Why did Robinson fight Maxim?

I also read that Moore wanted to get paid in stock (I forgot the name of the company) but Robinson wanted cash.

 

I have trouble believing the $ 1 million dollar story. Without doing any research (so if I'm wrong will someone please let me know) I would guess that neither Robinson or Moore ever received anything close to $500,000 for a fight. If there really was $1 million on the table, they would have been happy to settle for $500,000 apiece. I don't disagree that Robinson was the greedy one, however. But talk about some promoter in that era coming up with a $1 million guarantee is a pipe dream. Talk is cheap. Especially after the fact.

 

It's in Brenner's book Only the Ring was Square. He says the man putting up the money was Irving Kahn. Brenner also says they offered Robinson $500,000 for a third Basilio fight (which is plausible as Robinson didn't make much less than that for the first two Basilio matches) but he turned it down because he thought he could make more with the proposed Moore bout. I don't vouch for the story, I'm just repeating the author's words.

 

Irving Kahn indeed would have been the most plausible money guy because he was the head of TelePrompTer, which was the only closed-circuit promoter at the time. TelePrompTer was just coming off the second Robinson-Basilio fight which had drawn a record amount of closed-circuit revenue. This was a pivotal fight in bringing to everyone's attention that the real money to be realized was from the closed-circuit gate rather than the live gate. It shifted the paradigm of fight promotion from the local on-site promoter to the closed-circuit TV promoter.

Nonetheless, confidence in the closed-circuit promotional model had not yet progressed to the point where Kahn could have made a cash guarantee to Robinson and Moore for a $1 million-dollar pay-off to the fighters. Robinson realized $255,000 and Basilio $110,000 from the closed-dircuit receipts of their second fight in 1958. Kahn might have suggested to Robinson and Moore that based on a percentage guarantee they possibly could realize as much as combined $1 million dollar pay-off, but this would have been an aggressive sales pitch, i. e., sheer puffery, rather than a guarantee. No way had the closed-circuit business evolved yet to the point where a promoter could confidently guarantee anyone a solid $1 million-dollar amount. I am almost certain that the $255,000 figure was far and away Sugar Ray's largest purse ever. The really big money which Patterson received from his trilogy with Johannson did not materialize until talks about a Robinson-Moore fight had subsided. And neither Kahn nor anyone else would have equated a Robinson-Moore contest with a heavyweight championship bout.

 

Basilio & Fullmer said the same thing about SRR.