By Allan Fox: IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Andre Ward (31-0, 15 KOs) says the only name that he’s interested in fighting right now is Sergey Kovalev (30-1-1, 26 KOs), but the fight needs to make sense for him. This is the same thing that Ward has been saying since he beat Kovalev by a controversial 12 round unanimous decision in their fight on November 19 last year on HBO PPV at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Ward says that the rematch will be like the start of the 13th round with the fight being a continuation of their previous fight. I’m not sure that the boxing fans will be overjoyed at that news from Ward, because their previous fight was a very boring fight filled with Ward mauling Kovalev on the inside with holding and wrestling.
If the second fight is going to be a continuation of the first, then it’s going to take a good referee to keep Ward from turning the fight into a second wrestling match. The referee that worked the first fight just stood and watched the wrestling without doing anything about it.
Kovalev appeared to win the fight in the eyes of this writer and in the eyes of many boxing fans and member of the media. However, the three judges that were assigned to the fight gave Ward the win by the scores 114-113 x 3. Those judges were overruled by a lot of the fans and members of the media. Ward got the win, but his victory was seen as one in name only but not in the view of the larger public.
It’s unclear whether a rematch can be put together between the two fighters, because Ward wants the terms to favor him. There was a rematch clause in the contract for the fight, and supposedly the terms for the rematch were already set in the original contract. It doesn’t look like Ward sees it that way.
Ward said this to IFL TV about the Kovalev fight:
“I don’t think there’s more people that think I lost,” said Ward about his controversial win over Kovalev. “I don’t have a problem with people saying it was close or someone saying I think he edged it out. It was a tight fight. I’ll give him that. Anybody saying it was a robbery. You can’t have a polarizing opinion if you think he won by one point or two points. ‘Oh, it’s a robbery.’ How many points did you have him up by? The knockdown was one point. It’s two points for the knockdown, but it’s one or two points when you add it all up. I would tell them to look at the scorecards. It was a unanimous decision. It wasn’t a majority decision. It wasn’t a split. It was unanimous. There’s such a thing as having a close fight but a clear victory,” said Ward.
I would beg to disagree with Ward about the number of fans that saw him as the loser of the fight. I think the majority of the boxing fans saw Ward losing to Kovalev. It would seem that the minority saw Ward as the winner of the fight. If you look at the comment section in discussions about the Kovalev vs. Ward fight on the Internet, most of the comments from fans are of the opinion that Kovalev should have been given the decision rather than Ward. They saw the fight as a robbery in large numbers.
“My team is working on some things right now,” said Ward. “They’re going to present me some things soon in the next couple of weeks. I’ll take a look at it and see where I’m at. Right now the only fight that interests me is Kovalev. He still believes the hype even after that fight. What he doesn’t understand is that wasn’t my best performance. I had to win a different way to climb off the canvas and come from behind. He didn’t have any answers. He had 10 rounds to make an adjustment. There’s nothing intimidating about Kovalev. I wasn’t the one looking for the bell to ring in round 12. It was him. It’s a different story, because we’re going to start in where we left off in round 12, and it’s going to be like a continuation like it’s round 13. I’ve been boxing my whole life. I’m not going to start being scared now. He’s got bad habits outside of the ring. Yeah, we know about those two. I know all about the outside the ring habits. It’s my job to know. So that’s why he’ll always fade down the stretch, because of bad habits,” said Ward.
It’s going to be interesting to see if Ward is going to be allowed to fight without giving Kovalev a rematch. Kovalev has a rematch clause in the contract. Will Ward be able to fight other people despite there being a rematch clause? If so, then what’s the point of having a rematch clause if a fighter is able to pick and choose whether he wants to do that rematch?
I think Kovalev and his promoters at Main Events aren’t going to be too pleased if Ward is able to move on and fight whoever without giving them their rematch. You can argue that they made a mistake of giving him the fight if this is how it’s going to turn out. They probably didn’t know the fight was going to turn into a wrestling match. They should have watched some of Ward’s fights from the Super Six tournament. If they had, they would have seen that Ward does a lot of grappling in his fights. It was predictable for me how Ward would elect to fight Kovalev. I never thought for a second that Ward was going to fight Kovalev in the traditional sense. I figured that he was going to turn the fight into a wrestling match like he did against Allan Green, Carl Froch and Sakio Bika.
Speaking about the Kovalev rematch, Ward said, “If I get the right situation and it makes sense, I would love to do it again. We’ll see what happens.”
When asked if he thinks of facing WBC light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson, Ward said, “Not a lot, because he had the opportunity several years ago to fight Kovalev and assert himself at the top of the division and he chose repeatedly not to do it. Now that the light heavyweight division is hot again and he saw the buzz that me and Kovalev has got, now he wants to throw his hat inside the ring. It has to make sense. I don’t feel like that’s a step up from Kovalev. I’m talking about the event itself if we were to fight. I’m thinking it’s a step down. That’s the reality of it. Kovalev was the champion. You can talk about unification. That may make sense. He would have to beat someone where the fans are clamoring. If you’re making more noise than the fans, then I don’t know if it makes sense. He’s the one getting on social trying to drum up interest. It has to be in demand, fans, networks saying we want to see the fight, and I don’t know if they’re doing that right now. I definitely won’t rule it out, but I don’t know if it makes sense when he had plenty of opportunities to bump heads with Kovalev. Maybe he would have beaten Kovalev, and I would have been trying to gun for Stevenson instead of Kovalev. Who knows how it would have turned out? Stevenson would have had all the belts by now, but he chose not to fight him repeatedly,” said Ward.
I don’t know why Ward wouldn’t want to fight Adonis Stevenson. If Ward isn’t going to fight a rematch with Kovalev, then a fight against Stevenson makes a lot of sense. It’s not as if there are other fighters in the division that are more popular than Stevenson. Ward mentioned the possibility of a fight against Badou Jack, who recently moved up in weight to 175 following his fight against James DeGale. However, Jack isn’t a big name.
Ward vs. Jack is not going to be a big fight. It would be one where Ward would have a good chance of winning, but it wouldn’t be a big fight with the boxing public. I think Stevenson would be a very hard fight for Ward, because he’s not as fast as Stevenson nor is he as powerful as him. For Ward to beat Stevenson, he would probably need to turn the fight into a wrestling match like he did with the Kovalev fight. He would need to get the better of Stevenson in a grappling contest. If a referee is assigned to the fight that polices wrestling and takes points off for excessive and prolonged mauling, then I could see Ward losing to Stevenson, because if he has to actually fight him in a non-wrestling fight, then I see Stevenson winning easily. But with Ward saying he’s not really interested in fighting Stevenson, then it doesn’t even matter in speculating who will win, because the fight won’t happen.