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The August 27 HBO fight between Robert "The Ghost" Guerrero and Marcos Maidana is off, as Robert Guerrero has suffered a left shoulder injury in sparring.
Guerrero (29-1-1, 18 KO) was to move up in weight to the junior welterweight division, and the fight was going to be for the WBA's "regular" title. Maidana (30-2, 27 KO) is now the WBA "regular" titlist, and possibly the most intriguing part of this is that Amir Khan is saying that Guerrero isn't injured, and that Maidana paid him off:
No injury, I reckon maidana payed off Guerero step aside money, so he can become the WBA champ becus I have moved up as WBa super champ.
This is frankly a semi-ridiculous statement by Khan, and is only understandable if, in fact, the plan is now to hold a rematch between Khan and Maidana in December, a year after their BWAA Fight of the Year from 2010. If it's a way to start the hype between that fight, then so be it. And it's sort of exactly the way that Khan and Zab Judah started hyping their July fight. It was all Twitter trash talk, and then the idea was that the fight wasn't going to come off, and then it did. So it wouldn't be anything new from Khan.
Maidana did respond to the accusation:
"Look who's got out of the cave to open his big mouth again. Amir Queen Con is the biggest liar and conner you can find around boxing these days. He says I paid Guerrero not to fight. What a stupid comment, disrespectful to both Guerrero and myself. Especially when that comment comes from someone who hires lawyers and files special requests to avoid a fight with me, like he did a few weeks back," Maidana said.
I don't know exactly how Golden Boy would feel about rematching Maidana and Khan, given their big plans for Khan in 2012, which include a fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr, but they could feel that a rematch between these two takes some of the sting out of losing the Guerrero vs Maidana fight. They'll still prefer Erik Morales as Khan's low-risk December opponent, I'm sure, but Morales has a doozy of a fight with Lucas Matthysse lined up
Obviously it sucks that we're losing a good fight on August 27, considering that now means that the 8/20 and 8/27 weekends once again lack anything very significant on U.S. TV. The biggest fight card of the weekend on 8/27 is now the Povetkin vs Chagaev show on Epix, and Epix has such low availability, and their streams are so unreliable, that as well-intentioned as it is, it's not a huge factor yet. This has been a miserable month for boxing fans, who have lacked big fights to get excited about, and had the one big fight (Agbeko vs Mares) overwhelmed by controversial officiating.