It’s official: Keyshawn Davis has pulled out of the Richardson Hitchins fight — and according to Hitchins himself, the reason is money. Not real money. Fantasy money.
Breaking the news on AKHi TV, the message was blunt from the start: “What I’m about to tell you, you wouldn’t even believe. Keyshawn Davis has officially pulled out of the Hitchins fight.” And as AKHi put it, anybody who was paying attention saw it coming. “We know this fight was iffy from the jump.”
Hitchins didn’t hold back when he addressed it. In a quote aired on the show, Hitchins said Keyshawn “priced himself [out] to fight me,” adding: “I’ve been agreed to fight going on two months. I was wondering, what was the hold up? But he was asking for six million to fight me… Your boy never even made more than an M boxing. Fight is off.”
Six million dollars. For a fighter who, by Hitchins’ math, has never earned a single million in the ring. AKHi called it what it looks like: “For him to ask for six million to fight Hitchins, that’s a joke. It can’t be serious. It can’t be real.”
A pattern, not a prophecy
This didn’t come out of nowhere. Bill Haney had been saying a pullout was coming, and AKHi was quick to explain why that wasn’t any kind of prediction: “You think this is prophecy, but it ain’t. It’s just pattern. Because Keyshawn, he ruined his reputation — ‘one of the best fighters in the world, boogeyman’ and all that, to a duck.”
The warning signs were there from the beginning. The fight never added up: why would Keyshawn turn down a bigger fight and more money against Devin Haney for a world title to fight Hitchins for a Zuffa Boxing belt instead? And before the pullout, there was the whole purse bid process — and the skits. As one voice on the show put it, both men have histories here: Hitchins pulled out the night of a fight, Keyshawn pulled out of the purse bid. “So when we talk about who wins — who pulls out first? What’s the question?”
There was also talk that the Hitchins fight would have paid Keyshawn in the neighborhood of $3 million — which would have been his biggest payday — and that the money wasn’t even the real surprise. The surprise was that J Prince, with all his leverage, couldn’t get the deal closed either.
Free agent, and running out of road
The fallout is real. Per AKHi, Shakur Stevenson and Keyshawn are both free agents now — Top Rank dropped Keyshawn because they’re “tired of his BS.” And the style question won’t go away: Keyshawn keeps steering clear of the skillful, American boxer style — the Devin Haney style, the style Hitchins fights with at range. “He ducked Hitchins, too… Shakur and Keyshawn, they don’t like [fighting] boxers.”
Meanwhile, the sport is moving on without them. AKHi pointed to DAZN putting Devin Haney’s name front and center — because Devin is the one who can actually make the biggest fights happen: the Ryan Garcia rematch, Teofimo Lopez, Rolly Romero, Shakur, Tank Davis, even a Boots Ennis undisputed-versus-undisputed fight. “The face of boxing is the one who can make the biggest fights happen. And Devin can… Meanwhile, Keyshawn and Shakur get fired on their day off. Clearly we see who’s ducking. Clearly we see the executives who they’re signing and who they’re letting go — because they want to sign the ones who want all the smoke. They don’t want to deal with all this headache, wasting time and money.”
The show closed with a clip taking aim at the other elephant in the room: Shakur and Keyshawn’s “we’ll never fight each other” pact. If you two are the best and the money is right, make it happen — and the “$200 million” talk attached to it got laughed out of the room.
From where we sit
Here’s our take at Rnd5Media, and we’re not going to dress it up: Keyshawn Davis and Shakur Stevenson are destroying boxing, and they’re turning it into social media fights.
Look at the formula. A fight gets announced. A purse bid turns into a soap opera. The skits start. The callouts fly on social media. Then comes a price tag nobody was ever going to pay — $6 million to fight Richardson Hitchins — and the whole thing collapses before a punch is thrown. The fight doesn’t happen in the ring anymore. It happens on the timeline, in clips and skits and quote posts, and the fans get the content instead of the contest.
Boxing used to settle these questions with gloves. Now the biggest names in the lightweight picture settle them with demands designed to be refused. A $6 million ask from a man who hasn’t made one million isn’t negotiation — it’s an exit door with a price tag taped to it. And when two of the most talented fighters in the sport would rather protect the brand than test the skills, the sport pays for it: belts sit, divisions stall, and the fighters who actually want the smoke — Devin Haney, Richardson Hitchins — are left waiting on men who keep finding reasons not to sign.
Fighters fight. That’s the job. Everything else is marketing.
Watch the full breakdown from AKHi TV below.
🎥 Video: AKHi TV
