Dillian Whyte and Martin Bakole do not like each other. At all. Too many times in this great sport of ours, we’ve seen two fighters come together who profess to have genuine dislike for one another, only for an attempt at hype and the shifting of tickets to be the real story. But then, sometimes, the dislike, hatred even, is real.
With Whyte and Bakole – who almost got into it in Poland on Saturday night, this at the Rozanski-Babic fight, the two screaming insults at each other – the bad blood seems to be as real as can be. Both men want to hurt each other, both guys calling for the fight and vowing to score a nasty knockout.
https://youtu.be/5UNSMy5lXuE?t=13
After swapping verbal insults that could easily have escalated into actual punches, Whyte telling Bakole to “come upstairs” – Bakole and Whyte spoke with IFL TV (in separate sittings, obviously!).
Bakole actually pleaded for the fight, saying he will “knock him out cold” if he gets the chance to share a ring with Whyte. Usually a nice guy outside of the ring, Bakole, of Congolese descent and now based in Scotland, was angrier than he has ever been before when confronting Whyte.
Bakole, 19-1(14) wants Whyte next and he wants him bad.
“I saw that he’s scared, and he ran away,” Bakole said of Whyte. “I want this fight, please. I want to stop him. I’ll stop him cold like Tyson Fury did. I’ll knock him out bad. He called me names and he then ran upstairs from me. I want this fight.”
Whyte, 29-3(19) and no stranger at all to trash-talking, did indeed call Bakole names. Some very unsavoury names.
“This guy’s a paedophile,” Whyte said to Boxing UK, this when he was being heckled by Bakole. “Shut up, you nancy, f*****g paedophile! This guy has sex with young kids, he’s a paedophile.”
Genuinely nasty stuff, you will of course agree. Whyte laid into Bakole further when speaking with IFL.
“There’s nothing exciting about him, it’s hard to even sell a fight with guys like this,” Whyte said of Bakole. “If he rematched Michael Hunter, if he beat Michael Hunter, then that makes it a fight, because he’d beat a guy who beat him before. People forget, he quit in the ring against a cruiserweight. So he doesn’t bring anything to the table for me. Stop talking rubbish [Bakole]!”
But there is now some genuine fan interest in a Whyte-Bakole fight. Whyte we know wants a big rematch with Anthony Joshua, but if that fight doesn’t happen, and if Whyte cannot find himself another deal, Bakole is absolutely desperate to fight him. And Bakole wants to make Whyte pay.
Who wins if these two do rumble?