By Tim Royner: IBF/WBA heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn has been doing a lot of talking about how he’s going to make a fight between AJ and WBC heavyweight champion Deontay ‘Bronze Bomber’ Wilder next, but thus far he’s done nothing to indicate that he intends on doing that.
Wilder says no fight has been offered to him by Joshua’s management. They offered him a fight against Matchroom Boxing heavyweight Dillian Whyte, but they weren’t willing to tie that fight in with a match against Joshua for some reason.
Deontay did his job recently to clear a path for him to fight Joshua in a unification with his fine 10th round knockout victory over Luis ‘King Kong’ Ortiz on March 3 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. Joshua needs to do his part to get the Deontay fight by beating WBO heavyweight champion Joseph Parker on March 31 in Cardiff, Wales. Further, Joshua must get his promoter Eddie Hearn to make the fight with Wilder instead of just name dropping all the time.
Deontay doesn’t understand the reluctance on Joshua’s management’s part in putting the fight together between them. He says they didn’t seem interested even to make a fight between him and Whyte after they initially made the offer to him to fight him.
“As long as you have Joshua on the end of that, we’re good,” Deontay said to Talksport about how he was offered a fight against Whyte by Matchroom Boxing. “And they didn’t even want to make that happen. That was the only thing that was going. There wasn’t anything about me and Joshua discussed. Nothing. Not one thing. They come back and said we did make an offer, we didn’t reach an agreement. How can an offer be made when the main subject wasn’t even discussed? We’re talking about Wilder vs. Joshua!”
Deontay will be taking a wait and see approach to the Joshua fight. Heck, the British heavyweight might not even get past Parker on March 31. If Joshua loses that fight, then you can forget all about a Wilder-Joshua fight for the time being. Hearn will need to put Joshua back in with Parker in a rematch and keep his fingers crossed that he doesn’t get beaten a second time, because it’ll be game over if he gets knocked out twice by the New Zealand heavyweight. That 10-year reign that Hearn was talking about in terms of Joshua ruling the heavyweight division would a failed dream on his part. Joshua needs to worry about getting past Parker before he can even think about a fight with Wilder.