by Rick Reeno

A week ago, there appeared to be a very strong possibility that WBC/WBA/IBO/IBF middleweight champion Gennady 'GGG' Golovkin (35-0, 32KOs) was going to make a fall defense of his titles against British champion Chris Eubank Jr. (23-1, 18KOs).

By the midway point of the week, the fight had fallen apart. By Friday, an announcement was made that a deal had been finalized for Golovkin to defend his titles against IBF welterweight champion Kell Brook (36-0, 25KOs) on September 10th at the O2 Arena in London. 

According to both sides, Golovkin had agreed to terms - but Eubank Jr., and his father/manager Chris Eubank Sr. - were unable to reach an understanding with their own promoter Eddie Hearn of Matchroom Sport.

According to Hearn himself, the Eubanks wanted operational control of the entire event. They wanted control of the ticket prices, the undercard fights, the hotels, the security - and they even wanted control over the commentators for Sky Box Office. The list of demands killed the fight and forced Hearn's hand to offer the Golovkin opportunity to Brook.

“We have a model with our fighters,” said Hearn to BBC Sport. “The problem was that Chris Eubank wanted operational control of the show. He wanted to select his own ticket prices, which when I saw I nearly fainted. I would have been strung up. He wanted to select his own undercard, select the purses for the undercard… talking about security and hotels. I don’t need that hassle in my life - that’s what we do, that’s what we’ve done for 30 years."

"They fight, we'll make them all the money in the world. We do an unbelievable job and they collect it at the end. I'm not going to give a fighter and an ex-fighter operational control of an event that could go horribly, horribly wrong. That's not the way we work. Like I said, he has a huge future but he has to understand how the game works."

Abel Sanchez, trainer for Golovkin, has been around the boxing business for decades and he's never observed a situation where a manager made such outrageous demands. Sanchez strongly believes Eubank Sr. made those demands in order to find an exit from the ongoing negotiations.  

"There's a lot of way to turn down a fight. There's a lot of ways to say 'I don't want the fight.' There's a lot of ways. There's a lot of methods. Eubank Sr. found a different way - by making demands that were unreasonable for his promoter. Not for us, we agreed to everything on our side. Everything was fine on our side. It was their side that couldn't come to terms with Eddie Hearn. So Chris Eubank Sr. found a different way of turning down a fight," Sanchez told BoxingScene.com.