Jolted Kovalev is fighting mad
Cites animosity for Ward in rematch
In two weeks, former unified light heavyweight champion
Sergey Kovalev will get his wish. He will have the opportunity to avenge his hotly and highly disputed points loss to Andre Ward. Frankly though, it sounds as if he’s already spoiling for a fight.
Last week at his Oxnard, Calif., training base, Kovalev spoke ominously of the bad intentions he will carry into the ring at Mandalay Bay Events Center on June 17 — a night he seems to think is about payback for more than the losing of the IBF/WBA/WBO belts he once wore.
“I don’t like this guy and I want to punish him because he puts his nose really up right now,” Kovalev said. “I don’t care if he shows respect to me or not. I know only one thing: I will kick his ass! I want to destroy him.
“I want to destroy this guy as a boxer, as a champion. For me, he is not a champion, he’s fake champion. He lives right now with this status (but) he’s a fake champion. He believes in his victory over me and right now he’s trying to get belief of people in this victory. He knows he didn’t win. It’s wrong, for me, it’s wrong.”
Boxing is the sport of threatening words as well as threatening acts, the former often more for show and dough than anything else. But Ward and Kovalev had no love lost between them when they first met last November and even less now that they’ve grown to know each other in a way few men ever get to.
While each surely respects the other’s boxing skills whether they can admit it or not, there honestly seems to be little respect for the other as a man or a champion. Ward believes he out-gutted Kovalev for the win after getting off the deck in the second round. Kovalev admits he faded late in the fight but said that was due to overtraining. Yet he also believes the titles he held were stolen from him that night by compliant judges.
If that were all there was to it this might well be just a skirmish of words (war being too harsh a connotation). But the truth is neither fighter likes the other much, and their camps feel the same way. Enmity only grew in the months leading up to the Nov. 20 fight. And when you combine that with the controversial nature of Ward’s victory, you have the breeding ground for the kind of ill will Kovalev made clear he carries for Ward.
“It’s not the first fight where I’m angry, I’m always angry when I am fighting, but last two fights were very disappointing for me,” Kovalev said. “I want to prove that he didn’t deserve these belts. It’s my goal. I want to punish Andre Ward too because he doesn’t deserve this money, these belts, this status and to be champion. He’s not champion. In my eyes, he’s not champion. . . .
“I have a goal: to get belts back. It’s more to motivate me than any test.”
Although Ward (31-0, 15 KOs), the last U.S. Olympian to win a gold medal, has not lost a fight since the age of 12 and is a twodivision world champion, he is a boxer by inclination and skill. Ward wins not with the kind of raw power for which Kovalev (30-1-1, 26 KOs) is known but rather with movement, agility, body punching and the accumulation of points and punishment.
None of that seemed to have made much of an impression on Kovalev, who mocked his opponent’s power last week while threatening his destruction as well.
“One day in my hometown Chelyabinsk (Russia) a girl, 25 years old, slapped me on my shoulder,” Kovalev said. “When Andre Ward punched me in the fight it was same. I didn’t feel any hard punches from him. I didn’t feel his uppercut and so I didn’t block his uppercut.
“I didn’t feel his punch but judges counted this punch. It is touches, not punches. Punches is punches. His was like a tap. Judges counted any tapping as punches.”
Whatever they counted was enough to give Ward the victory by a single point on all three cards. In contrast, media scoring had only 16-of-63 polled scoring the bout for Ward, a disparity from which Kovalev took some solace but not enough to assuage his pique whenever Ward’s name comes up.
In two weeks’ time, none of those scorecards will matter. Kovalev will again have Ward where he wants him. Standing in the same ring with him, although seldom right in front of him for long.
“I didn’t know that my energy will finish in the fifth round,” Kovalev said, alluding to his trouble in the first fight. “In the fifth round, I lost the speed, I lost the energy and I was empty, 100 percent empty. My body fought because my heart doesn’t say stop. I’ll be like fighting until I die. Andre Ward got like four rounds of victory with empty Kovalev. We’ll see what happens on June 17.”
Yes, we will and you can expect whatever we see it will arrive with bad intentions. Dirrells mess deepens
The mess created on May 20 by the Dirrell brothers’ uncle and trainer, Leon Lawson, when he sucker-punched Jose Uzcategui after the latter was disqualified for landing a knockout punch to
Andre Dirrell at the end of the eighth round of their fight, may not be over.
Lawson has been suspended indefinitely, perhaps permanently, and is facing two assault charges, but the fallout may also effect a planned world title fight between
Callum Smith and Dirrell’s brother Anthony, who is also trained by Lawson. The problem is not with finding Dirrell a new trainer. It’s that video showed the former WBC super middleweight champion also involved in the pushing and shoving and punch throwing following his brother’s “victory.”
That now vacant WBC title was to be fought over by Smith and Dirrell Sept. 9. The fight is set for California and Smith hopes it will not be affected by Lawson’s actions and the chaos that followed the fight’s ending.
In a bit of a statistical oddity, if Smith were to win the vacant title, three of the four major 168-pound belts would be worn by Brits.
James DeGale is the reigning IBF champion and George Groves recently won the WBA title. Odd but that’s boxing — odd. A weighty problem?
Mikey Garcia has agreed to take a dangerous step July 29 when he’s to face four-division champion Adrien Broner on Showtime. WBC lightweight champion Garcia (36-0, 30 KOs) settled on a non-title fight with the mercurial Broner at a catch weight of 140 pounds because it was more lucrative than any bout for him in the lightweight division — but it comes with a potential heavy burden.
Broner has had repeated battles with weight and most recently campaigned as a portly welterweight. He failed to make the 147-pound limit in his title fight with Ashley Theophane by a halfpound and refused to come to the scale a second time to try to make it, and also struggled to make 147 in his next bout. Broner said the problem was he’d begun training for it weighing 180 and could not cut away 40 pounds in time.
Although this is the most lucrative fight Garcia could make, what happens when Broner (332, 24 KOs) comes in over the agreed 140-pound limit the day before the match? Does Garcia face losing both the payday and the goodwill of Showtime and take the risk even though he continues to argue he is still really a 135-pounder?
That is a question Garcia may yet have to answer, and if he does the options are not good ones. Short jabs Junior lightweight prospect
Casey Ramos is trying to make it in boxing while also trying to succeed in the real world. The 27-year-old Ramos recently received a degree in economics from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. Ramos (24-1, 6 KOs), is promoted by Bob Arum’s Top Rank Promotions. He decisioned Miguel Beltran Jr. April 28, his first fight after losing to undefeated Andy Vences last November. Ramos suffered a cut around his left eye from an accidental head butt and could not continue, thus losing a technical decision. He won far more than that by earning his degree. . . .
On a sadder but perhaps hopeful note, former Cuban-born heavyweight prospect Mike Perez will try to restart his flagging career June 10 in Belfast as a cruiserweight. Perez (21-2-1, 13 KOs) has gone 1-2-1 since defeating Magomed Abdusalamov on Nov. 2, 2013 — a brutal fight that left Abdusalamov with irreversible brain damage. Perez was stopped in the first round in his final outing as a heavyweight by former WBA champion Alexander Povetkin two years ago. Whether he can come back remains to be seen but the demons he must face inside the ring may have little to do with his next opponent, Tommy McCarthy (9-1, 4 KOs). . . . Miguel Cotto, the only Puerto Rican-born fighter to win world titles in four weight classes, signed a promotional deal with
Oscar De La Hoya’s Golden Boy Promotions last week only months after his promotional deal with Jay Z’s Roc Nation was dissolved with one fight remaining. Roc Nation vastly overpaid to sign Cotto and although he fought for it twice, he did not deliver the kind of profits or performances they hoped. Cotto will face Japan’s Yoshihiro Kamegai Aug. 26 at the Stub Hub Center in Carson, Calif., for the vacant WBO junior middleweight title. . . .
Four-time heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield will begin his career as a boxing promoter June 24 when his new company, Real Deal Sports & Entertainment, stages its first card at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Ky. The card will air live on CBS Sports Network at 10 p.m. as part of a six-week “I Am Ali” festival honoring Muhammad Ali’s memory in his hometown.