IBO Boxing Honesty and Integrity
By Scoop Malinowski
Don’t hold your breath waiting for Al Haymon to risk his key assets Errol Spence, Gervonta Davis and Deontay Wilder any time soon against any rival promoter’s star fighters. Nope, according to Bob Arum, Haymon lacks the confidence in his key assets to put them at risk and will continue to protect them in his in-house minor league boxing series called PBC, Premier Boxing Champions (or Protected Bum Club, to some).
“We would like their [PBC] fighters to fight our fighters and we’ve said that repeatedly. And [Haymon] said ‘well I’m not going to give you all of my fighters to fight on ESPN’ and I said ‘no, we’ll work something out.’ It doesn’t all have to be on ESPN. If you want one of our fighters to fight one of your fighters on FOX, that’s acceptable. But you have to sit down and you have to have dialogue,” Arum revealed to www.BoxingScene.com.
“The truth is, Haymon doesn’t want dialogue, Haymon wants an island onto himself. That’s his strategy. He doesn’t want to operate with other promoters. But that’s his choice and he’s not violating any law if he does that.”
Translation: Haymon is blocking all the big fights the fans and media want to see.
Spence vs Terence Crawford, Wilder vs Fury, Wilder for Joshua, Davis vs Lomachenko…you can just forget about it.
“I can make a deal in five minutes that’s fair with Haymon, but I don’t think Haymon wants to do it. There is a whole psychological thing, where he doesn’t want to risk his fighters losing to our fighters,” Arum said.
It’s a shame Al Haymon has no confidence in his key asset fighters to risk them vs the best. Or maybe Haymon knows his key asset fighters are all overrated protected frauds and if he did put them all at risk, he’d be out of the business in nine months.
