Comments Thread For: Haye: Drop The Slave Contract and I'll Fight a Klitschko

[WladIsTheChamp]

this topic is so boring now...haye doesnt want to give up his tv money because its more then the klitschkos make.the klits advisor said so & im sorry but haye is the WBA champion & can do what he wants...hes not in it for you or any boxing fan so unless you are actually buying a ticket to the fight all your opinions mean ****! he don't care about anything but money & its already proven even by the klits advisors that haye is a bigger moneymaker & he doesnt have to bend for anyone.if i was him i keep playing hardball. they may be the better heavyweights but they can't seem to secure big fights.it has nothing to do with fear but everything to do with money...they are ****ing greedy & too cheap to pay possible opponents a nice payday.if povetkin fought lennox lewis,sasha would have been offered at least 5 million or vs holyfield or tyson.valuev being a 2 time champ should have got like minimum 7 million...they are making alot more then that when its all said & done.when rid**** bowe challenged holyfield for the title he made 14 million! GET MY DRIFT PEOPLE? THEY LOWBALL THEIR OPPONENTS....its bad buisness on their parts.they are only hurting themselves & their legacies.only their fans care about them,while 75% of boxing fans don't...this haye/klit stuff is so yesterdays news & you all say the same thing over & over....NOT ONE OF YOU HAVE BEEN TO THE MEETINGS OR HAVE SEEN A COPY OF THE CONTRACT SO ITS ALL JUST SPECULATION & HE SAID,SHE SAID BULL****!

Man, you don't know anything about boxing history do you? Or you are just purposefully ignoring the facts to suite your argument, is that it? The money fights you describe - Holyfield, Tyson, Bowe, etc. was a different era in terms of PPV revenue - it wasn't uncommon for a HW title fight involving Tyson to bring in a total of $100 million, so for him to give $10 million to his opponent was just 10% of the purse. By contrast, an average Klitschko fight brings in around $10 million, so if Vitaly gave Valuev $7 million as you suggest, that would make it so that Valuev gets 70/30 split in his favor. Vitaly offered Valuev more than Valuev ever made, and that's a fact you can go look up because there have been many stories on here about it.

Same goes for Povetkin, he was a mandatory and getting the mandatory purse bid % of $2.5 mil, out of a total purse of $7 million or so, so he was getting about a third. That was also Povetkin's highest payday of his life, multiple times over.

The fact remains that the Klitschkos are the biggest game in town at HW and no other HW generates as much viewership or $$$ or Euros as them. They also pay very well, most fighters that fight them get the highest payday of their career. The problem is that the Klitschkos also end those careers via a severe beating, but its not the job of the Klitschkos to provide a retirement fund for all of their opponents.

So your entire post is bogus, because it compares two different eras in terms of PPV revenues and over-all fight revenues. It is also bogus because it fails to take into account the fact that the Klitschkos pay more to those fighters you mentioned than they have ever earned in their or life (Povetkin, Chambers, Arreola, Byrd, Peter, Valuev, etc, etc).

[WladIsTheChamp]

You are very patient , I gave up trying to explain this to idiots a long time ago, if they believe what Haye says they deserve to be fooled.

I also gave up, it's like they just got on this site today and heard Gaye's queefing for the first time. The no options thing has been addressed already.

[Rick Grimes]

It's not that the UK has a bigger PPV market. It's that in the UK, there is PPV, and in Germany, there isn't. As a result, boxing has become a niche sport in the UK (as it has in the US), whereas it is still a mainstream sport in Germany. The Klitschkos' fights are regularly watched by over 20 million fans in Germany, and they have had live gates in excess of 50,000. By contrast, Haye's fights are usually watched by less than a million TV viewers, with less than 20,000 watching live. In numerical terms, the Klitschkos are far bigger draws than Haye will ever be.

Anyone who loves boxing should applaud the Klitschkos for sticking with terrestrial TV, and keeping boxing mainstream in Germany, rather than cashing out and harming boxing by going for PPV in Germany.

When I first watched boxing in the UK, big fights used to regularly be watched by over 15 million people, and now it's less than a million, and that's because of satellite TV and PPV. If Haye were to ditch his Sky contract and have his fights shown on terrestrial television, so that a mass audience could watch them and so that the sport could become mainstream again, every boxing fan would applaud him. And every genuine boxing fan should applaud Wlad for sticking with terrestrial TV, even at the expense of some revenue.

But the UK PPV revenue for a Haye-Klitschko fight would be far higher than for any other Haye fight, and probably more than double the revenue that any other Haye fight could generate. So for Haye to claim that Wlad shouldn't get any of the UK PPV money that he had helped to generate is ridiculous.

Haye vs. a no name fighter would generate 500k UK PPV max. Haye vs. someone like Adamek would probably generate around 700k UK PPV. Haye vs. Harrison will probably generate around 1 million UK PPV. Haye vs. a Klitschko would probably generate over 2 million UK PPV. So at least half of the PPV revenue will almost certainly be generated by the fact he's fighting a Klitschko. For him to claim that they shouldn't get any of that is so ridiculous that it is clearly simply an excuse to get out of having to fight them yet.

Can you imagine the reaction if Floyd insisted on getting 100% of the US PPV to fight Pacquiao, with Pac just getting the Filipino money and half of the rest of the non-US TV money, and half of the gate money and sponsorship money? That's roughly equivalent to what Haye is asking for.

What's sick is that the media aren't calling him on it.

@ You trying to make it out that Wlad chose the RTL deal for the good of the sport, he chose it because it was the best deal on the table. Germans don't buy PPV's.

[WladIsTheChamp]

@ You trying to make it out that Wlad chose the RTL deal for the good of the sport, he chose it because it was the best deal on the table. Germans don't buy PPV's.

Actually the Klitschkos prefer that their fights are not PPV, they have stated so publicly many times. They want as many people to see them fight as possible, not just those hard core fans willing to shill out PPV fees.

It's your boy Gaye that is greedy as f@ck and give F@ck all about his legacy even though he said the opposite. All he cares is doing his bookazines and fleeing to Hollywood instead of fighting the men off whose names he made his own name. If it wasn't for Gaye calling out the Klitschkos we would all still be saying "David Who?"

[Gratide]

I hope Audley does indeed knock out Haye in the first round . Haye needs to STFU and fight .

[Ravens Fan]

so hold up Wladimir and Vitali are trying to tie him down to 2 fights AFTER and IF he beats 1? then that's 3 back to back fights against the Klitschko's, that's absurd, since when does 1 contract for 1 fight tie you into anything other than just 1 rematch strictly against the guy you beat, if he signed to fight Vitali then in the contract with Vitali it shouldn't bind him to fight Wladimir or even leave the open spce for it to happen, that's separate business and that's not the way it's done..

If it's truly like how Haye says, if Wladimir or Vitali don't come out and say something different then it IS horse **** and the Klitschko brothers are out of line, this is a business and it's supposed to be handled as such, if you're Vitali you don't use Wladimir's contract to try to assure yourself a space, a contract is for TWO fighters not THREE

Let me start by saying that this whole "slave contract" talk is really getting annoying because it really is such old news. I would also like to say that I would not take David Haye's word if he told me the sun was going to rise tomorrow, but that is just me. I am also not going to pretend that I know what was written in a contract between Haye and the Klit brothers. I imagine just like anything else the truth is somewhere in the middle of the two sides. But for the sake of argument lets say Haye was telling the absolute truth. And this is where I get lost and what I really don't understand about the situation.

Because if Haye was in fact telling the truth he had exactly what he said he wanted. After all he was the one that stated he was going to clean up the big boys and he was starting at the top. And if he truly meant this than even if he was tied up in this so called "slave contract" he in fact had exactly what he wanted. Which would have been fights with the two best heavyweights on the planet, the Klit, brothers. The kicker is that he only had to beat a washed up Monte Barret to get to that position and now he is fighting a washed up never was to begin with Harrison. So, am I to assume he decided to clean out the division by starting from the bottom and he will eventually work his way to the top? With that said what I really don't understand is the fact that there are fans out there that still somehow blame the Klit brothers for this, why?

After all it was Haye who did all the *****ing and moaning than got exactly what he wanted handed to him on a silver platter. And then he decided, and not the Klit brothers, to take an easier softer path to his make believe over hyped joke of a heavyweight legacy. However, in my opinion the joke is really is on his fans because Haye is still making tons of money by doing the exact opposite of what he said he was going to do. And as I already stated his career has tuned into a joke but unfortunately it is not a very funny one. In closing I truly believe that the bottom line really is that if Haye really believed he could have beat the Klit brothers he would have already fought them.

[Nuurzhaelan]

Haye gave Harrison a 70/30 deal and a rematch clause.

Pot. Kettle. Black. My friends.

If that is true then you just haye!

[sigrab jr]

Khan is nowhere near as popular as Pacquiao/Mayweather. Haye is bringing the most money to the fight, the Klitschko's should accept that, like Mayweather and Pacquiao did when they fought DLH.

Khan is more popular than Haye I said. Not more popular than Mayweather and Pacquiao. Haye hasn't fought nobody at HW outside of Valuev. Ruiz was old and average already, Barrett sucks, Maccarenilli has been stopped 3 times after Haye stopped him.

The Klitschko's have been doing it for years and have fought better opposition than Haye.

I know Haye is more exciting and can help bring back interest in HW boxing. But I still stand by Haye not deserving 50-50 against a Klitschko. 60-40 is okay.

[crillz]

Haye admitted in May that he was offered a straight 50/50 deal with no rematch clauses to fight Wlad this year and turned it down. The rematch clause deal was on the table in 2009 before he held a world title. It's normal for a title holder to have a rematch clause when having a voluntary defence, as was the case in 2009, but is not normal in the case of unifications, which is why Wlad dropped the rematch demand in the 2010 negotiations.

Haye is now being disingenious by pretending that the 2009 deal is still on the table when it isn't. The reason he's doing that is that he doesn't want to look like the ducker he is.

As for why he's ducking, it's obvious - he's building up his pension. He is making $10 million in a zero risk fight against a journeyman, Audley Harrison. Prior to that, he made a lot of money against a shot Ruiz and a painfully slow Valuev, and the 50/50 deal to fight either Klitschko will stay on the table until he fights one of them, so from a purely financial standpoint, he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by spinning it out for as long as possible. He knows he'll almost certainly lose to either K bro and is milking the situation in order to earn as much money as he can before he fights one of them. But he's doing it by lying, and misleading the public, and most boxing journalists, who should know better, are failing to call him on it, and that's disgusting.

why did Haye turn down that fight in May though what was his reasoning for that? I just want to cover all the bases and know bit for bit each piece of information in the proper order. thing is Haye just doesn't rub off on me as a coward, no Boxer for that matter, I got this hunch that there is something else to this that we still don't know. your post was informative though, I guess I have to do more of my own research about the negotiations for this fight past or present

[Dirk Diggler UK]

why did Haye turn down that fight in May though what was his reasoning for that? I just want to cover all the bases and know bit for bit each piece of information in the proper order. thing is Haye just doesn't rub off on me as a coward, no Boxer for that matter, I got this hunch that there is something else to this that we still don't know. your post was informative though, I guess I have to do more of my own research about the negotiations for this fight past or present

Haye was offered a 50/50 contract. However he wanted more money from German TV than the Klitschkos were getting from their contract with german network RTL. The Klits are tied to the contract so could not fight on another network. So Haye wanted to keep all the UK PPV money and let the Klitschkos keep the German money which is bull**** because Haye wouldnt make half what he does in PPV money without a Klit in the other corner.

Haye is on a paper chase, instead of a glory run.