According to Andre Ward, we fans could have, indeed, would have, seen a super-fight between he and middleweight king Gennady Golovkin this year had Team-GGG been willing to take the 50-50 fight that was offered to them. Speaking with TMZ Sports, Ward, now the unified light-heavyweight champion, said Golovkin was not willing to fight him until 2018, so he made the decision to move up in weight and challenge Sergey Kovalev.
“I think the fight with Golovkin should have happened before the Kovalev fight,” Ward said. “That fight was talked about, our teams had some correspondence, and it just didn’t work out. I’m not here to expose them or throw them under the bus or nothin’ like that. But I will be honest with the fans because there is a lot of confusion out there. They didn’t want the fight. They flipped it and said we were ducking and dodging. If you read the e-mail [of an offer for the fight] it was clear – we gave them a 50-50 split so there wouldn’t be any arguments.”
Ward goes on to say how the plan would have been for he and GGG to each box a tune-up – as he and Kovalev did before meeting earlier this month – “then let’s get it on right after.” But Ward says Team-GGG wanted Golovkin to unify the middleweight titles first (he still has the WBO title in his sights) “and then maybe [the fight can be made] in 2018.” Ward says he was in no way interested in waiting that long, “so right after we got off the phone with them I made the decision to move up and fight Kovalev.”
It’s not clear at what weight Ward and Golovkin would have fought pertaining to the deal Team-Ward offered, but a catch-weight would almost certainly have had to have been agreed on. As things stand now, Ward says he doubts the fight will ever happen but that “if he wants to come up and take that kind of challenge, I think it would be a tremendous fight that the fans would want to see.”
It would of course be interesting to get Team-GGG’s response to Ward’s statements, but at the same time we must take Ward at his word. Could we have seen Ward Vs. Golovkin on November 19th instead of Ward Vs. Kovalev? Will we still get to see this Dream Fight in the future?