By Keith Idec
With a purse bid scheduled for Tuesday looming, promoter Eddie Hearn is confident an agreement will be reached before then for a Kell Brook-Errol Spence Jr. welterweight title fight.
Hearn – whose company, Matchroom Sports, promotes Brook – and promoter Tom Brown, who’s representing Spence, have continued to negotiate so that they don’t have to attend a purse bid scheduled for Tuesday at the IBF’s headquarters in Springfield, New Jersey. With the fight apparently close to being finalized, Hearn can’t quite believe so many fans and media have doubted Brook’s willingness to take this dangerous fight against Spence (21-0, 18 KOs), the mandatory challenger for Brook’s IBF welterweight title.
“Social media is a funny thing,” Hearn wrote in his column for London’s Daily Mail this weekend. “I was bemused to see comments on Twitter this week that Kell Brook wants to swerve a fight with Errol Spence – pretty odd as he just went toe-to-toe with Gennady Golovkin. You’d think after going in for a fight like that, people would credit Kell with having some balls. But people still want to ask questions, so I’ll try to answer them.
“Firstly, it’s not a secret that it is a struggle for Kell to make 147 pounds and I felt he would be better off at light-middleweight [154 pounds]. But Kell does not want to vacate. In fact, he is desperate not to. Spence is his mandatory and it is Spence who he wants to fight. Now that fight is very close to being made.”
Brook, meanwhile, gave his strongest indication thus far Sunday that he’ll fight Spence next.
England’s Brook (36-1, 25 KOs) sent out a Tweet that made it clear he has no intention of giving up his IBF welterweight title to avoid the powerful southpaw from DeSoto, Texas.
In the Tweet, Brook wrote: All that work just to give it up? Never ducked a challenge in my life. Here to give the fans what they want @ErrolSpenceJr you are next … The Tweet was followed by emojis for flags of Great Britain and the United States.
Before Brook-Spence negotiations intensified, Hearn tried to arrange a domestic showdown with fellow Brit Amir Khan. Those talks ceased recently because Khan and Hearn couldn’t agree on how to split the revenue from a fight that would’ve done big business in the United Kingdom.
A purse bid for the Brook-Spence fight, scheduled for February 7, was postponed a week on February 6 because Hearn and Brown were making progress on closing a deal. If it goes to a purse bid Tuesday, Spence would make just 25 percent of the purse split, as per IBF rules.
Hearn has proposed bringing the Brook-Spence showdown to Bramall Lane, a soccer stadium in Brook’s native Sheffield, England.
Brook still could decide to relinquish his championship and fight someone else. The IBF granted him a two-month medical extension to decide whether to make his mandatory defense because Brook still was recovering from surgery to repair a fractured right orbital bone sustained during his fifth-round technical knockout defeat to Golovkin (36-0, 33 KOs) on September 10 in London.
That 60-day medical extension, which the IBF approved late in October, didn’t start until December 26 because that’s the date by which Brook’s mandatory defense was due.
Keith Idec is a senior writer/columnist for BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.
