Hearn expects Kell Brook vs. Jessie Vargas deal to be done next week

By Boxing News - 05/26/2016 - Comments

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By Scott Gilfoid: Matchroom Sport promoter Eddie Hearn is finishing up on the touches of a deal for a unification fight between his fighter IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook (36-0, 25 KOs) and the Top Rank promoted WBO 147lb champion Jessie Vargas (27-1, 10 KOs) for a fight in either late August or early September, on August 20, August 27, and September 3rd.

The fight will take place in Sheffield, UK. Hearn has made the 27-year-old Vargas an offer he can’t refuse, and he’s now willing to come over to the UK and fight on Brook’s own turf. The money that Vargas is getting for the fight is rumored to be three times more than he’s received for his biggest payday of his career.

As such, you can argue that Hearn is buying Brook a world title by getting Vargas to come over to the UK and fight in an unfriendly environment where he may need a knockout to have a chance at winning the fight.

“The crux of the deal is done in terms of the money, the airline tickets and the hotels,” Hearn said to skysports. “Now it’s just a case of putting it into the contract. When you’ve sent a draft contract, you get a reply with a few things to tweak and we’re just finalizing those things now. I’m very confident and I think that sometime next week, we’ll finally get the fight that Kell Brook has been craving for so long. That’s the plan, at Bramall Lane.”

I had a feeling that Vargas would go for the deal offered by Hearn for the Brook fight, because he doesn’t have anything else available to him right now. Tim Bradley, a fight that Vargas badly wants, isn’t available right now, and might not be available right now. Vargas also wants to fight WBC welterweight champion Danny Garcia. However, that’s probably not a realistic option for Vargas because Garcia is with Al Haymon. That might be a deal breaker for a unification fight between those two.

Vargas with Top Rank, and it’s not probable that a fight can be made between these two. Vargas hasn’t been mentioning a fight against WBA champion Keith Thurman. In that respect, he’s like Brook, who hasn’t been mentioning Thurman. I guess I can’t blame him. Thurman would be a very dangerous opponent for Vargas or Brook. Errol Spence Jr. is also not an option for Brook or Vargas.

“I’m going for the knockout plain and simple,” said Vargas to Hustleboss.

Well, if Vargas is going for a knockout against Brook, he better bring the jaws of life tool with him to pry Brook off him when/if he resorts to his clinching like he did against Shawn Porter.

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Vargas is a pretty flawed fighter, and I can’t see him beating Brook. If you had a chance to see Vargas’s fight against Tim Bradley last year or his fights against Antonio DeMarco, Anton Novikov or Khabib Allakhverdiev, he was not impressive at all. I thought Vargas lost to Novikov and Allakhverdiev.

Vargas looked terrible in both of those fights, and he was pretty average against DeMarco too. This is a gimme for Brook in fighting Vargas for his WBO title. If Brook can’t beat Vargas, then I don’t know what to say about him. I think he would need to move up in weight because there would be nothing for him at 147.

Brook won his IBF title against Shawn Porter in 2014 by using a great deal of clinching to keep Porter from throwing punches. It was night of holding, and the referee working the fight might as well have been wearing blinders because he was just watching the holding without taking charge of the fight and doing his job.

I thought Brook should have been docked points for his holding and then disqualified if he had failed to stop with the grabbing. In hindsight, it was a gift for Porter because he learned after that fight how to deal with guys that hold nonstop like Brook. We saw those improvements in Porter’s game in his match against Adrien Broner last year, as Broner tried the same tricks that Brook did by holding 24/7. But instead of waiting for the referee to do his job and take points away from Broner for his nonstop holding, Porter simply kept throwing punches while being held. He hammered Broner with one arm while being held or both arms while in a tight bear hug. It was good to see that Porter had learned how to fight the clinchers.