(Photo credit: Tom Hogan – Hoganphotos) By Scott Gilfoid: After unsuccessfully attempting to negotiate a fight against Carl Froch (33-2, 24 KOs) several months ago, the talented WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward (27-0, 14 KOs) has concluded that Froch simply doesn’t want to fight him.
Ward says that he was willing to fight Froch in the UK, which was what was originally asked of him. But when Ward next heard that they not only wanted him to fight in the UK, but also in Froch’s hometown of Nottingham, then at that point Ward said he realized that they [Froch and his promoter Eddie Hearn] weren’t serious about wanting to fight him.
It’s too bad because it would have given Froch a sliver of a chance of redeeming himself after he was whipped by Ward four years ago in the Super Six tournament in 2011. Ward thoroughly schooled Froch in that fight by beating him with one hand, and having him looking at the referee for help in trying to fight on the inside against Ward.
“Honestly I don’t think he wants to fight,” Ward said via Skysports.com about Froch not wanting the fight against him. “I was open to it a couple of months ago when the WBA mandated that we speak. I don’t know what happened with that. It went from possibly fighting at Wembley to fighting in Nottingham. I can give but I can’t give everything. To me that was an answer; he doesn’t want to fight me and that’s fine.”
It gives you a pretty good indication that Froch and Hearn didn’t want the fight with Ward when they were willing to pass up the huge money that they would have received had they staged the Ward-Froch 2 rematch at Wembley Stadium in order to place at a much smaller venue in Nottingham. The money difference between having the fight take place at Wembley Stadium or in Nottingham is huge.
I honestly think Ward was in a no-win situation with the Froch negotiations. Had Ward agreed to fight Froch in Nottingham, I think Hearn and Froch would have then said that the fight wasn’t a big enough money bout for them to take it at all, period. If not that, then there likely would have been another hoop for Ward to jump through in order to get the fight with Froch.
They could have easily flushed the negotiations down the toilet by telling Ward that he would only get an 80-20 split of the revenue. Once Ward heard something like that, he would have been gone in the next instant because he wouldn’t have let Froch take the lion’s share of the loot to the point where he would get almost nothing. That kind of thing might work for Froch against some of the obscure guys he’s fought, but it wouldn’t work against Ward.
Ward will be fighting this Saturday night against England’s Paul Smith (35-5, 20 KOs) at the Oracle Arena in Oakland, California. It’s a warm up fight for Ward to get him ready to start taking on stiffer competition like Sergey Kovalev in the future.
Comments are closed.