We’ve talked to Felix Sturm’s people; they couldn’t do the fight in the fall because of their commitment to German TV but they can come to America in his fight after next. Not after his fight against Matthew Macklin- which is in a few weeks- but he has to do one more fight in Germany and by next year, he can come here.
Frankly, we made another offer to- at HBO’s request- to Daniel Geale, who frankly, was another fighter that Sergio wanted to fight to, in effect, unify- even though he doesn’t technically have the [W]’BC belt, we don’t acknowledge [Julio Cesar] Chavez Jr. as champion- and we tried to make the deal with Geale but Daniel wants to make the first defense of his title in Australia against somebody of less danger than Sergio before he takes on a challenge like Sergio, which I can understand. But right now, it’s looking more and more like Barker and I hope to have that wrapped up with HBO by tomorrow.
I mean, there’s a lot of factors; he [Pirog] doesn’t bring one dollar to the table, none, zero. Two, there’s a certain point in time where a fighter has a right to say, ’I want to fight this guy.’ [Martinez] has fought everyone that’s been put in front of him and not been given any type of ability to select and he really doesn’t want to fight for the WBO, period. He thinks what happened with his title getting stripped, they didn’t give him a chance to make a decision to stay at ’60 or ’54 and they stripped it, frankly, because they thought they were going to hand it to Danny Jacobs.
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