By Radio Rahim

From 1998 to 2000, British boxing legend Naseem Hamed and pound-for-pound fighter Floyd Mayweather Jr. were the shining stars of their respective divisions.

During that time period, Hamed was a world champion and destroying everyone in the featherweight division, while Mayweather - also a world champion - was outclassing everyone at super featherweight.  

Fans were initially whispering and soon shouting for a Mayweather-Hamed matchup. The fight never happened. Hamed was upset by Marco Antonio Barrera in 2001, and then retired in 2002 after one more fight. Also in 2002, Mayweather left the super featherweight division and moved up to win a lightweight title from Jose Luis Castillo in the most debated outcome of Floyd's career.

There are conflicting stories on who was avoiding who back then.

According to Mayweather,  he wanted to fight Hamed but claims the British wanted to be his friend.

"Once I got to a certain point [in my career] - very, very quick I wanted to make it happen. He didn't really want to fight. He wanted to be friends. I didn't want to be friends with nobody, I wanted to fight everybody," Mayweather said.

 Hamed, obviously has a different take on the situation.

"It's a good job that he didn't fight me though, because he might not have the career that he did," Hamed told BoxingScene.com.

Hamed and Mayweather are both retired and the two fighters have become good friends over the years. Hamed has a tremendous amount of respect for Mayweather's abilities as a businessman, which helped the unbeaten boxer become the highest paid athlete in the world.

"In my eyes, the most cleverest person to ever come into the boxing game is Floyd 'Money' Mayweather. While everybody is hating him.... don't hate the brother, just watch him enjoy his fruits," Hamed explained to BoxingScene. "In my eyes, I'm just so happy that somebody in my sport is the highest paid in all of sports. Me and Floyd are friends, we get on."

"I will always rate him. He's not the most entertaining fighter that I love to watch, but from a business sense, in the sport, to execute something the way he did - for me nobody will ever be as clever as Floyd 'Money' Mayweather. I just said to him recently when we was on face time - 'it's Money May all day.'"