Main Events boxing promotions has now confirmed that veteran heavyweight James “Lights Out” Toney has been dropped as an opponent for contender Tomasz Adamek on September 8 in Newark, NJ. The fight was to have been a Pay Per View special in Adamek’s home country of Poland.
According to Kathy Duva, Main Events CEO, “As we were not able to come to terms with Toney by the time the IBF unexpectedly ordered Tomek to participate in a four-man eliminator, we have decided to explore that option and move on.”
The proposed bout had been widely criticized in the boxing press as a total mismatch between a current heavyweight contender and a long-past-his-prime and possibly brain-damaged 43-year-old fighter who owes over $350,000 in back taxes to the California State government.
Toney didn’t help his own case when he videotaped an obscenity-laced YouTube segment in which he threatened to go the ESPN offices and attack boxing scribe Dan Rafael, who criticized the Toney-Adamek match-up.