Ahead of his co-feature on the Canelo-Smith card tomorrow, Willie Monroe Jr. answers questions from FightHub about where he beef with Gabriel Rosado stems from...Oh, and the possibility of Gennady Golovkin using doctored gloves. Check out some excerpts below.
Monroe on how animosity with Gabriel Rosado all started:
"Well, honestly the talking has been more on his behalf, I've just been saying 'God bless.' I mean it started from a Twitter post, someone tagged me 'would you fight @gaberosado.' I gave him a compliment, I said 'He's a good fighter, but I don't think a fight with Gabe Rosado will do anything significant for my career, at this point...This was right after he fought [Joshua] Clottey. It was no disrespect, it was just how I felt at that point...I guess he took offense to that and started going in on me...I even told him 'I like you as a fighter, you're barking up the wrong tree right now...'
"He kept going, ok, let him talk. Then they called Artie Pellulo and asked if we would fight Billy Joe Saunders on this card. And Billy Joe Saunders and his team turned us down immediately. Artie Pellulo called me back and said 'it looks like Gabriel Rosado's in play, Billy Joe Saunders' team said absolutely not...'
"So they were in negotiations with Rosado and I guess that fell apart...So me and Gabe Rosado turned our attentions to each other...so here we are. Almost a year after that little beef we're fighting.
Having Gennady Golovkin as a common opponent, Monroe's responds to Rosado's suspicions that Golovkin has used tampered gloves:
"They could be very true...after my fight [with Golovkin], some tweets from some bigger name people, who I won't say, went out about Gennady's gloves looking suspect when I fought him. I retweeted the tweets in the heat of the moment...Then everybody started looking at my like 'you're a sore loser...'
"...If politics exists on a level where we're talking about minimum wage, what makes you think it doesn't exist on the level where we're talking superstardom, millions of dollars...I'm not making any comments, I'm not saying anything specific, but what I'm saying is the fans have to be a little more intelligent...you see what you see on TV. If a glove looks smaller, it looks smaller, that's facts, you're eyes not playing tricks on you. And if your gloves look smaller every single fight you gotta think to yourself 'wow, maybe it is.' Maybe it's the way his gloves are made, maybe he has bigger hands where the gloves sort of contract when he expands - you never know. But I'm not making any comments or saying it is or it isn't, but Gabe Rosado isn't the only fighter that has said that about him..."