We’ve all heard, repeatedly, how a heavyweight mega-card could take place in Saudi Arabia this December, with Deontay Wilder to fight Anthony Joshua, and with Tyson Fury to fight Oleksandr Usyk. Plenty of fans have an ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ attitude, and who can really blame them? However, there is more heavyweight news, news that suggests both Wilder and Joshua will take what could certainly be looked at as risky fights before they face each other for all the money in the world.
Firstly, Wilder, via his trainer Malik Scott, has sent a “helluva offer” to Andy Ruiz, this for a fight that has been on the cards for some time now.
“TIMES UP: We doing our part and we sent you a helluva offer. Ah, Andy Ruiz The ball is in your court now, let’s get it signed and sealed,” Scott’s message, uploaded on social media, reads.
It will be interesting to see if Ruiz accepts this offer, whatever it actually consists of. But again, Ruiz is a high-risk “tune-up” foe for Wilder, if this is how Wilder and Scott view the Mexican-American.
Meanwhile, the Joshua-Dillian Whyte rematch fight that was on the cards for August 12 could be back on. Yesterday, Whyte spoke with Talk Sport, and the 35 year old laid into AJ and Eddie Hearn for “using” his name by speaking about a potential fight, this a rematch of the 2015 slugfest AJ and Whyte had, when in fact they didn’t actually want it.
Hearn has now responded as we knew he would:
“We made an offer to Dillian four or five weeks ago and they came back and the exact wording was ‘absolutely not, this is unacceptably low’ and basically nowhere near a number that they’d accept,” Hearn said to Boxing Social. “I funnelled that back to AJ and the team and we said ‘Okay, we’ll move onto another opponent.’ That was it. Now they come out of the blue and say, ‘We accept that offer,’ right when we’re about to announce or are in negotiations with another opponent. We went straight back to Dillian and said, ‘Can you confirm that you accept that offer?’ and they said, ‘Yes, we do’ and I said ‘Fantastic,’ so we’re getting them a contract. They’ll have a contract today. We need to move at pace but if they’re serious that fight can 100 percent happen. It’s still the fight that AJ wants for August 12th so again, if Dillian is serious, that fight is going to happen.”
So, Wilder-Ruiz And Joshua-Whyte II this summer? It seems too good to be true, and maybe it is. But it sure would be great if these two interesting heavyweight match-ups did happen, before Wilder and Joshua, if victorious, then met in a genuine blockbuster in December.
If these two “tune-up” fights do happen, who has the tougher, riskier fight – Wilder against Ruiz, or Joshua against Whyte?
