Duva: Lawsuit Isn’t to Prevent Stevenson vs. Hopkins
May 29, 2014 • 12:27 PM ET
by David P. Greisman
Main Events wanted its fighter, light heavyweight titleholder Sergey Kovalev, to face 175-pound champion Adonis Stevenson, and the company claims that it had an agreement for that bout to happen this fall.
But the lawsuit Main Events filed last month — against Adonis Stevenson, boxing adviser Al Haymon, promoters Yvon Michel and Golden Boy Promotions, and Showtime — isn’t intended to prevent an anticipated fight between Stevenson and Bernard Hopkins and force a fight between Stevenson and Kovalev to occur instead.
“The lawsuit is for damages,” said Main Events CEO Kathy Duva, speaking with BoxingScene.com on May 28. “You can’t force people to fight you. That was never the goal of the lawsuit. It was simply to make people understand there are repercussions, that when you do something, there are consequences. I don’t think that any of us went into the lawsuit thinking we were going to force a fight to happen.”
Details of the lawsuit are available at this link:
An initial pretrial conference in the case has been scheduled for June 27, according to online court records.
The goal of the case isn’t to try to enforce the agreement that Main Events claims it had, Duva said.
“You can’t force somebody to work if they don’t want to. That was never an option. That was never our intention,” she said. “We could’ve gone for an injunction to prevent Adonis from fighting, but that would’ve prevented Sergey from fighting as well, and that seems pointless.”
Instead, the desire is to seek damages and to send a message.
“If you let people walk all over you like that, that’s all anybody’s going to do,” Duva said.
Duva said there have been no conversations between Main Events and the defendants about a settlement, and she doesn’t anticipate that there will be. She declined to discuss what it would take for Main Events to agree to a settlement.
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