Ward skips “Face Off” taping for Kovalev rematch

Yesterday Sergey Kovalev and his Main Events promoter took to social media to call out Andre Ward for failing to appear at the filming of HBO’s “Face Off” segment with Max Kellerman, a program typically run by the network to promote its big fights.

Main Events would make an analogous posting directed at Ward on their own page, and in an interview with RingTV Kathy Duva explained what happened with the scheduled filming.

“HBO was set up to shoot a Face Off with Sergey and Ward today (Sunday),” Duva said. “That is why we all came out to Las Vegas this weekend. It was the only date where we could sync everyone’s schedules. A great deal of money and time was expended to set this up.

“And this morning, a few hours before the taping, HBO and I got an email from Roc Nation informing us that Andre had already left town. So unprofessional. And such disregard for the money wasted by both his promoter and Main Events. More important, an HBO crew was at the studio setting this up at 4:00 a.m. because Ward’s people insisted that we start as early as possible today.”

From Ward’s side, a source with knowledge on the situation tells RingTV that it was actually Kovalev who didn’t appear, suggesting that they were supposed to interviewed during the Canelo-Chavez card on Saturday night to promote their upcoming rematch.

And since Kovalev didn’t appear for that interview, Ward decided to leave town afterwards as he wasn’t keen on going out of his way to accommodate Kovalev — particularly following Kovalev’s posting of this since-deleted meme that was alleged to have racist undertones (which isn’t the first time Kovalev has been accused of such behavior).