by David P. Greisman
Billy Joe Saunders is far from the first fighter to have his business decisions come into question.
He’s far from the worst. Others have lost years off their careers, lost their world titles, lost out on significant paydays, lost opportunities and lost respect. Saunders hasn’t lost comparatively much just yet. That doesn’t mean his decisions aren’t questionable.
There’ve been boxers who were even worse cases because they had even worse causes. However, the sentiments of the public and the pundits tend to follow the news cycle. There’s not much of significance going on in this sport this August, at least not beyond the amateurs (and a few pros) competing at the Olympics.
And so the headlines tend to turn to what people in boxing are saying as opposed to what they are doing, and to conversations about fights that will happen and fights that won’t.
One that won’t happen is Billy Joe Saunders defending his middleweight title against Gabriel Rosado on the Sept. 17 pay-per-view undercard of Liam Smith vs. Canelo Alvarez.
The lack of Saunders-Rosado isn’t a big loss, at least not for Saunders. But it will be if it has repercussions on the proposed fight between Canelo and Saunders in December.
It would be bad enough of he missed out on facing Canelo because he didn’t accept this deal. Canelo is the lineal middleweight champion but someone who has never faced a true 160-pounder before; it’s a winnable fight for Saunders. It’s also a huge payday, given Canelo’s superstar status in the United States and Mexico, and how big the bout would be on the broadcast in the United Kingdom, where Saunders is from.
It would be the low point in a year that has seen a few big fights offered to Saunders, only for none to come to fruition, though in his eyes he shouldn’t be at fault.
No rematch with Chris Eubank Jr., whom Saunders defeated in 2014? Blame it on Eubank, Saunders says.
No unification bout with Gennady Golovkin?
“I’ll go to America, but these Americans have got to stop offering me sh*t money to fight,” Saunders told British boxing reporter Kugan Cassius in March. “People keep saying I got offered $4 million to fight him. … It’s a load of sh*t. They offered me $1.5 million, which is what? To go in someone’s back yard. It’d be different if I’m not the champion. Alright, [David] Lemieux done it, but look where Lemieux is now: scratching his arse with no belt and no ranking.”
“I never ever ducked Golovkin,” Saunders told Kassius last week. “There was never a contract put in front of me. Never a contract. Never terms and conditions. Only money. People need to realize that money is the easy part. We can all talk money. … The money they was talking was stupid.”
Saunders’ talk with Cassius was posted online the day before the news came out that he wouldn’t be appearing on the Sept. 17 show in Texas.
“The way things is looking, I don’t know if I’ll be on the September bill or not,” Saunders said at the time. “Five weeks out before a world title fight, and still — not the fault of my own — still no opponent.”
Golden Boy Promotions, which promotes Alvarez, offered Saunders three different opponents: Willie Monroe Jr., Rosado and Curtis Stevens, according to Eric Gomez, the Golden Boy Promotions vice president, who spoke with Dan Rafael of ESPN.com.
“We offered him reasonable opponents, and he said no,” Gomez said. “We thought it would have been great to have Saunders and Canelo on the same card before a possible fight between them. But now we are moving on.”
Saunders wasn’t happy with Rafael’s tweets reporting the news, as well as Rafael’s observation that Saunders not only “ran from” Golovkin but “now he’s turning down all his victims, too.”
He expressed his unhappiness in a tweeted tirade with language that was both coarse and objectionable, and none of which had anything to do with why Saunders turned down the fight. It was only through an interview with Phil Jay of World Boxing News that Saunders gave his reasons, something that he should’ve done from the outset on Twitter.
“First of all, Golden Boy didn't get me the opponent that was originally agreed,” Saunders said, without indicating whom that opponent was supposed to be. “Gabriel Rosado was put to me as an alternative, but in my opinion I don’t gain anything in fighting him. Rosado has been beaten eight times, and I made it clear I’d rather face an unbeaten fighter who was with a rival promotion. But if people really want me to fight Rosado, I’d be happy to — but he's a world-class journeyman, at best, and that's all he is. At the end of the day, I’ll fight anyone my promoter puts in front of me. But if I had the choice, it wouldn’t be someone like Rosado, who would get beat again, and my name wouldn’t get any bigger from it.”
Here’s the thing, though: Saunders hasn’t fought at all in 2016. His last appearance was in December 2015, when he put Andy Lee down twice en route to a majority decision victory that earned him the World Boxing Organization’s middleweight title. After turning down a Golovkin fight, Saunders was instead supposed to make his first defense in April against Max Bursak. That fight was canceled when Saunders hurt his hand.
There was no Golovkin fight. There was no Eubank rematch. There was no deal to be made with Daniel Jacobs either, something that Showtime executive Stephen Espinoza attributed to Saunders’ side.
“We were getting a lot of delaying and non-response, so at a certain point Danny’s team locked in a fight rather than wait around indefinitely,” Espinoza told me recently.
“I’m not sure what the plan was,” he said. “I think there was ample opportunity for him to commit to a Jacobs fight, and Jacobs even would’ve been flexible with the date and the scheduling to accommodate him. We may have been a stalking horse [a term defined as ‘a false pretext concealing someone’s real intentions’] to get another fight, but ultimately he really hasn’t committed to a fight, so I’m not sure it worked out well for him either.”
And there’s the rub: Saunders is in an excellent position. He has a world title. The other three sanctioning body belts in the 160-pound weight class belong to Gennady Golovkin. Canelo is the lineal champion. Jacobs has a secondary World Boxing Association “regular” title (Golovkin is the WBA’s “super” titleholder). He is a British fighter in a division where the other top middleweight in his country, Eubank, is someone he already beat, and their rematch remains nonetheless marketable.
If he’s waiting for the right deal, he’s still got nothing to show for it. He’s akin to a highly attractive dater who refuses not only to enter a relationship until he finds the perfect suitor, but doesn’t go out at all.
In boxing, as in romance, you can’t end up sharing a ring with the right match if you don’t first meet people who otherwise never would deserve to be there with you.
Yes, Rosado, Monroe and Stevens could be perceived as steps down, yet there aren’t many other options available at 160 beyond the major fighters with whom an agreement couldn’t be reached. A win in a Rosado fight would at least land him a fight with Canelo months later, so long as Canelo gets by Liam Smith. It’s a showcase bout to set up a bigger showdown.
Instead, Saunders is stubbornly holding out — all while holding out hope that he will still get to face Alvarez next as Canelo moves up to 160 in the hopes of setting up a fight with Golovkin for later in 2017.
“Even though Saunders won’t be on the Sept. 17 card, we have not closed the door to still trying to make the fight for December,” Eric Gomez of Golden Boy Promotions told Dan Rafael of ESPN.com. “I'm not sure what else Saunders wants to do, but this was a great opportunity.”
But as we saw with the saga of Canelo and Golovkin, Alvarez could always head in a different direction. He could opt to face someone else in December, and then perhaps have his first fight of 2017 come against the winner of a proposed bout between David Lemieux and Curtis Stevens. Lemieux, too, is with Golden Boy, after all.
Or Saunders could fight at home in September, still wind up facing Alvarez in December, get paid what he feels he deserves and either head home defeated but richer for it, or head home the victor and castigating all of us doubters and critics.
That’s his prerogative. Boxers can make stubborn stands. They are the ones who put their bodies through grueling training camps and put their lives and careers on the line in the ring.
They don’t do it for us. They do it for themselves. We, the paying customers, just happen to be the conduits through which fighters will have something to show for their efforts.
He needs something to show for this stand. It does little good to turn down a fight over money if you sit out and get paid nothing.
This could still soon come to a resolution that leaves much of this forgotten with time. But if it doesn’t, then this will be a big deal about someone who considered himself a big deal — and ended up costing himself a big deal.
“Fighting Words” appears every Monday on BoxingScene.com. 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