Hunter Made The Call To Pull Andre Ward From PPV

By Edward Chaykovsky

Up until a few short weeks ago, this coming Saturday night was expected to be the light heavyweight debut of Andre Ward, who ruled the super middleweight division for several years.

Ward (28-0, 15KOs), 31-years-old, returned on June 20th in what was his first bout since the fall of 2013, when he won a dominating decision over Edwin Rodriguez. When he returned earlier this year, he punished Paul Smith for a ninth round TKO win.

In two days, Ward was scheduled to face Alexander Brand in the co-featured attraction to the Miguel Cotto-Saul Alvarez HBO Pay-Per-View at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

During his camp, Ward developed an issue with his knee which became worse as the training sessions continued day to day. Ward was still very focused on returning against Brand, but his trainer, Virgil Hunter, felt it was much safer to pull him to prevent a more serious injury from developing in the ring.

Ward recently signed a multi-fight deal with HBO, and that agreement includes a 2016 showdown with unified light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev.

"There was a lot of swelling in the knee, which surprised us. We weren’t too alarmed at first but it simply wouldn’t go down because of course he had to train everyday. Andre is a really gung ho kid with the pain tolerance and it’s hard to slow someone down when they’re driven like that," Hunter told On The Ropes Boxing Radio.

"Andre really needed to take maybe a week or so off, but at that point we weren’t able to do that because we were closing in on the date and we had the sparring guys here. We just treated it the best way that we could and hoped that it went down and that we could work around it, but the swelling just wouldn’t go down."

"It was a tough decision that I had to make, it wasn’t his decision, it was mine. Once it started hurting, that did it for me. At first it was just the swelling and we kind of got around it, but once the pain started accompanying the swelling, we couldn’t take it any further. We didn’t want to risk damage further up the road."