Brook will fight Bradley in summer 2016, says Hearn

By Boxing News - 09/25/2015 - Comments

brook67By Scott Gilfoid: IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn is looking past Brook’s next fight against #4 IBF Diego Chaves (23-2-1, 19 KOs) towards a unification fight between Brook and WBO welterweight champion Timothy “Desert Storm” Bradley (32-1-1, 12 KOs) that Hearn wants to schedule in the summer of 2016.

Hearn seems to be very confident that he can make the Brook vs. Bradley fight. Brook barely beat Shawn Porter using nonstop clinching last year in their fight in June 2014.

It doesn’t make any sense for Hearn to be assuming anything when it comes to Brook, because he’s just an easy to hit fighter with heavy hands but a leaky defense.

“With a win [over Diego Chaves], we [Brook] would then be looking to get out again early in 2016 before making the Bradley fight for spring or summer and collecting more belts,” Hearn said to the dailymail.co.uk. “After maybe another fight or two, so three or four fights from now, I would say that Kell will move up a weight division. The move is inevitable so it is a matter of when.”

Brook should already be moving up in weight now, because he takes off a lot of water weight to fight at 147, which is one of the reasons for his success in that weight class. Brook is bigger than a lot of the fighters he faces at welterweight. It’s got to be hard for Brook to drain down in weight to fight in the 147lb division. You can say that Brook should have moved up to junior middleweight last year.

The fact that Brook is still fighting at welterweight tells you that there must be some apprehension about him fighting against the top junior middleweights. Brook need not worry though.

When he moves up to 154, Hearn is likely going to have him fighting John Thompson or Liam Smith for the WBO junior middleweight title rather than Erislandy Lara or Jermall Charlo. I see Hearn keeping Brook far, far away from those two. Instead, it’ll be Brook fighting the winner of the Thompson-Smith fight for the WBO junior middleweight title.

“People have only seen 60 per cent of Kell Brook – he has been excellent but there is more to come,” Hearn said.

I think the boxing world has seen 100 percent of Brook, and that was in his close call win against Shawn Porter last year. Brook was getting dominated on the inside and was going to lose the fight when he started holding at any chance he could get. It was nonstop holding from Brook, and the only reason he won the fight was because the referee failed to do his job in taking points off from Brook for his excessive holding. Brook was holding like a fighter who had been rocked and was holding on for dear life to escape a round.

The thing is Brook did this round after round for 12 continuous rounds, and the referee was asleep at the wheel, letting Brook do this in the fight. The referee is supposed to pull a fighter like Brook to the side and take points off after giving him two to three warnings. We didn’t see that. Brook was just holding and really making an ugly fight of it.

“I can see him winning world titles at both light middleweight and middleweight and there are tempting fights to be made against men like Miguel Cotto and Saul Alvarez,” Hearn said. “He is good enough to be a multi-weight world champion so the next couple of years should be very exciting.”

I do agree that Brook can win a world title at 154 if he fights the winner of the Thompson-Smith fight. I don’t think that Brook could beat the better junior middleweights like Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, Jermall Charlo, Erislandy Lara or Demetrius Andrade. As far as Brook winning a world title at 160, Hearn would need to match Brook against the winner of the Andy Lee vs. Billy Joe Saunders fight for him to have a chance at winning a paper title. But there’s no way that Brook could beat David Lemieux, Miguel Cotto, Canelo or Gennady Golovkin.

What Brook would be doing in winning world titles at 154 and 160 is similar to what Manny Pacquiao has done in winning world titles in eight divisions. Pacquiao rarely fought the very best fighters at a particular weight when he started moving to the weight classes like lightweight, light welterweight, welterweight and junior middleweights. He fought the paper champions in many cases. If Brook doesn’t care that he’s winning paper titles, then he could probably go all the way up to super middleweight to win titles if that’s what he’s aiming to do.



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