By Scott Gilfoid: IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook’s promoter Eddie Hearn says IBF mandatory challenger Errol Spence’s manager Al Haymon failed to accept an offer he made to him for a Brook-Spence fight. Hearn says he believes that Haymon wants the fight to go to the purse bid on February 7 so that he can win that bid.
Brook would get a 75/25 purse split if it goes to a purse bid. I don’t think Spence cares that he’ll get the smaller money. He just wants to beat Brook and take his IBF title so that he can use the belt for unification fights. Brook is just someone standing in Spence’s way. Spence is seen as the future of the welterweight division.
Brook is seen as a fighter that has had 13 years of largely soft match-making by his different British promoters. Why they’ve chosen to match Brook so softly through most of his career is the big question. Whatever the case, it appears that Brook’s time as the IBF champion is about to end one way or another now that Spence is his mandatory. It was thought that Brook would vacate his IIBF title, but now it appears that he might defend the title against Spence. We’ll see if Brook does.
The purse bid is on February 7. There’s still a week that Brook could vacate if he wants to duck the Spence fight. Hopefully, Brook takes the fight so that the boxing fans can see a good match-up. Spence says he prefers to beat Brook for the IBF title rather than him winning the belt outside of the ring.
Hearn says that Haymon is going to need to come up with a lot of money to win the purse bid. Hearn obviously doesn’t want to lose the bid, because Brook is a popular fighter in the UK and he stands a better chance of winning if he’s fighting in front of his own British fans in the UK than if he has to fight Spence in the U.S.
I don’t think it matters whether Hearn wins the purse bid. Spence is so good that he’d likely beat Brook even if the fight took place in his living room in the UK. Spence is such a big puncher and a dangerous pressure fighter. Spence is not going to be bothered if he has to fight in front of a hostile crowd of pro-Brook fighters.
If anything, the crowd is going to energize Spence and cause him to want to knockout Brook even faster. I hope for Brook’s sake that he can run and hold for 12 rounds, because Spence will be looking to land some big head shots. I don’t know if Brook’s surgically repaired right eye socket will hold up to the kind of pounding from Spence. Golovkin broke Brook’s eye socket in their fight on September 10. Brook hasn’t fought since. Spence is dangerous fighter for Brook to be facing in his first fight coming back from a busted eye socket.
“He has a purse bid with Errol Spence next Tuesday,” Hearn said to RingTV.com. “Hopefully, Mr. Haymon can dig nice and deep, which he’ll have to do to beat us on that one. But we’ve made Errol Spence an offer and they didn’t come back to us, so I presume they just want to go to a purse bid.”
It depends on how far Hearn is willing to go to keep the Brook fight in the UK. Brook isn’t a pay-per-view attraction other than when he was fighting Gennady Golovkin. Brook needs big named opponents for him to be able to fight on PPV. It might not be worth it for Hearn to try too hard to beat Haymon in the purse bid. I think Brook’s days as a world champion at 147 are about done. He’s probably not going to be able to win another world title at 147, especially with him bellyaching about how hard it is for him to make weight for the division.
Brook will then move up to 154. I don’t see him doing well in that division. Hearn would like to match Brook against Miguel Cotto at 154. That’s not going to happen though. Cotto is very choosy in who he faces. He seems to be looking for just soft fights while he waits for his rematch with Saul Canelo Alvarez in December.
If Hearn puts Brook in with the junior middleweight champions like Jermall Charlo and Erislandy Lara, he’ll lose to them in my estimations. The fact of the matter is the only chance Brook has of being anything is if he stays at 147 and somehow beats Spence. If Brook beats Spence, he’ll have a lot of time to wait for the big money fights against Amir Khan, Manny Pacquiao, Keith Thurman and Danny Garcia. Once you get past Spence in the International Boxing Federation’s rankings, there’s not much there for Brook to worry about.
These are the most difficult contenders in the IBF’s rankings: Spence, Jeff Horn, and Andre Berto. Horn is probably the only guy that Brook needs to worry about other than Spence. That’s why it’s better for Brook to stay at 147 than it would be for him to move to 154. I’m surprised Hearn doesn’t realize that. He’s got too much faith in Brook’s ability to handle the best fighters at 154, because if he saw how good those fighters are, the last thing he’d want Brook to do would be too move up in weight.
I think Brook would be clowned by Erislandy Lara, and knocked out by Jermall Charlo, Demetrius Andrade and Julian Williams. I can honestly say that Brook would never win a world title if he moved up to 154. He would end up losing two or three times before having to move back down in weight to welterweight just to try and revive his sagging career. By that point, I don’t know if Brook could bring his career back. That’s why it’s smart for Brook to stay at 147. He seems to realize that. I don’t know why Hearn doesn’t. It’s kind of sad that Hearn isn’t able to see how useless it would be for Brook to move up to 154.
In Brook’s recent fight against Gennady Golovkin, which took place in the UK, one judge had it 3 rounds to 1 for Brook and the other two had it 2 rounds a piece. Most boxing fans saw Golovkin winning 3 rounds to 1. Fighting in the UK might be Brook’s only chance of beating Spence if the fight can go to the cards. Brook could get lucky and win a controversial 12 round decision over Spence if the fight takes place in the UK.
In the U.S., Brook would have a tough time, because he wouldn’t have the boxing fans on his side. That doesn’t mean Brook couldn’t win a controversial decision. He did it in his fight against Shawn Porter in 2014 in the U.S, and Brook pretty much just held all night long to keep Porter from throwing punches. The referee didn’t penalize Brook or disqualify him for his excessive holding. The judges even gave Brook rounds despite the fact that he was doing pretty much nothing but holding for 12 rounds.
Brook will need to really run for the full 12 rounds for him to make it the full distance. He running nicely against Golovkin last September, but the Kazakhstan fighter flattened his wheels when he hit Brook with a hard body shot in round five that caused him to stop running. I think Spence will be looking to do the same thing. He’s not trying to try and hit him with a lot of head shots, because it’ll be impossible to do with Brook moving his head constantly. Brook is a lot easier to hit with body shots.