By Allan Fox: IBF/WBA heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua views his unification fight against WBO champion Joseph Parker as a history making affair this Saturday night when the two of them face each other in Cardiff, Wales.
(Photo credit: Esther Lin/SHOWTIME)
The winner of the fight will possess 3 of the 4 heavyweight titles in the division, and to Joshua, it’s a big deal. Unfortunately, the boxing public doesn’t see it as nearly the same way. While the fans are interested in seeing Joshua fight, they don’t rate Parker as having much of any chance at all of winning. It’s viewed as a near certain win for the 28-year-old Joshua.
There’s expected to be 80,000 boxing fans to see Joshua face Parker on Saturday night at Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. What those numbers prove is Joshua doesn’t need to face a big name for him to bring in a lot of fans. That’s a bad thing because it gives his promoter the freedom to ignore the better fighters, because Joshua can make money fighting anyone. So instead of getting the best against the best, you see lesser fights being made while the more important ones put on hold for year after year.
”This is history. This is a unification fight with two heavyweights undefeated and it’s in the UK,” Joshua said to BBC Radio Five. ”It’s going to be electric. You know when you come here to fight myself, you know there’s going to be blood, a fighter hurt and 20 times out of 20 I’ve been victorious, so expect the same routine.”
Joshua (20-0, 20 KOs) wants the boxing fans to be excited about his pay-per-view fight against Parker on Saturday night at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, Wales. The fight is more along the lines of Joshua’s recent match against Carlos Takam than it is being a history-making affair. The fight that will make history is if Joshua faces WBC heavyweight champion Deontay ‘Bronze Bomber’ Wilder (40-0, 39 KOs) in a unification fight.
Unfortunately, I have to say ‘if’ Joshua ever takes that fight, because he and his promoter Eddie Hearn have different ideas about what Wilder is worth as an opponent in terms of his purse, and that may ultimately keep the fight from ever being made. Hearn doesn’t help matters with his dogged determination to pressure Wilder into facing Dillian Whyte before he’ll consider making a fight between him and Joshua. Here’s the thing. If Wilder loses to Whyte, then Hearn can forget about him. If Hearn still give Wilder a fight with Joshua after a loss, then his purse will be a tiny fraction of what he could make if he were still unbeaten and in possession of the WBC title.
”That’s no problem,” Joshua said to secondsout about Wilder willing to accept a smaller purse in his first fight against Jacobs with the agreement that he should receive a bigger purse in the rematch. ”We’ll go again and make the offer we’re interested in, and it’s not 50-50. My focus is on Parker, but we’ll go back a third time and look at the landscape and hopefully we can agree. We’ll get this Wilder fight out of the way,” Joshua said.
That would be great if Joshua is serious about wanting to fight Wilder before one of the two loses, and then the interest fight goes way down. The boxing public saw how Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao waited too long before they eventually fought each other. Both guys were in their prime in 2009, but by the time they fought in 2015, Pacquiao was over-the-hill and Mayweather had lost a lot of speed and had become a boring pot-shot fighter. It wasn’t the same Mayweather that we knew earlier in his career when he was beating guys like Diego Corrales. He’d become a safety-first type of fighter. Joshua needs to take control over the fights he makes and insist that the Wilder fight be made now, otherwise he could get stuck with Dillian Whyte.
”The fight is won or lost in training camp but the last bolt is screwed on during the spell from your changing room to the first bell,” Joshua said.
if Parker wins this fight on Saturday, then Joshua can forget about all this history making business and realize that you can’t start looking at history this early on. Joshua is still in the early stages of his career and he’s worrying about history. Joshua might have lost perspective. He doesn’t realize that he hasn’t faced a lot of opposition. He’s just had the fight with Wladimir Klitschko, an injured Dillian Whyte and Carlos Takam. There’s not much to Joshua’s legacy right, so he shouldn’t focusing on that kind of stuff yet. If he was at the end of his career, then he could daydream and think about legacy. Right now, Joshua isn’t taking the dangerous fights against the likes of Wilder and Luis Ortiz.
Joshua vs. Parker will be televised on Showtime Boxing in the U.S and Sky Box Office in the UK this Saturday night.