Shakur Stevenson sat down with his mentor Andre Ward to talk about navigating the politics of boxing, and specifically touched on his issue with the WBC, who stripped him of their lightweight title over a dispute about sanctioning fees. Stevenson says he couldn’t bring himself to dish out a significant amount of money to them for a fight that weren’t even involved in, and believes they were really just taking out their frustrations with Terence Crawford on him.
“I want to say [the WBC wanted] triple
of what I had to pay for my fight with Zepeda,” Stevenson said. “After the fight you need to pay [sanctioning fees] so I paid that and then for Teo fight they tried to triple it [but it wasn’t a WBC title fight]…Basically they kept sending emails back and forth to my team…I guess we was slow responsive to them [as I was in training camp] and we responded to them but I already knew beforehand they was going to strip me.
“I was cool with it because I know at the end of the day this ain’t right, so the side that I’m on is I want to be on the right side of things and I’m not paying nobody that much money if you don’t have nothing to do with my fight. What am I paying you for? This is a WBO sanctioned fight for me and Teo at a different weight class, so why would I pay you any money?
“So I just felt they was trying to rob me, but truthfully I feel like their issue is more so with Bud, because this didn’t happen and they didn’t come to us with this until they started having issues with Bud Crawford and I feel that wasn’t right either. Because if me and you, Mauricio, all these people at the WBC got a relationship and we cool, why are you taking out your beef you got with Bud, on me? I just don’t respect it.”
