By Scott Gilfoid: Heavyweight Dillian Whyte (16-1, 13 KOs) says he would be interested in facing former WBA heavyweight champion David Haye (28-2, 26 KOs) in the future. Whyte, 28, says Haye has slowed down recently with the muscle weight that he’s put on and isn’t the same fighter that he was years ago in the zenith of his career.
Haye, 35, missed close to four years of his career from 2012 to 2016. Since making a comeback, Haye has beaten fringe contender Mark De Mori and Arnold Gjergjaj in embarrassingly one-sided contests. Haye is now looking to fight 44-year-old Shannon Briggs next. If Haye is successful in that fight, there’s a possibility of him facing Tony Bellew in a fight at heavyweight.
It looks like Haye is staying on the same level in fight after fight without in a stultified manner without moving up or moving down. He appears to be stuck at this level waiting for his big money fight against IBF heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua in the future.
“I’d have no problem with facing David Haye. The Haye of now is not the same as the Haye of years ago,” said Whyte to skysports.com. “He didn’t look particularly fast and he looks a bit too heavy and muscle-bound. He looks like a body builder – his chest is the size of my head.”
I agree with Whyte. Haye did look slower against De Mori and Gjergjaj than he’d been in the past. What I also noticed was Haye looking like he was starting to gas after just one round in the Gjergjaj fight. It was pretty sad to see.
Haye was starting to labor after just two minutes of action in a one-sided affair with the 31-year-old Gjergjaj. Luckily for Haye, he was able to get Gjergjaj out of there in the 2nd round because if the fight had gone into the later rounds, we might have seen Haye ready to get beaten.
I’m not sure if Gjergjaj would have done the job on him, but I think he might have been if Haye had continued to deteriorate like he was. I saw Haye looking like a charged up battery at the start of the fight, but by the 2nd round, he looked like he was already down to 75 percent capacity. I’m not sure if it’s all the muscle weight that Haye has put on or if the years of inactivity has caught up with him.
Haye is 35-years-old, and he’s not spring chicken any longer. It could be simply age that has slowed him. Putting on a mess of muscle weight obviously isn’t going to help Haye’s stamina. However, he kind of has no choice.
If Haye tries to fight the bigger heavyweights in the division while weighing only 210lbs, he’s going to get thrown around the ring like a rag doll. Joshua weighs 250, and Deontay Wilder is in the 240 range. Luis “The Real King Kong” Ortiz weighs in the mid-240s. All the top heavyweights are much heavier than Haye.
At 224lbs, Haye is still a small heavyweight. You can argue that the only reason why Haye hasn’t been exposed yet in his comeback is because he’s facing such poor opposition. Unfortunately, I don’t expect that to change. I see Haye staying at the level he’s at right now in terms of competition until he gets his cash out fight against Joshua in 2017 or 2018, depending on when Joshua and his promoter Eddie Hearn pull the trigger on the Haye fight.
“His card the other night was terrible. I’m a fan of David’s – don’t get me wrong – and he is trying to work his way back in and get some fights but he needs to stop lying to the fans. They’re not big fights and he needs to be honest,” said Whyte.
The real circus fight for Haye will be against Tony Bellew if he takes that fight. Bellew is a decent cruiserweight, but he’ll be outweighed by Haye by a HUGE margin if the two of them face each other. Even if Bellew bulks up for the Haye fight, he’ll still be out-sized. That’s just a terrible mismatch.
I don’t blame Bellew for wanting to take the fight though, because he’s got very, very bad options in front of him now that he’s the WBC cruiserweight champion. If he just defends the title, he’ll be faced to defend it against either former champion Grigory Drozd or Mairis Briedis. The only way around that is if Bellew can get permission from the World Boxing Council to get a voluntary defense of a unification fight against IBF/WBA champion Denis Lebedev. All of those options won’t be big money fights. The only money fight for Bellew is against Haye.
Whyte will be in action this month on June 25 on the Anthony Joshua vs. Dominic Breazeale pay-per-view card on Sky Box Office at the O2 Arena in London, UK. Whyte still doesn’t have an opponent for that fight. It’ll be Whyte’s first match since having shoulder surgery to repair a problem in his left shoulder.