By Edward Chaykovsky

During his appearance on TMZ Live, WBA, IBF, WBO light heavyweight champion Andre Ward (31-0, 15KOs) was questioned about the possibility of a catch-weight fight with WBC, WBA, IBO, IBF middleweight king Gennady Golovkin (36-0, 33KOs).

Ward explained the situation that transpired during their most recent discussions - where he claims Golovkin's team was not willing to do the fight before 2018.

Ward says once they gave him their  answer, he made his decision to move up in weight to 175-pounds to face Sergey Kovalev. The Kovalev fight took place two weeks ago, with Ward winning a close twelve round unanimous decision.

Ward is still open to the idea of doing that fight, if Golovkin heads up in weight to 175-pounds.

"I think the fight with Golovkin should have happened before the Kovalev fight. 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 nothing 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," Ward explained.

"And when they didn't want the fight, most people would have took that email that I had [with their answer] and put it online, put them on blast - because they were saying the opposite of what that email said. They flipped it and said that we were ducking and dodging. If you read the email it was clear... we gave them a 50-50 split so there wouldn't be any arguments. We said let's get it on and each fighter would get a tune-up fight, similar to what me and Kovalev did, and then lets get it on right after."

"This was probably in early 2016. They were talking about him unifying the titles and maybe [the fight can happen] in 2018. That's not something we were willing to do, so right after we got off the phone with them - I made the decision to move up and fight Kovalev. Partially I don't see that fight happening because he's at middleweight and I'm at light heavyweight. But 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."