He’s not within sniffing distance of top pound for pounder Floyd Mayweather, but heavyweight David Haye titlist has Money beat in one department: the ability to insert both feet in his mouth.
At a press conference on Tuesday to hype his Nov. 13 defense against Audley Harrison (27-4 with 20 KOs), a fellow Brit, Haye out-Floyded Floyd when he said to a group of reporters during a roundtable that his fight with the 38-year-old Harrison would be “as one-sided as a gang rape.”
Coming the week after Mayweather used his worst judgement by referring to Manny Pacquiao in racist and bigoted ways, Haye’s wording is particularly shocking. Or maybe not…maybe he saw the hubbub that the Floyd Ustream rant caused, and fearing that tickets sales against the fighter nicknamed “Fraudley” would be anemic, the 29-year-old WBA champ figured he’d go the same classless route as Mayweather.
Haye (24-1, 22 KOs) didn’t follow Floyd’s lead, when he refused to apologize for a jab that makes one realize that 1) he apparently has never had to see firsthand the damage that rape can do to a psyche and 2) he lacks empathy in a big way, because one shouldn’t have to see the pain rape causes to steer clear of using such flippant langauge.
On his Twitter page, he said: “If I apologised for every stupid/ignorant thing i said, I wouldn’t have time for anything else during the day!”
TSS is taking a stand: unless Haye apologizes for his wording, we hereby promise to not cover the Harrison defense, before during or after the bout. He looked like a reluctant warrior in “taking” the title from Nikolay Valuev last November, has ducked the Klitschkos like Paris Hilton trying to slip a coke charge…but maybe there’s a chance he will at least show some stones in this situation, and man up, admit what he said was beyond tasteless, and needs to be retracted, ASAP
