by David P. Greisman
David Lemieux’s fight with Cristian Rios in Montreal next month will be against an unheralded opponent with only six knockouts in 21 wins, rather than against Curtis Stevens, who has a similar style of coming forward and seeking to knock his foes out.
“Lemieux wouldn’t take the fight,” said Kathy Duva of Main Events, which promotes Stevens. “Jolene [Mizzone, the Main Events matchmaker] said he had scheduled a trip to Midas or Jiffy Lube for a tune-up. He wanted no part in fighting Curtis.”
There weren’t any negotiations for the fight, just conversations, she said.
“You’re talking. It’s not always offers. So the conversation back and forth, we think we can make Lemieux and Curtis, we think we have a place for it, we think it’s going to be on HBO,” Duva said. “We never got to the point of talking about money. Both sides thought, ‘This is great, it’s going to happen.’ Then the next thing we know was Lemieux wasn’t going to take the fight because of the money. It wasn’t our show. It would’ve been a Golden Boy show. We had no control over the money. We never had a conversation about money. We never even touched on it a little bit. One day I’m reading online that there’s going to be a fight, the next day I’m reading there isn’t.
“We thought we were getting toward them making the offer. It never came,” she said. “I really don’t know what happened. Golden Boy came to us and said, ‘Would Curtis fight Lemieux? We think we can get a date,” and we said, ‘Yay! Yes, let’s do it.’ That’s pretty much as far as it went.”
The reason it didn’t come, according to boxing reporter Luke Furman, is that HBO didn’t have the budget for the fight.
The fact the fight wasn’t made is a shame, Duva said, because of what it could’ve been.
“That’s a tremendous fight. Curtis is a guy that just wants to go out and fight, as he’s shown. He likes to fight. And every fighter needs to be active,” she said. “That’s a fight, the first time we were supposed to make Kovalev-Adonis Stevenson, and Al Haymon signed Stevenson, we had already made Stevens-Lemieux as the co-feature. That was going to be a tremendous show. We always thought that was a makeable fight. It’s a knock-down, drag-out fight. Somebody’s not walking out of the ring.
Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide. Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com
