Wilder’s manager says Povetkin fight is cancelled, not postponed!

By Boxing News - 05/16/2016 - Comments

povetkin7By Dan Ambrose: WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder’s co-manager Jay Deas says his title defense against his WBC mandatory challenger Alexander Povetkin (30-1, 22 KOs) has been canceled, not postponed like World Boxing Council president Mauricio Sulaiman announced on Sunday in a press statement. There is difference. Sulaiman’s announcement made it appear to some boxing fans that the fight will be rescheduled at a later date. Deas is saying the fight is definitely canceled.

“The fight’s canceled,” Deas said to tuscaloosanews.com. “There is no postponement. It’s canceled. You can’t just pick up a fight and move it to another date and time as if it were a fighter with an injured hand. That’s a postponement. This was a violation of WBC rules, therefore this is a cancellation, which means we have to see what all the fallout is before we can proceed in any way. It’s definitely 100 percent canceled.”

The WBC is the decider.

“I would like him back in the ring in the neighborhood of September,” Deas said.

That’s four more months from now. Team Wilder would need to find another opponent for that date. The WBC will probably select the next highest ranked contender that is free and willing to take the fight against Wilder. We could see a rematch between Wilder and Bermane Stiverne, as he’s ranked #2 by the WBC. He already fought Wilder in 2015 in losing to him by a 12 round decision. Negotiating a fight between him and Wilder could stretch out over a long time.

It would be hard to see a fight between Wilder and Stiverne taking place in September. It would more likely be October, November or December. This means Wilder would fight just twice in 2016 rather than three to four times. Wilder wants to stay busy by fighting as much as possible, but he’s finding out now that things happen and it makes it hard to get to the ring.

Povetkin’s promoter Andrey Ryabinsky really wants the Povetkin vs. Wilder fight to take place, and he might not give up easily on the idea of that fight taking place unless the WBC says definitively that the fight is canceled and Povetkin suspended.

Wilder is on his way back to his home in Alabama, and he’ll be arriving there at 11:00 a.m. on Monday. He’ll be taking it easy for a while, according to Deas. They see his long training camp as a fight and they’ll consider it a victory. It was a lot of hard sparring that Wilder had to go through during the camp, and he wants to rest up to recharge for his next training camp for whoever he winds up facing in September.