Kell Brook vs. Errol Spence possible for April or May

By Boxing News - 12/01/2016 - Comments

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By Scott Gilfoid: IBF welterweight champion Kell “Special K” Brook (36-1, 25 KOs) will be putting his IBF title on the line against his unbeaten and highly talented mandatory challenger Errol Spence Jr. (21-0 18 KOs) in April or May, according to Dan Rafael. That’s when Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn wants to have him defend his International Boxing Federation 147lb title.

Brook has already been given a medical extension by the IBF to give him time for his surgically repaired right eye to heal before he has to defend his title against Spence. I doubt that the IBF will give Brook another medical extension if his eye still isn’t ready to go by March or April.

Brook is said to be back in training. Hopefully, Brook doesn’t have a setback in training, because the IBF would need to make a decision what to do with him. As it is, Brook hasn’t defended his IBF title since March of 2016 in stopping Kevin Bizier in the 2nd round. If Brook still hasn’t defended his title by March of 2017, it means over an entire year will have elapsed since he last defend his IBF title.

The sanctioning bodies usually strip a fighter when they’ve gone for more than a year since they last defended their titles, which is why it doesn’t make sense if Brook is allowed to defend his IBF title in April or May against Spence. If Brook fights Spence in April, it will have been 13 months since Brook defended his title. If he fights in May, it will be 14 months. I mean, come on. How can a champion sit on a title for OVER a year and not defended it? The IBF is going to need to decide what they’re going to do with their title if Brook isn’t back inside the ring by March. I’m just saying.

Hearn hasn’t given up on the hope of being able to match the 30-year-old Brook against WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao in a unification match. It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen though. Pacquiao’s promoter Bob Arum is interested in matching him against Vasyl Lomachenko in 2017. If not him, then Arum is likely going to go in another direction towards putting Pacquiao in with Terence Crawford. Brook isn’t a high priority for Arum, because he’s not well-known in the United States. A fight between Pacqiuiao and Brook would be lucky if it brought in even 300,000 buys on HBO PPV. But if Pacquiao did agree to fight Brook, the IBF would allow that fight to take place ahead of Brook’s now due mandatory defense against the talented 26-year-old Spence.

“Pacquiao’s going to want a big fight,” Hearn said to espn.com. “I told Kell, ‘You’re a big fight but you’re not that big fight for him so if we can’t get a unification, you have to fight Errol Spence.’ He said, ‘No problem.’”

Brook needs to accept reality that he’s NOT going to fight Pacquiao. It’s not happening. Brook has a choice. He can defend his IBF title against Spence or he can vacate the belt and become a contender once again like all the rest of the contenders in the division. It wouldn’t be all bad news if Brook swerved the Spence fight. Brook could then angle to fight the winner of the Keith Thurman vs. Danny Garcia fight as a challenger. If Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn can work out a deal, he might get a chance to fight the winner of the Thurman-Garcia fight, but he’d have to vacate his IBF title, and he’d look bad doing that in the eyes of a lot of boxing fans.

You got to look at it as a calculated move on Brook’s part. If he fights Spence, he’ll likely get knocked out by him. Who knows if Brook’s surgically repaired right eye will hold up under the pounding of Spence’s huge power punches? I tend to doubt it. But if Brook dodges the Spence fight by vacating his IBF title, then Hearn can possibly get him a shot against the winner of the Garcia vs. Thurman fight. I think Brook loses to Thurman, but I think he would beat Garcia if given the chance against him.

Honestly, I don’t know why Hearn is still pining away for a fight between Brook and Pacquiao. It’s not going to happen. A fight between Brook and the winner of the Keith Thurman vs. Danny Garcia fight isn’t going to happen next either. The Thurman-Garcia fight is taking place in March. Brook can’t just freeze his IBF title while he waits for the smoke to clear for that fight.

Brook has got to defend it already. Brook wasted a voluntary defense with him moving up in weight to challenge IBF/IBO/WBC middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin last September at the O2 Arena in London, England. Golovkin broke Brook’s right eye socket, and hurt him with a body shot in the 5th round.

The fight was then halted by Brook’s trainer Dominic Ingle, who threw in the white towel of surrender. If Brook hadn’t taken the Golovkin fight, he could have padded his record with another soft job like the way he did when he defended his title against Frankie Gavin, Jo Jo Dan and Kevin Bizier. I think it would have looked bad if Brook fought yet another weak opponent, but he would have been still unbeaten and likely injury free.

The thing is, all the soft jobs that Brook has faced during his career have kept him from becoming a big name. If Brook had been fighting guys like Tim Bradley, Golovkin, Saul Canelo Alvarez, Keith Thurman, Marcos Maidana and Danny Garcia years ago, he’d be a recognizable name by now and have a larger fan base. Of course, if Brook had fought all those guys and lost to all of them, then I guess he wouldn’t have a large fan base. Only Brook and his promoters truly know why he never fought the quality fighters until now. Before Brook’s loss to Golovkin, his best opponent on his resume was Shawn Porter, who he beat by clinching for 12 rounds in their fight in 2014. That was a really ugly to watch fight if you ask me.

“It’s a pay-per-view fight in the U.K.,” Hearn said about a fight between Brook and Spence. “It’s a great fight. Kell is not the kind of guy to swerve a fight. I said, ‘You’d have to fight Errol Spence.’ He went, ‘Fine.’”

Yeah, we’ll see if Brook fights Spence or not. Hearn keeps talking about how Brook will fight Spence, but in the next breath, he keeps yapping about wanting to match Brook against Amir Khan or Pacquiao. The IBF isn’t going to let Brook freeze his IBF title so that he can fight Khan. He’ll have to vacate his title in order to take that fight, because the last time I checked, Khan IS NOT one of the welterweight champions.

Another thing that seems weird to me is how Hearn keeps mentioning the 75/25 purse split that Brook will be entitled to for a fight against Spence if it goes to a purse bid, which seems to be the case. I don’t think Hearn is going to even try and negotiate the Brook-Spence fight. I think he’s going to wait for it to go to a purse bid so that he can win the bid and have Brook get a 75/25 split. But with the way that Hearn keeps mentioning the 75/25 split for the Brook-Spence fight all the time, I get the impression that he’s hoping to scare Spence and his manager Al Haymon off with the low split.

They might not like the idea of being shortchanged by getting so little for what would be a big fight. I hate to rain on Hearn’s parade, but Spence is not going to back out of a title shot against Brook for the IBF belt, because he needs that title to get a big unification match against the winner of the Thurman vs. Garcia fight. Brook is standing in Spence’s way of taking that strap.

As messed up as Brook’s eye was from the Golovkin fight, I have a bad feeling that his eye is going to be a problem for him when he gets inside the ring with Spence in early 2017, if he gets inside the ring with him. I think Brook’s surgically repaired right eye is going to close up on him once Spence starts nailing him with power shots. It’ll be like a replay of the rematch between Antonio Margarito and Miguel Cotto from 2011 in which Margarito’s surgically repaired eye closed up on him in the 9th round. The fight had to be stopped. Margarito took the rematch with Cotto after being out of the year for an entire year after suffering an eye injury in his 12 round unanimous decision loss to Manny Pacquiao in 2010. Margarito had three separate eye surgeries in the year leading up to the Cotto rematch. Margarito didn’t take a tune-up to see if his eye would hold up. Brook isn’t going to take a tune-up either, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his eye gives him problems against Spence.