By Dan Ambrose: Last Saturday night’s rematch between IBF/WBA/WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev (29-0-1, 26 KOs) and 33-year-old Jean Pascal (30-4-1, 17 KOs) averaged 1.179 million viewers on HBO Championship Boxing with a peak of 1.269 million with their fight at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Canada.
Kovalev easily stopped Pascal in the 7th round. The fight was not competitive at all, and nothing like the first fight between them. It was so one-sided that it was boring to watch.
The viewership is slightly better than the previous Kovalev-Pascal fight from last year in March. That fight averaged 1.152 million viewers with a peak of 1.2 million. For comparison sakes, Kovalev’s fight against Nadjib Mohammedi last year averaged 1.014 million viewers.
Hopefully this closes the door for the Kovalev-Pascal fights.
Kovalev has now knocked Pascal out twice. I think it’s time that HBO starts saying no to some of the fights that are offered. If Kovalev is going to keep fighting Pascal over and over again, then HBO needs to reject the fight and insist that Kovalev start fighting other guys instead. If Kovalev and Pascal never fight each other again, I think it’ll be too soon. It’s just bad television to keep putting these guys together.
You can understand why Kovalev’s management and HBO chose to show the fight again. The previous fight’s ratings were good enough to have a second fight, but they really need to move on and look other fights instead of shoving this same fight down the throats of the boxing public.
The co-feature bout between Dmitry Mikhaylenko and Karim Mayfield on the Kovalev-Pascal 2 undercard averaged 701,000 viewers on HBO with a peak of 835,000. Mikhaylenko won the fight by an easy 10 round decision. This was a mismatch that should have never happened. HBO should have turned down the Mikhaylenko-Mayfield fight and insisted that a better co-feature bout be found. Mikhaylenko was too big for Mayfield to handle in that fight, and it was predictable going in that it would be that type of fight.
Kovalev will likely be facing Andre Ward later this year on HBO in what would be a big fight. However, in the meantime, Kovalev needs to fight someone else not named Pascal. It would be good to see Kovalev face WBC champion Adonis Stevenson in a unification fight, but that’s not likely to happen.
It was obviously a mistake on Pascal’s part to fight Kovalev a second time, because he had nothing to keep the Russian fighter off of him. There was no improvement in Pascal’s game from the first fight.
“In the gym, on the mitts and everything like that, we had a real good style. He looked really good. Even the warm-up in the locker room was really great,” Pascal’s trainer Freddie Roach said to Fighthype.com about Pascal. “In between rounds, I said, ‘Where’s that guy in the [expletive] dressing room?’ Because that guy in the dressing room didn’t really go to the ring. I was a little disappointed in him. Maybe this guy just has his number, because he’s beaten him badly both times they fought. I wanted to stop the fight in the sixth round, he asked me for one more. I said if you can’t go out there and change this, I have to stop it. He did do better in the next round, but it wasn’t good enough for me. I didn’t want him to get hurt in the fight. I think I made the right decision. I got booed pretty bad because of that, but I don’t care about that. They can boo all they want. I care about people, and I care about my fighters mostly.”
Kovalev should fight one of the following contenders in his next fight to get him ready for the Ward fight:
Artur Beterbiev
Erik Skoglund
Andrzej Fonfara
Sean Monaghan
Edwin Rodriguez
Marcus Browne
Enrico Kolling
Vyacheslav Shabransky
Dominic Boesel
Robert Stieglitz
Any one of those fighters would have been world’s better than having Kovalev fight Pascal a second time last saturday night. At least one of them would have been someone new for Kovalev, and it would have made the outcome of the fight much less predictable than it was in the Pascal rematch. Pascal looks like a shot fighter now. I think HBO needs to get a clue and think seriously about not showing his fights on their network until Pascal proves he’s not a shot fighter.
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