Every feud needs both camps on the record, and Mill City Boxing got the Shakur Stevenson camp’s version from the man who trained him: Willie Moses. It is, to put it mildly, not the version Bill Haney has been selling.
Start with Devin Haney the fighter. Moses says he has seen Devin get beat, and that the flaws he saw back then have not gotten any better. Haney, in his words, is a jack of all trades and a master of none — fighting like Roy Jones one moment, like Floyd the next, like somebody else the moment after. How many trainers, Moses asks, is he going to go through until he gets it right? And on the resume argument, Moses is just as dismissive: Brian Norman Jr., the undefeated welterweight Devin took out, is “really a new kid on the block,” not a seasoned fighter — and Devin doesn’t qualify for the pound-for-pound conversation, Moses argues, because his strength of opponents doesn’t put him there. Shakur, he says, already holds the thing Devin always wanted: the number-one status.
Then the negotiations, where Moses flips the popular story on its head. Shakur has called out the biggest names since he came into boxing, he says, and on Haney specifically: “Do you think they came with an offer to Shakur to fight Devin? No. Shakur made the offer to fight Devin.” He also rejected, flatly, the fan theory that Zuffa and Dana White squeezed Shakur toward a Haney fight at 147 until the house of cards fell. Never 147, Moses said — Shakur fights at 130, 135 and 140, and Shakur himself has said that further down the line, if his body grows to 147, he’ll fight there. His weight complaint cuts the other way: we’re at 135, you want us to move up to accommodate Devin, so why doesn’t Devin meet in the middle? Every time we move up to his weight class, Moses says, he moves up.
There was honesty in the interview that team Shakur doesn’t always volunteer. Moses grades the Teofimo Lopez performance a B. He confirms Shakur told him in the second or third round, “Pop, I could stop this guy” — and that Moses told him not to chase it: keep boxing, come out victorious, come out with your health. Knockouts make champions in the highlight reels; in Moses’s telling, ring generalship and IQ do, the way they did for Ali at his peak, when he was winning more than he was stopping people. Moses also took credit for Shakur’s new promotional company — his suggestion, he says, so Shakur promotes other fighters and is vested in the business when his own career ends.
And the close is the line this whole saga will be quoted by: asked whether they are running Devin Haney out of his division, Moses corrected the question. “We’re going to run Devin Haney out of boxing until he fight us.” That’s the Shakur camp’s official position now — the chase is on, the offer was theirs, and the fight, Moses says, can happen on DAZN whenever Haney wants it. The Haney camp says the exact opposite with the exact same confidence. One of these camps is going to have to sign something eventually.
Video credit: Mill City Boxing.
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