By Dan Ambrose: It’s not looking good for the WBA’s 7-day deadline for the negotiations between middleweight champion Gennady “GGG” Golovkin and WBA ‘regular’ 160lb champion Daniel Jacobs. The deadline runs out this Wednesday. A purse bid will be ordered after the deadline.
Oddly enough, Golovkin’s promoter Tom Loeffler is still optimistic that he’ll be able to work a deal with Al Haymon, the manager for Jacobs, according to RingTV. However, Loeffler has been optimistic for months that he’d be able to get a deal done, and it’s just not happened.
Loeffler is saying that Haymon hasn’t called for a purse bid yet. That might not matter if the negotiations aren’t completed by the end of the deadline on Wednesday. The World Boxing Association will surely order the purse bid, because the negotiations have dragged on for three months.
It’s hard to know why Loeffler didn’t five up and let it go to a purse bid, because Golovkin missed his December 10 fight date on HBO due to the negotiations being stalled. If Loeffler had it go to a purse bid, he could have likely still fought in December. With the way it’s looking now, the Golovkin-Jacobs fight could get pushed beyond the March 18 date that was being talked about.
That’s if Haymon wins the purse bid. The fight could get pushed past March. That’s bad news for Golovkin, because he’s wasting a lot of time for what should have been a simple fight. At some point it might be better for Golovkin to give up his WBA title and go in another direction in looking for fighters whose management is able to negotiate quickly.
Loeffler said this to RingTV.com about the Golovkin-Jacobs negotiations:
“I’m still in contact with Al and hopefully we can still work out a deal,” Loeffler said. “The WBA has set a deadline now, so we’ll see how that works out. But Al hasn’t called for a purse bid. We’re still in contact.”
I wonder what other promoters would have done if they were in a similar circumstance as Loeffler in dealing with negotiations that were just dragging on and on?
If the fight goes to a purse bid, Golovkin will get a 75/25 split of the revenue. However, if Loeffler loses the purse bid to Haymon, then the fight will likely take place in Jacobs’ hometown of Brooklyn, New York. The fight could also be moved to Showtime, either on Championship Boxing or on pay-per-view.
With Golovkin being under contract with HBO, it’s possible that he might not be able to fight on another network. In that case, Golovkin might have to give up his WBA title by vacating it. It’s unclear if that would be a win-win for Jacobs or not. He wouldn’t get the Golovkin fight, but he also wouldn’t be knocked out by him. Jacobs wouldn’t be forced to vacate his own belt or be put in a position where he’s taking on a guy that he likely isn’t good enough to beat.
If the Golovkin-Jacobs fight is pushed to a later date in 2017, it could limit Golovkin to just two fights in 2017. Golovkin will have to decide if it’s worth it or not if the gets pushed to June or July instead of March. You can argue that Golovkin vs. Jacobs is not a pay per view worthy fight on HBO or Showtime.
We already saw that Golovkin isn’t a PPV guy in his fight against David Lemieux. Jacobs isn’t a PPV fighter either. If they put the fight on PPV, it’s possible that it might bring in low numbers like Golovkin’s fight against Lemieux. Would they be satisfied with 100,000 buys or less? Putting Golovkin back on PPV against a fighter like Jacobs sounds like a bad plan unless they would be satisfied with low numbers if the fight didn’t interest the boxing fans.
There’s talk that the Sergey Kovalev vs. Andre Ward fight did 160,000 buys on HBO last month on November 19. HBO hasn’t confirmed those numbers yet. But if they were accurate, would the management for Golovkin and Jacobs be happy with similar PPV numbers or would they be thinking that the fight would hit the jackpot in bringing in 500,000 buys or more? I always thought that Jacobs was mainly just popular in one part of the country in the New York area in the same way that Terence Crawford is mainly popular in Omaha, Nebraska. If a fighter is only popular in a region of the U.S, then it doesn’t make sense to put them on pay per view unless you’ve got low expectations for the number of buys the fight brings in.
Golovkin wanting to collect all the titles in the middleweight division puts him in a position where he has to stick it out with negotiations with Jacobs rather than walking away from them. Golovkin wants to collect all the titles in the division rather than just look for the best possible fights, which would be the wiser thing.
If Golovkin were looking for just the best fights, he could face guys at 154, 147, 168 and 175 rather than being stuck having to negotiate a fight that might not be possible to be negotiated in the long run.