Eddie Hearn rates last Saturday’s stoppage victory for Tyson Fury over Dillian Whyte as a “poor fight” and he’s not the only one. Before the sixth-round knockout by Fury (32-0-1, 23 KOs) there wasn’t one hard meaningful punch thrown by either fighter.
Hearn says he didn’t like what he saw at the final press conference & weigh-in where Fury befriended Whyte, taking away his aggression. To be fair, Whyte & Fury looked like best friends at the weigh-in, dancing with each other, hugging, changing hats & laughing it up like two drinking buddies.
It was surprising because this was Whyte’s big chance to rip the WBC title away from Fury and use the strap to fight the winner of the Anthony Joshua vs. Oleksandr Usyk 2 rematch.
In the early rounds, instead of Whyte coming out with fire in his belly, he was as gentle as a lamb, appearing to have a gentle spar with an old friend rather than someone that he’s trying to dethrone as the WBC champion.
Not surprisingly, Hearn believes Whyte blew his best chance of winning the fight by not fighting with the fire that he needed in the early going.
As Hearn points out, WBC heavyweight champion Fury looked scared and was fighting defensively, negating Whyte’s offense to make sure he didn’t land one of the big left hooks that he’d used in his previous bout to KO Alexander Povetkin.
After Fury’s last fight against Deontay Wilder in October, he wasn’t going to take any chances against Whyte and wind up on the canvas like he’d been twice against the ‘Bronze Bomber.’
“Let’s be honest, it was a poor fight,” said Eddie Hearn to Dazn. “He was getting outboxed, I didn’t give him [Whyte] a round in the fight.”
The Fury-Whyte fight was beyond poor. It was a monstrosity, particularly with all the hype that went into it. Fury looked slow, old, and threw light shots until he caught Whyte with a right-hand uppercut in the sixth.
Even that punch didn’t look hard. It was just perfectly placed on the chin of Whyte, who had no clue that it was coming because Tyson hadn’t thrown an uppercut until then.
“Dillian Whyte was too passive in the early stages, it was friendly-friendly.
“I think inactivity played a massive part as well. I think Dillian has fought something like six rounds in two years,” said Hearn. “It’s very difficult to go in with inactivity and beat a great fighter like Tyson Fury.”
“And what he needed to do was negate that Dillian Whyte, hold him whenever he could walk him back to the ropes and box from the outside,” said Hearn.
