By Scott Gilfoid: Deontay Wilder co-manager Shelly Finkel says he won’t be meeting with IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua’s promoter Barry Hearn next month to discuss a April 13 unification fight until he gives ‘The Bronze Bomber’ a “real offer,” according to Sky Sports.
Joshua, 28, says Deontay is his #1 choice for his April 13 fight Wembley Stadium in London, England. However, Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn has yet to give him an offer that they feel is acceptable. The offer that is on the table for Wilder to sign is the same $15 million flat fee offer that has been there for months, and he’s already said that he’s not interested in accepting that offer.
Hearn spoke recently of wanting to sweeten the offer for Wilder, but apparently he hasn’t done that. As such, if Wilder agrees to the $15 million flat fee, he could wind up with between a 15 to 20 percent cut of the revenue compared to Joshua’s 80 to 85% in my estimation. if the fight makes between $75 million to $100 million, Wilder’s $15 million flat fee would give him a lower percentage of the revenue than what Joshua’s opponent Joseph Parker received for a fight against him last March.
”Where is the new offer? Nowhere to be found,” Shelly Finkel said to skysports.com. “I have sent three separate emails to Barry saying that I have no desire to meet with Barry unless I have a real offer for Wilder to meet Joshua. He and I have been in the business long enough to know what that offer would look like,” Finkel said.
Obviously if Hearn is only offering Wilder a $15 million flat fee, that’s code for, ‘I want nothing to do with making a fight between you and my money train fighter Joshua. You’re WAY too dangerous for me to put AJ in the ring with you, so I’ll just give you a paltry offer that you’ll never agree to and I can then tell the boxing public I tried but you were too difficult to negotiate with.’ You can argue that if Hearn were really interested in making the Joshua-Wilder fight, they would give Wilder the 50% offer that he’s asking for or at least a minimum staring offer of 45%.
With the money the fight is going to pull in, Joshua would still wind up with by far his biggest payday of his career if he gave Wilder a 50-50 split. Joshua hasn’t made $50 million before for any of his fights. He could make that for a fight against Wilder if he would only agree to the offer that Wilder’s team gave to him. They were offering him $50 million with the rest of the money going to Wilder. It would have been a great deal. Hearn thinks the fight can make a lot more money than that for Joshua. Of course, if your fighter Joshua is hogging the purse with a 80-20 or 85-15 purse split for the Wilder fight, then yeah, you’re going to make much more money than what you would make if you accepted the $50 million offer given by Team Wilder.
“I know Team Wilder said it was a bull-s—t offer. They accepted the offer,” Hearn said to Behind the Gloves last Saturday about the $15 million flat fee that he offered to Wilder for the Joshua fight. “We’re proactively trying to make the fight. They’re not coming back to us saying, ‘We don’t like the offer. We want another offer. Could you make a higher one?’ We’re actively chasing them and e-mailing them. Shelly [Finkely] came back and said, ‘You don’t want the fight.’ We’re not just sending you e-mails from the office to have a laugh. ‘We just messaged Shirley [sic] for a bit of fun.’ We’re the ones asking for the meeting. We’re the ones sending e-mails. He makes me laugh. Hopefully, Shirley is going to meet up with my dad the first week of October…I think Wilder wins it [Tyson Fury] fight rather comfortably, and not because Tyson Fury isn’t a talented heavyweight. He’s not ready for that fight. I just can’t see Tyson winning that fight IF it happens. He’s taking that fight and good lucky to him,” Hearn said.
As you can see, Hearn still seems stuck on the $15 million offer that Wilder supposedly accepted for a September fight with Joshua. But since Joshua already rejected the fight with Wilder, the $15 million offer is null and void. Wilder (40-0, 39 KOs) wants a greatly improved offer of 50 percent, and until Hearn starts talking about that, he’s not going to get him to sign for the fight. Unfortunately for the British boxing public, they’re going to have to settle for a retread fight between Joshua and Dillian Whyte on April 13 at Wembley Stadium in London, England. The fans don’t want to see a second fight between those two guys because the outcome is already predetermined. Joshua blasted Whyte out with ease in 2015 in 7 rounds, so there’s no point in going over old ground with a needless rematch between AJ and Dillian. Hearn obviously wants to make the Joshua-Whyte2 fight because it’s a safe fight for the 28-year-old Joshua. It’s money in the bank for AJ, because Whyte is a simple blue collar type of heavyweight with the upper level talent needed for him to beat the likes of Joshua, Deontay and Tyson Fury. Those are the elite level heavyweights. Whyte is a blue collar guy, toiling away at the level below the top guys and fighting at the same level as old heavyweight war horses like Dereck Chisora and Kubrat Pulev.
The real test of whether Hearn wants the Wilder fight for Joshua will come in the next three weeks or so. If Hearn chooses to sweeten the offer to get it to 50 percent for Wilder to face Joshua on April 13, then the fight will get made. If Hearn continues to stubbornly stick to the $15 million flat fee business, then the fight isn’t going to get made. Even if Hearn bumps it up to a $20 million flat fee for Wilder, the Joshua fight is still not going to get made. For a fight that is going to make between $75 million and $100 million, Wilder receiving only $20 million would be an incredibly low offer. If Joshua is able to walk away with between $80 million and $85 million in comparison to Wilder’s $20 million, you can see that there’s something wrong with this picture.