By Trevor McIntyre: Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn says they’ve sent a legal letter to the WBC to have them to have Dillian Whyte installed as the mandatory challenge to immediately face the winner of the May 18 fight between WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder and mandatory challenger Dominic Breazeale.
If Hearn is able to get the Wilder-Breazeale winner to face Whyte in their next fight, it could potentially put Wilder in a position where he would need to fight back to back mandatory challengers. That’s something that is rarely done, and it’s hard to imagine the WBC forcing Wilder to fight Whyte (25-1, 18 KOs), who hasn’t fought in a title eliminator. He’s ranked #1 with the World Boxing Council, but he’s not had a title eliminator to make him the WBC mandatory for Wilder.
The WBC had planned on ordering Breazeale to face Whyte for the interim WBC heavyweight title when they were under the belief that Wilder would be facing Tyson Fury in a rematch. However, once Fury signed with Top Rank Boxing, they chose to have him fight someone else rather than Wilder. As such, Wilder is now free to fight his mandatory Breazeale.
“We’ve sent a legal letter to the WBC this week and we actually meet with Mauricio Sulaiman…and we’re saying ‘how can you make Breazeale mandatory?'” Hearn said to skysports.com. “Dillian Whyte is WBC No 1, and more recently Dillian Whyte was ordered to fight Breazeale for the mandatory position.”
Hearn believes that Whyte being ranked #1 with the WBC should equate to him being made the mandatory. Obviously it doesn’t work that way. The WBC orders fighters the eliminators, and Whyte never took part in one. Instead, he fought guys like Lucas “Big Daddy” Browne, Ivica Bacurin, David Allen, Robert Helenius, Joseph Parker and Dereck Chisora. Those are fine B and C-level heavyweights, but they major talents, and more importantly none of those fights were designated as title eliminators with the WBC.
If the WBC forces Wilder to fight two mandatory defenses back to back, it would put him in a spot where he’d be making less money potentially than he could get in fighting popular heavyweights like Anthony Joshua or Tyson Fury.
Ideally, the WBC should order Whyte to fight in a title eliminator against either #2 WBC Tyson Fury or #3 WBC Luis Ortiz. Fury would likely decline the offer to fight in a title eliminator, as he doesn’t need to work for a title shot like the 30-year-old Whyte. That leaves us with Luis ‘King Kong’ Ortiz. The WBC can order Whyte to face Ortiz with the winner of that fight being the new WBC mandatory AFTER Breazeale, the current mandatory, faces Wilder on May 18. If Whyte can beat Ortiz, then he would be the official mandatory, and Hearn wouldn’t have to worry so much. If Whyte had simply faced Ortiz when the WBC wanted the two to face each other in a secondary title eliminator, it would be academic at this point, if Whyte won that fight. But instead of fighting Ortiz, Whyte opted to fight the likes of Dereck Chisora, Lucas Browne and Parker. It was waste of time for Whyte to fight them. He should have taken the Ortiz fight, as he wouldn’t have any issues.