Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua are signed to fight on December 11 at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, live on Netflix. Joshua spent Thursday telling talkSPORT Boxing that he would walk away from it tomorrow if his promoter asked him to.
“My loyalty’s with Eddie, so whatever he wants to do, if he wants to pull the plug, I’ll be right there tugging that plug with him,” Joshua said.
Before anybody panics: the fight is official and the launch press conference already happened in London on Wednesday. Joshua was describing a hypothetical, not announcing a cancellation. The reason he was asked at all is the mess happening behind the promotion.
The Dana White Problem
The event is promoted by Ring Magazine and Turki Alalshikh in partnership with Zuffa Boxing, which is Dana White’s operation. White did not attend Wednesday’s press conference, and when his name came up the Cardiff crowd booed it at length, to Eddie Hearn’s visible delight.
Hearn’s position is that contracts already in place prevent White and Nick Khan from being involved in this event without his approval, Alalshikh partnership or not. He has not been diplomatic about it.
“What’s happened to them over the last seven days has been one of the greatest PR disasters in boxing,” Hearn said on The Stomping Ground.
On White’s explanation that UFC Contender Series duties kept him away: “That’s like me not coming today ’cause I got the next gen Show. It’s a load of bollocks.”
And on what he thinks White should have said instead: “All you had to do was say, we understand there is a contract in place that prevents us from being involved; we’re going to get together with Eddie Hearn and Turki Alalshikh and we’re going to discuss it.”
Joshua Is Picking a Side, Not Threatening a Fight
The framing going around is that Joshua would scrap the fight to spite White. That is the headline writers talking, not Joshua. What he actually did was declare loyalty to the promoter who built his career.
He was clear about how much he wants this. “Obviously, the agenda was to make this fight happen by any means,” he said. “It has to happen. There’s no better time than now. What else would I have done? Who else would I have fought?”
He also said he has received corporate-level messages from people unhappy with his resistance to certain contract terms, and noted he has previously accepted less money to fight in the UK rather than at Madison Square Garden. Keeping this fight in Wales reportedly cost both men money, and they did it anyway.
Alalshikh summed up the achievement at the presser. “For 15 years, no one has been able to make this fight,” he said. “The time for talking is over.”
What the Fighters Actually Bring
Joshua is 36 and turns 37 on October 15, carrying a 30-4 record with 27 knockouts. His most recent outing was a second-round knockout of Kristian Prenga in Jeddah on July 25, a fight in which he was dropped twice in the opening round before finishing it. Before that he stopped Jake Paul in six rounds in Miami last December, flooring him four times.
Fury is 38 and 36-2-1 with 25 knockouts, with both losses coming against Oleksandr Usyk. He stopped Mariusz Wach in the seventh round in July and beat Arslanbek Makhmudov by unanimous decision in London in April.
The Real Risk
Neither man looks like he did five years ago. Joshua getting knocked down twice by Prenga is not a detail you skip past, and Fury’s comeback has come against opposition built to make him look good.
Fifteen years of waiting means this fight arrives with both heavyweights past their peak and a promotional war running alongside it. Hearn and White fighting over credit is the subplot. Whether two 36-plus heavyweights can still deliver in December is the thing that decides if any of it mattered.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.