The air was heavy in the conference room that morning for the usual HBO pre-fight production meeting. A particular subject hung in the balance that makes people edgy. Sergey Kovalev was about to defend the IBF, WBA and WBO light heavyweight titles against Jean Pascal on Jan. 30 in Montreal, and the Russian expatriate and his team were sitting down with the HBO broadcast crew handling the fight.
No one wanted to broach the gravity of the topic weighing on everyone’s mind, especially with Pascal making it such an issue leading up to the fight. It was all spawned by a picture Kovalev posted on Twitter in 2015 superimposing a gorilla’s head on the body of WBC light heavyweight champion Adonis Stevenson, who is black.