By Dan Ambrose: Adrien Broner weighed 147 lbs, and his opponent Bill Hutchinson came in at 145.5 pounds at Thursday’s weigh-in for their 10-round contest this Friday night at the Casino Miami. The Broner-Hutchinson event will be shown on FITE for $24.99 at 6:50 p.m. ET.
An easy mark has been chosen for the 33-year-old Broner to get a confidence booster in 34-year-old Hutchinson (20-2-4, 9 KOs), but when you’ve been out of the ring for as long as AB, there are no sure things.
It should be interesting to see if King keeps Broner around for a second fight if he loses to Hutchinson, looks bad, or if the PPV bombs badly. It wouldn’t be profitable for King to pour money into keeping Broner around if he loses to this level of fighter.
Broner receiving is being given a chance, perhaps his last, to try and resurrect his career. Promoter Don King hopes that Broner (34-4-1, 24 KOs) can be the fighter he once was 11+ years ago before being beaten to a pulp by Marcos Maidana and seemingly ruined forever.
The former four-division world champion Broner looked lean and youthful, but that won’t make any difference if he can’t let his hands go.
Also, if Broner wants to compete at 140, he’s heading toward failure because he doesn’t have the power to compete with the top dogs or even the fringe contenders in that weight class.
That’s already proven with Broner losing to little Mikey Garcia and struggling against Adrian Granados and Jovanie Santiago. The only thing that would make sense is for Broner to lose more weight and return to the 130-lb division because that’s the only division he’s shown to have any real success.
If Broner fights at 135, he’ll get torn apart by all the talented fighters in that weight class, and there are so many that would beat the living daylights out of the fossilized shell of what’s left of AB.
“Well, Adrien Broner is using Hutch, as they call him, for a comeback fight. He’s trying to demonstrate that his talent of yesterday is going to
be here today again, and he has a record that sustains and substantiates that dream by having four world titles,” said promoter Don King to Fighthype about Adrien Broner’s comeback after 2 1/2 years out of the ring.
“Money is incidental, and don’t say that I’m not trying to make a profit, but it’s incidental to giving the people. That means giving them not one title fight as a headliner but giving them collective headliners.
“Now, after Adrien Broner has been declared the problem and everybody has been putting an antagonistic attitude toward him, nobody wants to help him, and then they tried to convince me not to
try to help him.
“When I say to them that trouble is my middle name, all those little problems I had with the guys like Larry Holmes. Now Adrien Broner comes in an hour of need because he wants to come back and demonstrate by his own words that he wants to be able to unify and defend, and he wants to win new titles; he wants to reclaim his glory and that’s why we say return to Glory.
“To me, as a fan, it’s going to be the one who wants it the most, but as a promoter, I have to say, I got to deal with what is real. Adrien Broner has been selling not less than a million buys, and so he has established himself as four champion winner. Hutch has not done that. He has not lost a fight, but he’s never held a title.
“So, therefore, we got to go for the fans, and the fans are what comes with me. The people are my most important asset. So you got an exciting situation here, and then to add on to that, we got coefficients. We don’t call them undercards,” said King.
All Weights:
Adrien Broner 147 vs. Bill Hutchinson 145.5
Ahmed Elbiali 173.8 vs. Rodolfo Gomez 174
Guillermo Rigondeaux 118.8 vs. Charlie Clemente 119.4
Neslan Machado 127.8 vs. Jonathan Smith 127
Antonio Williams 133.6 vs. Braulio Rodriguez 134.8
Adlay Rodriguez 146.2 vs. Raul Garcia Jr. 146.8
Antonio Perez 145.8 vs. Nigel Fennell 146.6