By Edward Chaykovsky

Gennady Golovkin's promoter, Tom Loeffler of K2 Promotions, denies the continued claims of attempting to weight drain Andre Ward - when the two sides briefly discussed the possibility of a fight in 2015.

Ward claims Golovkin (36-0, 33KOs) and his team had little to no interest in the fight and tried to get him down to catch-weight of 164-pounds.

When they discussions were going nowhere, Ward (31-0, 15KOs) made a decision to move up in weight - to the light heavyweight division.

According to Loeffler, they tried to get a fight going with Ward - but there was little movement because the Olympic gold medal winner was going through a legal battle with his former promoter and he was also coming off shoulder surgery. Loeffler denies that weight was ever discussed.  

“We talked about a fight with Ward, but at that time Andre was going through his legal battles and he had shoulder surgery. A day after we announced the fight with David Lemieux in July 2015, we got a call from Ward’s camp about agreeing to a fight with him sometime in the future. I politely explained we had just announced a fight and that we wouldn’t be able to negotiate at that time. We never got as far as to talk about location or weights, or anything like that,” Loeffler told Forbes.

Ward has since unseated Sergey Kovalev to capture the WBO, IBF, WBA light heavyweight titles. The two fighters are heading into a rematch in early 2017 - while Golovkin is scheduled to defend his WBA, WBC, IBO, IBF middleweight belts against Daniel Jacobs on March 18th.

Golovkin-Jacobs takes place at New York's Madison Square Garden. A sellout is expected by Loeffler.

“Gennady is one of those special people,” Loeffler said. “Fans are drawn to how humble he is, but he’s also like Mike Tyson in many ways. People flocked to see Tyson because they knew he might knock someone out in the first, second or third round. Gennady has 23 straight knockouts and fans want to see that.”