THE SCENE in the parking lot of the Mayweather Boxing Club in Las Vegas has devolved into an extended documentary on the perils of celebrity. There's a betting slip on the loose worth $80,000, earned on the merits of the Miami Heat's first-half performance about two hours earlier on this Friday night, and the quest to find it has everything but a circus-music soundtrack.

It's not about the money. Really, it's not. Floyd Mayweather Jr. bets a lot, both in frequency and amount, and this betting slip is not extraordinary in any way. Just the night before, he lost $50,000 on the first half of the Thunder-Lakers game before doubling down on his beloved Thunder and winning $100,000 in the second half. This is a man who later that night will put on a pair of pants he hadn't worn in a while and pull four grand out of a pocket the way you or I might find a five in the dryer. Trust me: Eighty grand won't change his life.

Mayweather is standing next to his sleek four-door black Mercedes, one of the more sedate of his roughly two dozen cars, and is wondering out loud how many people he might have to fire over this debacle. A few leggy, extravagantly dressed women watch laconically, waiting to follow the champ to dinner. Curtis Jackson, publicly known as 50 Cent, sits in the passenger seat of the Mercedes.....