According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, WBA Super Middleweight champion Callum Smith has turned an offer to fight Canelo Alvarez in May.
“He’s an idiot,” said Golden Boy Promotions CEO Osacr De La Hoya. “Callum Smith is a good fighter and has an amazing shot of beating Canelo and he turns it down?”
“Callum Smith turned down the fight and he would have made three to four times the money he has ever made and he turned it down,” said De La Hoya, who declined to say how much Smith was offered. “I wish him all the best and hopefully he can make the same money somewhere else. But Callum Smith, the most dangerous fighter out there at super middleweight, is out there and he’s bragging how he wants to fight the best and he turns it down? What’s wrong with these fighters? What’s happening with the legacies? It’s all business now.”
“We turned down the initial offer but, of course, it’s the fight that Callum wants next,” Smith’s promoter Eddie Hearn said. “If we feel the offer is right, he will jump at the chance.”
“We have a few opponents that we’re looking at,” De La Hoya said. “We’re going to go down the list. And whoever turns it down, on to the next one. These days I can’t even mention names because they automatically add zeros to the final number (of dollars they want). I commend Billy Joe Saunders because he went on record saying he wants the fight and would fight Canelo for free, but there are several guys out there.
“I don’t want to mention any names from my mouth, but we will work with anybody. We will just keep going down the list. But it’s an idiotic mistake on their part to turn down a chance to fight Canelo, the biggest star in boxing, and to make the most money.”
