Controversy Built Adrien Broner's Career and Now Threatens to Destroy It

It's been a long time since Adrien Broner (31-2, 23 KO) made headlines for his boxing exploits. Once considered the heir apparent to Floyd Mayweather Jr., in recent years you could be forgiven for believing the 26-year-old fighter was little more than a reality television star.

Since bursting onto the scene with a win over Antonio DeMarco in an HBO main event way back in 2012, the promising prospect is notable mostly for his various shenanigans. He's made a fool of himself at a strip club, recorded a sex tape and flushed money down the toilet (warning: NSFW language).

What he hasn't done, at least when matched with top competition like Marcos Maidana and Shawn Porter, is win.

A Premier Boxing Champions fight with journeyman Ashley Theophane next week on Spike TV was supposed to be yet another new chapter in Broner's long journey back toward athletic relevance.

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"Everybody has bad nights," Broner told the press from his training camp Tuesday. "The Porter fight was just one of my bad nights. But we're back on track, we're back to being a world champion, and I will stay champion after April 1. It's going to be a fantastic show."

Now, instead of wondering how the fight will play out, whether Broner can be the fighter we all believed he was destined to become, we wonder whether the fight will happen at all.

Broner finds himself at the center of a controversy that's a little more serious. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, local police have charged the fighter with felonious assault and aggravated robbery after a high-stakes bowling game with Christopher Carson—who Broner met through mutual friends two years earlier—turned ugly.

According to the Enquirer's report, Carson has filed a lawsuit in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court that alleges Broner lost $14,000 to him in a series of bowling games and got angry when his opponent refused to continue playing:

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When Carson left a short time later, at about 3 a.m., Broner was waiting for him with a group of eight men, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges Broner punched Carson, splitting his chin open, and then, gun in hand, continued to threaten Carson.

Afraid, Carson put his hands up.

Broner then punched Carson a second time, knocking him unconscious, the lawsuit says.

Carson says he woke up, his chin bleeding, to find $12,000 in cash he had on him missing.

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These are serious charges, and promoter Leonard Ellerbe told ESPN the fighter should consult an attorney. For boxing fans, it's yet another reminder that Broner may never fulfill his considerable potential.

Fame, especially for a fighter like Broner who hasn't truly earned it, is a double-edged sword. It's easy to suggest that all of Broner's antics outside the ring are holding back his career. It might even be true.

But without the lewd videos, brash talk and run-ins with the law, no one beyond the boxing bubble would even know Broner's name.

Broner wasn't competitive against Maidana and looked like a sleepwalker for much of the night against Porter. Normally a young fighter on the losing end of two lackluster high-profile bouts would be tossed into the dustbin of history.

Instead, because of his penchant for creating chaos, he's promoted in the fashion usually reserved for much more accomplished fighters. Some athletes, like Mayweather, are motivated by an internal desire to be great. Fame and fortune are a benefit that come along with excellence.

For Broner, it seems, fame is the goal. Why bother with the hard work of improving your craft and staying fit between bouts when promoter Al Haymon will reward even middling performances with lucrative main event fights?

The result is a fighter who has stagnated just as he should be entering his prime. Since Broner decided to eat his way out of his ideal weight class, a once-prodigious talent has appeared nothing more than ordinary. The strategies that worked well for him at 135 pounds, as Sherdog's Andreas Hale explained, weren't nearly as effective as opponents got progressively larger:

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Watching Broner is an exercise in testing your patience. Ever since he moved up to welterweight, the [then]-25-year-old has been unbelievably stubborn in his approach. Before, he had the ability to stand in the pocket and throw pot shots with his exceptional reflexes. Now, that power is little more than average, and his inability to put his punches together, coupled with his extraordinarily flat-footed approach, has left him wide open for criticism. We have to wonder if he was ever that good to begin with.

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On paper, Broner is still a young champion on his way to the Hall of Fame. A closer look, however, reveals a fighter without a signature win, without a real world championship and without the desire or ability to earn a place among the sport's greats.

Jonathan Snowden covers combat sports for Bleacher Report.