nate, we go back before boxing,” he says.

On Halloween night, we watch silly photo-ops. Mayweather makes his grand appearance at the Mandalay entrance in an old red Cadillac, the model with ugly fins. He is wearing black pinstriped pants and vest, red shirt and red hat with a four-foot feather. A public-relations woman, Kelly Swanson, positions photographers for shots of Floyd giving candy to little girls with pumpkin sacks.

“If I can just get a shot on ‘SportsCenter,’ ” says Swanson.

We watch two days later as Goossen-Tutor Promotions holds one of the silliest news conferences in the history of boxing, which is saying something.

There are 22 people seated, most of whom eventually speak. There is a guy who is selling shoes and brings his main investor to the podium with him.

There are the usual three guys, standing behind Mayweather, holding title belts, and two shapely underdressed women, neither of whom you would bring home to mother, standing nearby for no apparent reason. Swanson eventually shoos them off to the side.

Two Mandalay guys shill for Mandalay, an HBO guy shills for HBO, and promoter Dan Goossen shills for everything else.

It ends, mercifully, when the nicest, mildest-mannered person in the room, Ellerbe, tells Baldomir there are two ways he can go out, on his face or on his rear end. Then he adds that there is a third way, and tosses a little white flag in Baldomir’s lap.

Baldomir’s manager throws water on Ellerbe, and Mayweather throws water on Baldomir’s manager.

You watch, giggle and marvel that boxing still thinks this stuff works, that it can’t see itself imploding by its own hands while the guys down the street who run the Ultimate Fighting Championship are laughing and taking boxing’s business away.

You feel good, though, because there was a story to tell, even if boxing had no idea what it was, and never will.

You have met Nate Jones, been exposed to the decent side of Floyd Mayweather, and are able to leave town before having to put on rubber boots.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.