Bernard Hopkins will fight a unification bout with Sergey Kovalev provided that Kovalev wins his Saturday night fight with Blake Caparello according to Dan Rafael of espn.com.
“The fight got made in 30 hours, from the start of negotiations on Thursday to the signing of the contract [Friday] afternoon,” Kovalev’s promoter Kathy Duva said after faxing the signed agreements to Hopkins promoter Golden Boy. “It didn’t take very long. When you don’t have obstructionists in the middle of a deal, it’s not that hard to do. I felt like it was the old days. HBO did their part, we did our part and Golden Boy did their part.”
Main Events also named Golden Boy in the lawsuit, but Duva said the suit never came up in the negotiations for Hopkins-Kovalev.
“We never even discussed it, but we will probably drop them from the suit,” she said.
“Sergey has to win [Saturday] night, so I don’t want to talk too much about the fight with Hopkins,” Duva said. “But we are all elated. It is going to be the most-anticipated fight of this year, even more anticipated than some of the pay-per-view fights. It’s a big fight on HBO.
“Sergey keeps saying, ‘I’m not going to talk about it or think about Hopkins.’ He knows his job is to stay focused on Blake Caparello. But Sergey did have a smile on his face when he signed the contract. Normally, I would wait to sign the contract until after Saturday’s fight, but there were time pressures to get the contract to the IBF.”
“Since Bernard was already approved in Sergey’s contract, we never thought that whatever issues HBO and Golden Boy had were going to be an issue if we could make this fight and they weren’t,” Duva said. “We are just excited about Saturday’s fight and seeing Sergey in a really big fight.”
