Showtime and Anthony Joshua to make big announcement tomorrow

By Boxing News - 05/03/2016 - Comments

joshua54By Scott Gilfoid: Both Showtime and IBF heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua will be making a big news announcement tomorrow [Wednesday] in a press conference. It’s expected that Showtime will announce that they’ve got a deal to pipe Joshua’s title fights from the UK into the United States.

I’m not sure if that’s a big deal though, if that’s what the announcement is going to be. Joshua is a foreign fighter and it doesn’t look like he’s going to be fighting in the U.S. like we’re seeing from other foreign fighters that have made it big over there like Manny Pacquiao and Gennady Golovkin.

Those two guys made a commitment to fight in the U.S. Joshua’’s promoter Eddie Hearn is saying point blank that they can make more money fighting in the UK, and it would take a lot of money to get Joshua to come to the U.S. But at the same time, Hearn thinks that he can turn Joshua into a PPV fighter in the U.S. I don’t know how he can if Joshua isn’t fighting there, isn’t going on tours to promote his fights there, and is fighting guys like Dominic Breazeale and Bermane Stiverne. I may be wrong, but I don’t think fighting those guys is going to turn Joshua into the next Mike Tyson in the U.S.

“We want him to be a pay-per-view fighter in the United States, but we have to build him and that’s going to take time,” said Hearn to Fighthype.

This is going to be interesting when Hearn tells Showtime to start charging the American public to see Joshua’s fights on PPV. I bet that will go over real well. I hope Hearn isn’t too ambitious in terms of PPV buys he’s hoping to make from Joshua’s fights being piped into the U.S. Boxing is becoming an expensive thing for American fans. There are now simple fights like Terence Crawford vs. Viktor Postol on PPV. If the sport keeps going in that direction in the U.S, it could diminish it completely. The fan base isn’t there to charge fans to see mismatches or fighters that the fans aren’t too familiar with, especially if the fights are dreadful match-ups where you know the A-side fighter is going to win.

Hearn always knows Joshua is going to win his fights, and the reason for that is because he’s matching him so carefully. I’m not holding my breath waiting for Hearn to put Joshua in with talents like Luis Ortiz or Deontay Wilder. I don’t think those fights are going to happen because Hearn has a golden goose in Joshua, and he can sell tons of PPV buys in the UK just by matching him against fighters like Charles Martin and Breazeale. Now he wants to expand by selling Joshua’s fights in the U.S. Like I said, it’s going to be interesting when we see Joshua on PPV fighting some hopeless opponent who clearly has no chance of winning.

I think Luis “The Real King Kong” Ortiz has a better chance of becoming a big star in the United States than Joshua, because at least Ortiz fights in the U.S and makes it interesting. Ortiz has an explosive style of fighting, and he’s very, very skilled.

With Joshua, he just looks like a big weight lifter pushing punches that look like arm punches than fast and hard shots that have snap on them. I mean, Joshua’s fighting style looks like a big weight lifter throwing arm shots against really weak and unskilled fighters. I haven’t been impressed with any of Joshua’s 16 opponents during his career.

I thought Dillian Whyte had some talent, but he was injured for his fight against Joshua, so the results of the fight were skewed. The other fighters that Joshua has fought have looked awful. Now he’s about to fight U.S. 2012 Olympian Dominic Breazeale in his next fight on June 25 at the O2 Arena in London, UK. Joshua’s promoter Hearn obviously selected Breazeale to partly cater to the U.S market, but the problem is Breazeale isn’t well known in the U.S. He’s not.

If you were to ask a bunch of casual fans who Breazeale is, they would look at you and likely say something like, ‘Brazil is a country in South America.’ Seriously, that was a waste of time for Hearn to match Joshua against Breazeale. He might as well have signed up Fred Kassi to fight Joshua, because Kassi arguably robbed in his fight against Breazeale last September in a losing a fight that he appeared to win.

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