It was last spring when Harlem Eubank and Adam Azim faced off in the ring in London’s O2 Arena. They were not dressed to fight, but to announce that they would be fighting. There was no date or venue, but it was supposed to be on. Only it never was.
“There was such a fallout. There was the face-off,” recalled Eubank’s promoter Kalle Sauerland.
“I can tell you exactly what happened there. I landed on a plane. It was Easter weekend, landed on a plane in Greece, got a call, and was told, ‘Well, there’s a face-off tonight.’ Boxxer wanted to do a face-off, and I said, ‘No, absolutely not.’ I said, ‘There’s no face-off. We haven’t got contracts yet. So, no, it’s not going to happen.’
“But I’ll tell you what, the calls kept coming, and I’m like, what is this? I’m happy for him [Eubank] to go to the show, of course, and whatever, but I was then asked, ‘Well, what can we say?’ And I said, ‘Well, you can say that we’re in discussions. In fact, I’ll go as far as you can say we’re in advanced discussions.’
“I’ve got this on WhatsApp. And, fair enough, I’ve gone about my Easter weekend, and suddenly, I get blitzed, like, ‘Oh, can you give us a statement to the fight?’
‘There’s no fight. There’s just a face-off that’s gone down.’
“So, I’ve obviously, thrown my toys out the pram a bit, but I’d said before, don’t do this. You don’t announce fights without signing contracts. You don’t announce, in any form of business, why would you announce a deal before you’ve done the deal? You leave yourself exposed, especially in boxing.”
“That fight can be made tomorrow. It can also be made in two years’ time. It’s not like that fight’s going somewhere,” the promoter said.
Also, Sauerland saw that there was an appetite for the bout, which is why it’s still talked about as the-contest-that-never-was almost a year on.
“We both know that those seeds in British blockbuster fights, they only grow, you know?” Sauerland went on. “So, I don’t think that, as long as they keep winning, or they keep putting on good fights, which they both need to do, to be honest, I don’t think that either yet has had that sort of a test. And I like Adam Azim a lot as a boxer. I think he’s fantastic. He seems like a terrific young man. But let’s face it, neither [Eubank nor Azim] has faced top opposition. So, for us, McKenna is a big step up. It’s a step up against someone who’s been in… He [McKenna]’s had an unprotected career, let’s put it that way. Interestingly, he [McKenna] said [to Eubank], ‘You’ve got a padded record.’ He’s half not wrong. Because that’s what we do. You build. And he [McKenna] hasn’t been built. He hasn’t had the luxury of that. So, he’s been in with Catteralls, Prograis, and yeah, he’s lost. Yeah, he’s won. But Belfast fighters, they don’t come to really turn up to make-up numbers.”
And Sauerland is wary of the threat posed by the Irish, having brought over Padraig McCrory to fight then 18-0 Leon Bunn in Germany in 2022.
“And he took my man’s head off. So, I’m always nervous when we’ve got a tough Irish opponent,” said Sauerland.
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