You do not watch a Bill Haney live for the decorum. Mill City Boxing put Bill across from Coach Dorset — Keyshawn Davis’s coach — and most of the nineteen minutes is two men shouting “hang on, little buddy” economics at each other. But buried in the noise, Dorset kept returning to one claim, and he returned to it so many times, in the first person, that it is clearly the thing he came to say.
It wasn’t about the money. It was about the stipulations.
Dorset’s version goes like this: the Devin Haney fight would have been Keyshawn’s last fight with Top Rank. Attached to the deal, he says, was a trap — beat Devin, and Keyshawn would have had to stay with Top Rank for an amount of time beyond that. A contract extension riding on the biggest win of his life. Devin Haney Promotions was part of the negotiations, Dorset says, Keyshawn’s side tried to get the stipulation taken off the table, and Bill Haney knew all of it from the beginning. So when Bill goes public saying Keyshawn turned down millions, Dorset’s charge is that Bill is leaving out the part that mattered. Bill’s response, in the moment, was flat: he doesn’t know anything about that. Dorset called him a liar to his face, repeatedly.
Bill’s own case never really changed across the whole live, because he doesn’t think it needs to. Who can Keyshawn fight — who can Shakur Stevenson fight — and make more money than they make fighting Devin Haney? That was his question, asked over and over. In Bill’s telling, Keyshawn and Shakur both walked away from the most money of their careers, baby money jokes and all. And when Dorset raised the extension, Bill shrugged at the whole idea of complaining about one: the Haneys, he said, never complained about a contract — if a contract came with an extension, that’s what it was, and they did the business in front of them to get where they are.
Dorset closed by flipping the duck charge onto the Haneys’ own record: you told DAZN, he said, “I can get this fight, I can get that fight” — so when is Devin fighting Tank? When is the Ryan rematch? When is Keyshawn, when is Shakur? Brian Norman, he argued, is not who the people asked for. Bill, for his part, used the word duck about Keyshawn before the live moved on.
Strip the shouting away and this is the real state of the lightweight-welterweight mess: one camp says the money was career-best and plain, the other says the money came with a leash. Both cannot be the whole story. What neither camp produced, again, is a signed fight.
Video credit: Mill City Boxing.
Read next: “We’ve Never Had to Duck”: Bill Haney and Coach Dorset Trade the Duck Charge Both Ways
