Demetrius Andrade "pulls out" of Charlo fight over purse offer

Something like shades of Rios-Gamboa, minus the press conference with a large captioned photo of the no-show. Yesterday, it was reported that Demetrius Andrade pulled out of his "scheduled" fight with Jermell Charlo. Well RingTV is now reporting that the cause of all of this is none other than (dun dun dunnn...) Money. Excluding injuries, money is almost always the reason. Or at least money always serves as a great scapegoat.

Andrade's father, Paul Andrade, says that there was never an official agreement for Demetrius to fight Jermell, and that the promoters put it together without even consulting them. Sound vaguely familar?

"That fight was made without even talking to us," said Paul Andrade. "I have no objection to the fight but what we have objections to is that they didn't want to pay us any money to fight.

"I mean, $250,000 for Charlo is ridiculous. That's what they offered, but we did not ask to make the fight or look to make the fight. We waited until the last minute for them to come back with a better offer but it just didn't happen."

As this fight was slated to be on the Amir Khan-Devon Alexander undercard, and being that Andrade would represent the only major titleholder featured on that card, Team Andrade felt they deserved a little more respect, by way of greenbacks.

"We're an undefeated fighter, we're the only titleholder on that card. I feel like all of the fighters on the card are getting well-compensated for their fights, but everybody else is getting big figures and we're going to be paid the least.

"It's not like we said we're going to fight this guy for this amount of money and then we pulled out of it. We never even saw a contract, and we weren't going to sign a contract for that little bit of money... We're not trying to be a Prima Donna where we're asking for ridiculous money, but I know that we're worth more than $250,000. We just feel that we should be fairly compensated for the fight."

Artie Pellulo, who is one of Andrade's co-promoters, actually disputed parts of this accounts, which clearly indicate a severe misstep in the communication process. Sources close to the purse numbers indicate that Andrade was actually offered $500,000 for the fight.

"It's unfortunate that the fight did not happen before the end of this year," said Pelullo, "but I believe that the fight will happen during either the first or second week of January between Demetrius Andrade and Jermell Charlo, or another top 10 opponent."

Paul Andrade then said that he is not opposed to his son fighting Charlo at some point (given the right price), but he would've preferred a bigger name opponent.

"I am not saying that the fight couldn't happen in the future, but, personally, if I had had my choice, I would have preferred to have fought Erislandy Lara, who is a bigger name," he said.

"Again, I just want to apologize to the fans who bought tickets, because they should have been told a couple of weeks ago that we weren't taking that fight. It was never a done deal. The money was never right for the fight.

"I'm not trying to make anybody look bad, but we never agreed to this. You don't go putting the cart before the horse. I feel badly about it because people are still calling me up about the fight. I feel bad for the fans and the people, because they really need to know what happened. They should have been notified a couple of weeks ago that the fight wasn't going to happen."