Ward is just using Golovkin’s name to stay relevant, says Sanchez

By Boxing News - 10/05/2015 - Comments

ward6666By Dan Ambrose: In a real surprising bit of news, IBO/WBA middleweight champion Gennady Golovkin’s trainer Abel Sanchez says that WBA super middleweight champion Andre Ward is using Golovkin’s name to stay relevant by name dropping his name to get attention from boxing fans and the media.

Sanchez says that Ward was lying when he recently said that Golovkin’s promoter turned down a fight offer from him to fight him. Sanchez says that Ward didn’t start talking about a fight against Golovkin until after he’d already signed for a unification fight against IBF middleweight champion David Lemieux (34-2, 31 KOs) on October 17th.

Sanchez doesn’t think that Ward is seriously interested in fighting Golovkin. He just thinks that he’s mentioning his name so that he can stay relevant by getting the attention from the fans.

“Untrue. Andre’s a liar, and I’ll say it on the air,” Sanchez said via Fighthype when told that Ward had said that Golovkin’s management turned down a fight with him. “Andre talked all that after he [Golovkin] had signed the fight against Lemieux. He’d been offered many things before that and never came out and said he wanted the fight. But once he signed the fight with Lemieux, you can go back and look at the record, the fight with Lemieux was signed and talked about, and then he [Ward] comes out and says that. That guy doesn’t want to fight. Not only that, he was at 72 for his last fight,” Sanchez said.

Ward was out of boxing for close to two years due to injury and promotional problems. He recently came back last June and defeated non-top 15 ranked fighter Paul Smith by a 9th round knockout. Before that, Ward hadn’t fought since 2013, when he defeated Edwin Rodriguez.

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The Ward-Smith fight took place at a catch-weight of 172 pounds rather than at 168, the super middleweight limit. Ward is talking about moving up to light heavyweight, and there’s a chance he could be fighting IBF/WBA/WBO 175lb champion Sergey Kovalev at some point in the future if Ward does well in fighting the top guys in this weight class.

“He’s a trying to use Gennady’s name,” Sanchez said. “Now that he’s not relevant, he’s using Gennady’s name to make himself relevant. I think Andre needs to concentrate on what he’s doing, and make sure he gets some relevant fights so that maybe he’ll be in position to be able to talk about fighting Gennady,” Sanchez said.

At this point it’s hard to know who to believe between Ward and Team Golovkin. Ward says he has an e-mail from Golovkin’s team turning down a fight with him around a month ago. If Ward still has the e-mail, and if he’s willing to show it to the media, then he can verify the date on the e-mail and show that the fight was – or wasn’t – offered before Golovkin had signed to fight Lemieux.

Recently, Ward had this to say to Fighthub about Golovkin’s management turning down a fight against him. Here’s what Ward had to say:

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“It’s not Triple G no more. It’s ‘Little G. Little G turned down an official fight with us. I don’t know, about a month ago. I have an e-mail right now that shows we gave him what he wanted, we’ll give you 50-50, these are the terms, these are the conditions, and the promoter turned it down and said ‘Maybe in 2017.’ So from now on, he’s ‘Little G.’ They turned it down in five minutes,” Ward said.

Ward’s management are working on putting him in with a big name at light heavyweight for the undercard of the November 21st Miguel Coto vs. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez fight on HBO pay-per-view.



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