Gary “Spike” O’Sullivan has decided to pass on an opportunity to fight Gennady Golovkin on May 5th, according to Dan Rafael of espn.com.
O’sullivan, along with his promoters, Golden Boy Promotions cited that the low purse and lack of time to be the main reasons for bypassing on the contest.
“Spike’s not going to take the fight. He really wanted to do the fight, but the short amount of time, the short amount of money, it just doesn’t work at this time,” Golden Boy Promotions Eric Gomez said. “He wants a big fight, but he doesn’t want to take a fight at the last minute. He wants to win and he took his time to really think about it, and we talked about it with him and with our [promotional] partner Ken Casey from Murphy’s Boxing.
“We have a responsibility to our fighter. We respect him. If he goes into a big fight like this, the biggest fight of his career, he doesn’t want to go into the fight as the opponent on three weeks’ notice. Getting ready for an ESPN card is very different than going in with one of the top pound-for-pound fighters in the world on three weeks’ notice.”
“I don’t know what Tom’s (Loeffler) is going to do,” said Gomez, adding that he informed Loeffler of the decision earlier Wednesday. “We went over all the deal points, and it was hard to turn down a fight like this. It’s very hard. Spike has a lot of pride, but it was the right decision.”