A tale told by Eddie Hearn regarding Andre Ward’s 2015 scrap with Paul Smith has been doing the rounds on social media in recent days, but now Smith has offered his version of events.
Andre Ward is lauded as one of the greatest pound-for-pound fighters of the 21st century and as one of the most talented super-middleweights of all-time. Wins over the likes of Arthur Abraham, Carl Froch and Sergey Kovalev cemented the reputation of Ward during the 2010’s but it was his fight with Smith that had led to plaudits for his character and class.
In an interview on Ward’s podcast, ‘All The Smoke Fight’, Matchroom Promoter Eddie Hearn detailed how Ward refused to take money away from Paul Smith, despite a deal being agreed as a consequence of the Liverpudlian missing weight and hitting the scales at 176.6lbs, rather than the 172lb catchweight.
“After that fight, you [Ward] came up to me in the ring and the deal I had done with Jay was that he [Smith] had to pay you $125,000 extra for missing weight. You came up to me and said ‘is he a good guy?’ and I said ‘yeah, he is a great guy’. Then you said, ‘does he have a family?’ and I said ‘yeah, they are all here’, and you said ‘tell him to keep the $125,000’, and I will never forget that about you.”
Speaking with Boxing Social, Smith confirmed the truth of the story and added that his wife was pregnant at the time.
“It is true, he came over to me in the ring after the fight also. I said ‘look the weight wasn’t intentional, I have f***ed up the weight, that was my fault and it is something that I will have to live with,’ and I have had to live with it. It’s something that I am not happy about but you don’t remember factual events, you remember the feelings. I remember how I felt, I remember what was going on, I remember the circumstances of my situation for that fight and the camp.
“It was an opportunity to fight in America on top of the bill against Andre Ward and you would have to be an absolute idiot to turn that down. It was the biggest day that I had in my career as well. There was no way that I was missing that fight, regardless of what had happened.
“I just got it wrong, I messed up with the weight and that was it, but it wasn’t intentional. The thing that he said to me in the ring was ‘you have got a baby on the way I have heard?’ and I said ‘yeah’, then he said ‘well, I am not taking the fine’.”
“He is a class man, inside and outside of the ring.”
Ward would famously hang up the gloves just two years later, at the age of just 33-years-old, becoming one of few fighters to retire with an undefeated record.
Boxing Social is now on WhatsApp! Join our channel by clicking here and getting all the latest boxing news direct to your phone.