Golovkin’s promoter believes Jacobs deal can be reached

By Boxing News - 12/02/2016 - Comments

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By Dan Ambrose: Tom Loeffler of K2 Promotions is confident that he can reach a deal with Al Haymon, the manager for WBA ‘regular’ middleweight champion Daniel Jacobs (32-1, 29 KOs) for a fight against his fighter IBF/IBO.WBA/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) for a fight that would take place on March 18 at Madison Square Garden in New York.

The Golovkin-Jacobs fight will be shown on HBO Championship Boxing. The WBA gave the two fighters’ camps a seven-day deadline to get the negotiations completed. The management for the two fighters has been in negotiations for three solid months without being able to finish the process.

It’s not surprising that the WBA finally gave them a seven-day deadline to get it finished. If Loeffler can’t reach a deal with Haymon for the fight, then it’ll go to a purse bid. The winning promoter for the bid will be the one that runs the promotions. If Loeffler wins, the fight will likely be held at Madison Square Garden.

If Haymon wins, then he’ll probably stage the fight at the Barclays Center in Jacobs’ hometown of Brooklyn, New York. Either way, the fight is going to take place in New York where both fighters have large fan bases.

If the Golovkin vs. Jacobs fight doesn’t get made, it would be sad news for a lot of the fans in the boxing world, because they want to see this fight. It would also have been a huge waste of time for Loeffler to have thrown away three months of Golovkin’s career in trying to negotiate the fight with Jacobs. You couldn’t blame Loeffler if he were to be hesitant in the future to try and revisit negotiations with Jacobs if the fight can’t get made this time.

The one problem that Golovkin has that forces him to negotiate with fighters that negotiate hard is that he wants to unify all the titles. Instead of being able to walk away to find guys that are easier to negotiate, Golovkin and Loeffler have to stick it out, because of GGG wanting to win all the titles. If Golovkin and Loeffler had just let the fight to go a purse bid the first time around, then they wouldn’t have wasted all this time in the negotiations. The fight would have been made already, and they likely would have fought on December 10 on HBO Championship Boxing without needing to give up that date due to the negotiations dragging on and on without end.

Loeffler said to ESPN.com this about the Golovkin vs. Jacobs negotiations:

“Usually, they give you 10 days’ notice,” Loeffler said. “That’s the standard, but depending on everyone’s schedule it could be something like 12 days or 14 days. I think it’s always been likely we’ll get a deal done. Every discussion I’ve had with Al has been that Jacobs wants the fight and that it’s a matter of finalizing the deal points, which is what we’re working on now.”

If the fight goes to a purse bid, then Jacobs will get a 75/25 split of the revenue in playing by the IBF’s rules. Jacobs wants a 60-40 split, and that’s not what Loeffler has in mind. It’s unclear whether Loeffler can make the deal if he gives Jacobs a 65/35 split or if he’s going to stick to wanting the 60-40 split. When it’s all said and done, Loeffler would have been better off giving Jacobs the 40% split of the revenue, because the stalled negotiations caused Golovkin to miss an entire fight.

With the lost money, Golovkin and Loeffler aren’t coming out ahead. There’s something to be said about making a fast deal when it comes to negotiations. If you’ve got a fighter who wants to fight three times per year, then you can’t let the negotiations drag out the way that they did with the Jacobs fight without it causing a missed fight date.

The Golovkin-Jacobs fight is a great little fight, but it’s still a non-PPV match. We’re not talking about PPV money. It’s also not worth it for Golovkin to miss a fight date by letting the negotiations drag. Loeffler probably should have given up on the negotiations a long time ago and let the fight go to a purse bid.

If it goes to a purse bid, then Jacobs gets a rotten deal of a cut of just 75/25 of the revenue, Will Haymon pull Jacobs out of the fight at that point? If so, then Jacobs goes back to just being a contender rather a champion, because the World Boxing Association will surely strip him of his WBA title for pulling out of the fight.

Can Jacobs make the money he’s been making as just a contender rather than a champion? I doubt it. That’s why it’s probably in Jacobs’ best interest to try and get the fight negotiated with Golovkin right now before the end of the WBA’s 7-day deadline on the negotiations.

Golovkin will fight in March with or without Jacobs, according to his trainer Abel Sanchez. They will absolutely fight in March. They won’t keep waiting on the Jacobs fight if it doesn’t happen by that point. Golovkin still wants to fight three times in 2017. If he puts too much more time into this fight, it’ll cause him to miss another date, and that’s not good.