By Sean Jones: The welterweight unification fight between IBF 147-pound champion Errol Spence Jr. and WBC champion Shawn Porter is being moved from August 3 in Brooklyn, New York to the summer or fall, according to Mike Coppinger. The August 3 card on Premier Boxing Champions on Fox will still take place on that night, but without the Spence-Porter fight headlining.
Hopefully, this isn’t a sign that the Spence vs. Porter fight is in trouble. There are rumors that Porter and his trainer/father Kenny Porter want the fight with Spence to be shown on Fox Sports pay-per-view. Given that the the potential fight between Mikey Garcia and Danny Garcia is expected to take on pay-per-view, it would look odd for the welterweight unification fight between the unbeaten Spence (25-0, 21 KOs) and Porter (30-2-1, 17 KOs) to be shown on regular FOX.
Spence vs. Porter coming at a bad time
The problem with that fight is Porter isn’t a huge name like Mikey Garcia. As such, Spence vs. Porter might not bring in a lot of PPV buys. What further could hamper the fight being a big seller on pay-per-view is the poor performance Porter recently put in against his mandatory challenger Yordenis Ugas (23-4, 11 KOs) two months ago on March 9 in Carson, California. Porter, 31, won that fight by a HIGHLY questionable 12 round split decision by the scores 116-112, 115-113 for Porter, and 117-111 for Ugas. Many fans felt that Ugas did more than enough to deserve the ‘W’ in that fight, as did Boxing News 24, who scored it for Ugas by a 117-111. The fight wasn’t even close. Ugas totally dominated Porter from start to finish.
Only rarely did Porter try and engage. Most of the fight, Porter ran around on the outside, trying not to get hit. That’s a fight that is begging for a rematch. For the many hardcore fans that saw Porter’s questionable win over Ugas, it’s hard for them to get excited about the Spence-Porter fight right now. Porter would be coming into the Spence fight off the back of a tainted win over Ugas. It puts Spence in a situation where he’ll be the one bringing in all the boxing fans. The timing in’t right for the Spence vs. Porter fight.
“SOURCES: The welterweight title unification bout between Errol Spence Jr. and Shawn Porter, originally penciled in for Aug. 3 in Brooklyn, is moving to a new date in late summer/fall. As always, lots of moving parts with PBC dates. Will still be PBC on FOX in Brooklyn that night.”
Is Porter getting cold feet about fighting Spence?
It wouldn’t be surprising if Porter goes in another direction rather than taking the fight with Spence. If Porter doesn’t take the fight with Spence, he’s got a number of interesting fights he can take against the likes of Danny Garcia, Jessie Vargas, Josesito Lopez and Sergey Lipinets. Unless Porter continues to look as bad as he did against Ugas, those are all winnable fights for him. Ugas is now ranked #4 with the World Boxing Council. It’s possible that Porter could hod onto his WBC title for another two to three years before he eventually loses it to someone. It might be better for Porter to make easy title defenses against those guys than it would for him to fight Spence and get beaten soundly. The Porter that fought Ugas won’t last long against Spence.
Spence looked incredible in winning his last fight against Mikey Garcia on March 16 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. The fight was shown on Fox Sports Pay-Per-View, and it’s rumored to have brought in approximately 400,000 buys. The only negative that you can say about the fight is Spence didn’t win by a knockout. He boxed too much, and looked like he didn’t want to exert a lot of effort in trying to knockout the smaller Mikey. From Spence’s perspective, you can understand why he might not have wanted to bulldoze Mikey. If Spence had knocked Mikey out, the fans wouldn’t have given him credit due to him being the bigger fighter. Further, as long as Spence beat Mikey by a decision, it left over the possibility of a rematch. If Spence had knocked Mikey out, he would have shot himself in the foot by ruining his chances, as such as they were, at getting a rematch. Unfortunately, the Spence-Garcia fight was so one-sided in favor of Spence, that there’s no way that the boxing public would be interested in seeing the two fighters face each other again.