Bill Haney is outside. Not metaphorically — literally outside, in the street, grinning, telling Mill City Boxing he is “outside outside” and having fun. Shakur Stevenson had just announced that Zuffa Boxing granted his release, and the slickest talker in boxing had seventeen minutes of things to say about it. Some of it was comedy. Some of it was receipts. With Bill, the two usually arrive in the same sentence.
Start with the invitation, because Bill never buries it. Whenever Shakur wants the fight, the door is where it has always been: “Come up to where the big boys is at” — the glamour division, 147 pounds. That, Bill says, is the same thing being asked of Keyshawn Davis: be the man, take the tariff, come up. And when the money question came up, Bill was blunt — he had warned Shakur himself that this path was career suicide, because the most money on the table for Shakur Stevenson is, and has always been, a fight with Devin Haney. “So how you gonna explain it?”
Then came the funniest thirty seconds of the interview. Asked about Shakur starting his own promotional company, Bill lit up. He’ll be calling, he said. “You might get a job over there. Just be quiet. Some people might be applying over there.” That is vintage Bill Haney — a man clowning a rival’s big announcement by treating it as a job fair. But ask him if leaving Zuffa is just the latest way of moving the goalposts, and the smile stays while the answer sharpens: “Definitely.” The whole Shakur crew, he added, is delusional — every last one of them.
Under the jokes, Bill put two claims on the record that matter. First, the lawyer story. Shakur’s camp has pushed the version where a Haney lawyer demanded 147 and killed the terms. Bill shut it down flat: if you don’t hear it from him or from Devin, it doesn’t count. Devin is the voice of the company, Bill is sometimes sent out to deliver the message — and no lawyer speaks for them. The narrative, he said, is fake, and nobody has produced any emails. Second, the weight. The only agreement the two sides ever actually reached, Bill said, was 145 pounds flat — with no rehydration clause — and the endless rehydration talk coming from the other side is what choked the negotiations out until the date became impossible.
That, Bill says, is also why Devin hasn’t fought this year: they spent it working this specific fight, because Shakur told them he would fight at 147. Then Shakur came out calling himself a 140-pounder. “Let him be a 140 pounder,” Bill shrugged — stop asking about a man who won’t do it. As for the rest of the Shakur operation, Bill was just as dismissive: Shakur training with Floyd Mayweather? “Don’t work.” Floyd’s tricks didn’t work for Floyd, so how is he teaching them? Shakur’s grandfather and trainer Wali Moses? Bill says he’s glad he got his son away from Coach Willie back in the amateurs, and that Wally is nothing like him. And the fighter himself? “Shakur just never got better” — not with everybody hyping him and his grandfather delusional. Devin, meanwhile, is a full-grown welterweight now.
And still, at the end, Bill wouldn’t close the door — because Bill Haney never closes a door the people are standing at. He’ll never give up on the fights the people want to see, he said; that’s why he comes to Mill City, “for the smoke.” The ball, as ever, sits at 147 pounds, flat, no rehydration — the glamour division, where all-time-great things get solidified. “That’s what we’re for.” Bill is outside, having fun, and waiting. Shakur knows the address.
Video credit: Mill City Boxing.
Read next: Free Agent: Shakur Says Zuffa Granted His Release — AKHi Says the Haney Money Is Why He Walked
