By Jeff Aranow: The World Boxing Council has ruled that they’re not going to impede the making of a mega-fight between the winner of the December 1 fight between WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury and IBF/WBA/WBO champion Anthony Joshua.
The WBC met at their 56th annual convention last week and one of the things they decided was not to get in the way of letting Joshua fight the winner of the Wilder-Fury fight in a unification fight that would unify all four titles.
The WBC could have fouled things up by ordering the Wilder vs. Fury fight to face WBC mandatory Dominic Breazeale (19-1, 17 KOs), who has been waiting for his title shot since last November after beating former world title challenger Eric Molina by an 8th round stoppage.
“That’s a fight the WBC has just ruled to support,” WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman said to skysports.com. “During our convention, a ruling of the mandatory status included the provision of trying to make the winner of Fury-Wilder against Joshua. I’m not certain about any contract. That’s a private agreement, but the WBC is of course the one that orders the fights, so our position is that we want to see the ultimate heavyweight fight, which involves Joshua and involves the WBC champion.”
It would be a big deal for the WBC if Joshua were to face and defeat the winner of the Wilder-Fury fight. The sanctioning fee money from Joshua’s fights as the WBC champion would likely be quite good for the sanctioning body, and it would be prestigious to have a popular champion like him as their belt holder. It wouldn’t be surprising if the WBC went out of their way to ensure that the mega-fight takes place in 2019 by making Joshua the mandatory challenger to the winner of the Wilder vs. Fury fight. Of course, the fallout from a move like that by the WBC would be severe, as Breazeale is already the WBC mandatory to Wilder, and it would look bad if he were shoved aside in favor of Joshua being installed as the new mandatory.
The WBC is already being heavily criticized for Ordering the recently beaten Gennady Golovkin to face new WBC middleweight champion Saul Canelo Alvarez’s mandatory challenger Jermall Charlo instead of having the Mexican star take care of his own mandatory challengers. This move boils down to Charlo having to fight in an eliminator a second time. Charlo already earned his mandatory position last year in defeating Jorge Sebastian Heiland by a 4th round knockout in July 2017.
The next thing the WBC did is have Charlo fight for the interim WBC middleweight title against Hugo Centeno Jr. last April in what appeared to some boxing fans as another hurdle the sanctioning body was putting in front of Jermall for him to get his mandated title shot against the WBC champion. Charlo destroyed Centeno Jr. in two rounds. The WBC can’t push Breazeale out of the way by making Joshua the mandatory for the Wilder vs. Fury, because it would bring about too much heat from boxing fans. The only thing the WBC can do is make sure they don’t mess up the chances of the Wilder-Fury winner facing Joshua in 2019 by ordering them to face Breazeale in early 2019.
It likely won’t matter what the WBC does to try and accommodate the making of the Joshua vs. the Wilder-Fury winner. Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn has already said that Matchroom Sport heavyweight Dillian Whyte is the leading option to face Joshua on April 13 next year at Wembley Stadium in London, England. Hearn has another one of his fighters in Jarrell ‘Big Baby’ Miller on standby as the second fight for Joshua in the second half of 2019. This means that the Fury-Wilder winner likely won’t face Joshua until 2020.