Boxers in Danger of Getting a Reputation for Ducking Tough Fights

It's not a four-letter word, but it's still one that every boxer wants to avoid being called.

Branding a fighter as someone who ducks or has ducked fights is about the lowest insult you can dish out to a boxer. Boxing is all about toughness and determination, so being labeled as someone who runs away from displaying those traits is as bad as it gets.

The reasons why a boxer might avoid a fight are all over the board. Most often it's because he wants to protect his belt, record or to preserve the chance of landing a bigger fight later, but those aren't the only reasons.

Often in today's boxing climate the politics of the sport play a major role in preventing major fights, with the relationships between networks or promoters standing in the way of getting a deal done. The blame seems to be directed 100 percent at the boxer, but the executives are often the bigger culprits.

Every boxer on this list is supremely talented and at or near the top of their divisions, but each also has a history of not taking the biggest fights available.

Adonis Stevenson

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It might be too late for Adonis Stevenson to avoid the "scarlet D," if you will, for ducking tough fights.

A year after his magical 2013 campaign that saw him go 4-0 with four knockouts including one over Chad Dawson to become the lineal 175-pound champion, Stevenson has ducked three major fights this year, which probably chased away many of the fans he had won over the year before.

Running across the street to join Al Haymon and Showtime to avoid a fight against Sergey Kovalev was bad enough, but to follow that up by resisting a fight against Bernard Hopkins and making unreasonable demands for a mega-fight in Canada against Jean Pascal probably permanently damaged his brand.

Stevenson will have opportunities to face Hopkins—if he defeats Kovalev—or Pascal next year, but at age 37 he's running out of time to improve his reputation and legacy.

Peter Quillin

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Before recently, I wouldn't have put much blame on Peter Quillin for not taking on the best competition at middleweight because the best two fighters in the division—Miguel Cotto and Gennady Golovkin—are both signed with Top Rank or HBO, who won't work with his adviser Al Haymon.

That all changed quickly and drastically when Quillin decided—probably at the urging of Haymon—to drop his WBO middleweight belt to avoid a match with mandatory challenger Matt Korobov. Quillin reportedly turned down what would have been by far the biggest payday of his career to "pursue bigger fights."

Who in the hell is he referring to? As I mentioned before, Cotto and Golovkin are already off the table, and Canelo Alvarez just jumped over to HBO, so that fight isn't possible either.

Who is he going to fight who would bring in more money than the inflated purse bid from new promotion company Roc Nation Sports? New middleweight champion Jermain Taylor? Quillin would be lucky to get half of the $1.4 million dollars he was offered to fight Korobov.

The most likely scenario is to fight Danny Jacobs, who is also signed with Haymon and holds a lesser middleweight belt, but I seriously doubt that Quillin's purse for that fight would crack $1 million either.

Don't buy for a second that this decision had anything to do with making the best fight possible for Quillin. If making the best fights possible was their only goal, then Haymon would repair the relationship with HBO and Top Rank to make a match against Cotto or Golovkin.

Per usual, this move stinks of being nothing but the ugly side of boxing politics. Even if Quillin wanted a bigger fight and that fight were available, it wouldn't have been available until next year anyway, so he could have taken the fight with Korobov first to collect a big payday before moving on to bigger opponents.

Danny Garcia

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In what has obviously become a theme for this article, Al Haymon's hands are all over the reasons why Danny Garcia has made this list as well.

It really is a shame, because before this year Garcia had taken on many tough opponents, but for reasons I can't speculate on his management team has taken a different path in 2014, a path that included a match against 72nd-ranked light welterweight Rod Salka.

His fight against Mauricio Herrera was, on paper, also a big drop-off in competition from his tough fight in September 2013 against Lucas Matthysse, but it was at least not a complete joke of a matchup.

The junior welterweight division is loaded with great potential matchups against Lamont Peterson, Adrien Broner and Matthysse, so Garcia doesn't need to search but just sign up to fight.

If he decides to move up to 147 pounds, as has been discussed in the past, then matchups with Amir Khan, Keith Thurman, Marcos Maidana, Shawn Porter, Kell Brook, Devon Alexander and Robert Guerrero are all possible.

All 10 of those matchups that I mentioned are possible even in today's boxing climate with each fighter having a relationship with either or in most cases both Haymon and Showtime, with whom Garcia works.

Haymon has had a knack for getting his boxers solid paydays for zero-risk fights, so until Showtime and the other networks he's partnered with start rejecting terrible matches, he'll probably keep pushing them through.

Adrien Broner

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One tuneup match after a tough loss is tolerable and understandable, but don't take a full year off from tough fights. That's what Adrien Broner essentially did in 2014 with fights against the 161st- and 28th-ranked light welterweights, according to BoxRec.com.

Broner's 2013 matchup calendar was very good, so I don't want to kill him over a lackluster 2014 like I have with some of the others on this list, but the level of his competition has to be raised in 2015.

As I mentioned on the previous slide for Garcia, the roster at 140 and 147 pounds for Al Haymon and Showtime fighters is absolutely loaded. Maybe the two most loaded divisions in all of boxing, so there is no excuse for deciding to fight cupcakes.

And as in Garcia's case, it is on Showtime to push Haymon for better matchups instead of continuing to pay for fights no one has any interest in. Really, Broner and Matthysse should have been fighting each other in September 2014 instead of fighting in separate co-main events.

Floyd Mayweather Jr.

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This one was easy.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. has had a reputation—fair or unfair—for ducking tough fights during his entire prime, but obviously the failure to make a match against Manny Pacquiao stands out as the most glaring example of such criticism.

In the beginning of the negotiations with Pacquiao, I didn't blame Mayweather for insisting on tough drug testing and not taking the fight if Pacquiao refused. However, since that time in 2009 Pacquiao has agreed to the testing and financial demands, but Mayweather moved the goalpost with new "requirements," aka excuses.

It also didn't help that Top Rank CEO Bob Arum seemed to conveniently lose interest in making the fight in 2012 as well.

The bottom line is this: In 2009, Pacquiao, a southpaw with power who was arguably just as quick with his hands and feet as Mayweather, presented a matchup nightmare that would put his undefeated record in great danger. To me, that more than anything else is why the fight didn't happen back then.

Fast-forward to 2014, and Pacquiao seems to have lost a step, so the same risk doesn't apply, which should make the match more appealing to Mayweather, but exclusive TV deals for both fighters present a major roadblock to making the fight.

Not to mention that Al Haymon and Arum don't exactly have a great working relationship.

As long as each fighter is exclusive to separate networks, this fight will never happen. However, if one of them leaves and Mayweather sees an opportunity to pick up an easy win over an aging Pacquiao, then we might get it.

Over five years too late, but it could happen.

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