When Floyd Mayweather wants his own gym, Leonard Ellerbe acts

LAS VEGAS -- A white tent occupied the two parking spaces immediately in front of the entrance to the Mayweather Boxing Club rather than the luxuries cars owned by the gym's proprietor that usually fill them.

It was media day for a pair of upcoming shows that Mayweather Promotions is staging, on Saturday at the MGM Grand on NBC and on Sunday afternoon at the MGM on CBS. The tent was to shade the fighters signing autographs in the scorching 110-degree temperatures for the several hundred fans who showed up.

The gym is fairly anonymous in a strip mall in Las Vegas' Chinatown section. It's about twice the size it was when it opened in the first half of 2007, when Mayweather was preparing to fight Oscar De La Hoya. That was the fight that turned Mayweather into a superstar.

But life with one of the world's greatest, and richest, athletes isn't always easy, as Mayweather Promotions CEO Leonard Ellerbe discovered one weekend during the build-up to the fight.

Mayweather was training for the fight at Barry's Boxing, a small gym that houses a lot of the best amateur boxers in the city, on a Friday afternoon. It was one of those days that things just didn't feel right.

"Barry's was great and they were very good to Floyd, but basically, he wanted his own place," Ellerbe said.

So when the work day was over, Mayweather gave Ellerbe a rather daunting task: Locate, buy and open a gym that he could train in by Monday.

It was an extraordinary task, but Ellerbe didn't bother to argue about the difficulty. He knew he needed to find a way to get the job done.

And so he located a space in the Chinatown section of town that was available. It was an empty garage, with concrete floors and not much else.

But it was perfect for a boxer training for a fight. Ellerbe made the arrangements and by Monday afternoon when Mayweather  showed up for work, he had a gym to call his own to prepare in.

Mayweather has subsequently acquired additional space for the gym to make it much larger than it was in 2007. It's now the most prominent boxing gym in the city and houses many great fighters who come to Las Vegas to train.

It was less than 48 hours, though, from the moment it was conceptualized until the time it was open and functioning as a boxing gym.

"He said he wanted it and you think, 'How can I possibly pull this off?' " Ellerbe said. "But we got it done!"

That's life with one of the world's best, and most demanding athletes.