By Scott Gilfoid: Dillian Whyte is an unhappy camper after hearing the news that WBA ‘regular’ heavyweight champion Manuel Charr isn’t interested in fighting him, and sees him as “irrelevant.” Whyte’s management team made an offer to Charr (31-4, 17 KOs) for a fight, but he’s not shown interest in taking the fight with him.
As one would expect, Whyte (25-1, 18 KOs) isn’t happy that he’s hit another dead end when it comes to him getting at a world title.
Whyte rejected a £4m offer to fight IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua. Whyte could be the mandatory to Joshua if he’d agreed to fight Kubrat Pulev in an IBF title eliminator. The World Boxing Council wanted Whyte to fight Luis “King Kong” Ortiz in an eliminator to get a shot at WBC champion Deontay Wilder, but Dillian chose not to take that option either.
Whyte, 30, says he’ll be back inside the ring on July 13 against an opponent still to be determined. He says they have a number of fighters that they’re picking from in hopes of getting one of them to agree to face him, but a lot of them don’t want to. Whyte says they price themselves out.
“Manuel Charr said he’s not interested in fighting me because I’m ‘irrelevant’ but the guy is a just a media whore. He hasn’t even got a proper belt,” Whyte said in his column at Talksport.com.
This is like Aesop’s fable, ‘The Fox and the Grapes.’ That story is about a fox that wants to eat some desirable looking grapes that are too high for him to reach. Instead of admitting that he’s incapable of getting to the grapes, the fox says they were probably “sour grapes” after all. So, by Whyte saying that Manuel Charr’s WBA ‘regular” title is not a “proper belt,” he’s devaluing it rather than admitting defeat at his goal of getting the fight. It’s a classic ‘Fox and the Grapes’ reaction by Whyte in not being able to get the fight against Charr.
The question is if Whyte sees Charr, 34, as not having a “proper belt,” then why is he interested in fighting him in the first place? It’s obvious that if Whyte can beat Charr to capture his World Boxing Association ‘regular’ heavyweight title, he can use that strap as leverage to get a better deal in a fight with Anthony Joshua or use it to help get better split in a unification fight against WBC champion Deontay Wilder. Joshua has the main WBA heavyweight strap, referred to as the ‘Super World’ WBA title.