By Dan Ambrose: In a surprising move, Main Events and their fighter IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev pulled out of their scheduled purse bid this Friday with WBC light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson.
Main Events and Kovalev were previously interested in facing the 37-year-old Stevenson. The World Boxing Council even helped Kovalev out by making him the WBC mandatory to Stevenson.
The reason why Main Events and Kovalev pulled out of the purse bid is because they’re under contract with HBO. Stevenson is with Showtime. Had Kovalev and Main Events lost the purse bid, which was a distinct possibility, then they would have likely been expected to fight Stevenson on Showtime or on Premier Boxing Champions on NBC, CBS or ESPN. That would have made it impossible for Kovalev to do considering his contract with HBO.
Kovalev will be facing his IBF mandatory challenger Najib Mohammedi this summer.
Kovalev and Main Events are still interested in facing Stevenson, but it would have to be on HBO and not on Showtime, NBC, CBS or ESPN.
According to ESPN, Stevenson’s adviser Al Haymon would have been in a good position to win the purse bid for Stevenson and thus have the fight televised on Showtime or one of the other networks.
Main Events’ CEO Kathy Duva said to ESPN.com “We want to make the fight very much and we’d love to make the fight with them on a 50-50 deal, but Sergey is contractually tied to HBO and we can’t go to a purse bid. We can’t fight the fight if we lost the bid so there’s no point in going to the bid and putting on charade.”
With Kovalev fighting on HBO and Stevenson on Showtime, it looks like the two fighters will never face each other unless one of them chooses to move over to the other network once their contract runs out with them. This means that boxing fans will never really know who the better fighter of the two is.
About the only thing fans can do is go by how long Kovalev and Stevenson can remain champions. Given that Kovalev is 32 and Stevenson 37, it would seem that Kovalev has the better chance of holding onto his titles than Stevenson does.
With the Kovalev-Stevenson bout now no longer possible, it obviously helps out Artur Beterbiev because he could be about the only dangerous guy that Stevenson has to fight. Beterbiev fights on Showtime as well, which would mean that he can fight Stevenson. It’s unclear if Beterbiev has an exclusive contract with Showtime. If so, then that means no Beterbiev vs. Kovalev fight in the future. Beterbiev vs. Stevenson is a good fight, but it would be more interesting to see Beterbiev being able to fight both Stevenson and Kovalev in the future.
Kovalev really has no one to fight now in terms of interesting opponents. If he can never fight Beterbiev and Stevenson, then Kovalev will have no problems holding onto his titles for a long, long time. He can fight Jean Pascal again in the future, but that’s a fight that would likely be won again by Kovalev. About the best option Kovalev has for a big fight in the future is if Andre Ward or one of the other top super middleweights choose to move up in weight to 175.
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