By Charles Brun: Eddie Hearn says he thinks that Daniel Dubois only suffered eye swelling and NOT a fractured left eye socket reported during his 10th round knockout loss last Saturday night against Joe Joyce.
Hearn questions why an x-ray wasn’t posted of Dubois’ left eye injury after the fight to confirm that he’d suffered a fractured eye socket. In Hearn’s opinion, the 240+ lb heavyweight Dubois (15-1, 14 KOs) wasn’t ready for the big of a step up in facing the more experienced Joyce, and he “imploded.”
Hearn notes that all it took for the 23-year-old Dubois to quit was a mere jab from Joyce in the 10th, and he views that as a sign that he lacks the heart to perform at the highest levels of the division.
Like many, Hearn believes that Dubois can come again, but he thinks he needs to fight at the English level for the title. He’s offering unbeaten Fabio Wardley (10-0, 9 KOs) as a potential option for Dubois when he returns to the ring.
Wardley, 6’5″, 240+ lbs, might be a little too dangerous for Dubois, though. The 25-year-old can punch with more power than Joyce, and he’s got a pretty mean jab that he would be using on Dubois.
Eddie wonders why no x-ray posted for Dubois’ eye
“During the fight, I was convinced that Joyce was going to win the fight from very early in the fight for multiple reasons,” said Eddie Hearn. “Did he? I haven’t seen any scans,” said Hearn when told that Dubois suffered an orbital fracture of his left eye.
“Report from what? Most people would post some sort of x-ray. I’m not a doctor, but it looks like eye-swelling to me, not necessarily a fracture.
“The problem was after the first round, he’d frozen,” Hearn said of Dubois. “After the fourth round, I told him [Anthony Joshua], his [Dubois] body language was horrendous. The corner was telling Daniel Dubois after four rounds, ‘
“This is the fight game. Come on.’ That was very strange. You need someone in the corner working on that eye. I just watched him implode. From the first round, I could tell you that Joe Joyce was going to win this fight,” said Hearn.
It is a good question about why an x-ray wasn’t posted to show Dubois’s damage to his left eye during the contest last Saturday. But perhaps, we may see one sooner or later if there is such an injury.
Hearn is right about Dubois looking like he froze from the first round. As soon as it became apparent that Joyce wasn’t going to fold up like the pedestrian-level opponents that Dubois had been matched against throughout his career, he looked shell-shocked.
Dubois had that 1000-yard stare that a fighter gets when they realize that they’re not ready for what they’re experiencing.
Hearn says Dubois has been poorly matched
“He’s just been poorly brought through, Dubois,” Hearn continued. “He’s never boxed above English level. That’s the level he’s boxed.
“Then you step to a guy that is top 15 in the world in Joe Joyce, and he just wasn’t ready for it. I think Sam Jones was 100% right. ‘He [Dubois] hasn’t had a middle fight.’
“He wasn’t ready for Joe Joyce, he wasn’t good enough, and he didn’t have the heart. And he didn’t have the ability to beat Joe Joyce because he hasn’t been put in that situation before.
“When you want to gamble, why make that jump when you’re not ready? You’re thrown in because they wanted to do a pay-per-view originally, and they wanted a big fight, and everyone believed he could win, and they believed in the hype.
“All he’s [Dubois] been doing is knocking over people in easy fights. At some point, you have to make that jump.
“Unfortunately, the matching has been so poor that they never gave him a Bryant Jennings or a Lenroy Thomas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p55Vlp7R3k
“That was the perfect fight for Joe Joyce, Bryant Jennings, and Daniel has just boxed at the English title level,” Hearn said.
Everyone knew going into the fight with Joyce that Dubois completely lacked in the quality experience required for him to do the job.
Dubois didn’t have the prerequisite experience to be inside the ring with a talent like Joyce.
The guys that his management had fed Dubois were the type of soft opposition that you’d see from limited domestic-level fighters.
What’s really sad is that now that Dubois has lost, he’s likely to continue to be matched against fighters that stunt his development.
Hearn: Fighters say Dubois 100 percent quit
“You have to listen to the fighter’s opinions, and the fighter’s opinions are that he [Dubois] 100% quit,” Hearn continued.
“He sat on his knee, he looked the referee in the eye, and he let him count to ten, and he never got up. Fighters are very special people, and to them, what he did was unacceptable.
“To be a great fighter, you’ve got to be extremely tough. To be a great fighter, you don’t look the referee in the eye and let him count to ten when you get put down from a jab.
“It’s not his fault that he didn’t get the experience and that he wasn’t brought through properly,” Hearn said of Dubois. “He got put in a fight because everybody believed the hype that he was the real deal.
“He can come again if he wants to because it comes back to the body language I saw. What I saw was not good signs that he has what it takes to fight the big-level heavyweights.
“He can come back, fight for the English title,” Hearn continued. “Fabio Wardley against Daniel Dubois.
“It’s a good fight. No one would have fancied before because he [Dubois] was bowling everyone over.
“Now everyone is going to look at Daniel Dubois like he has a significant weakness. The reality is, Daniel Dubois got hit by nothing from Joe Joyce, really, other than a jab. That was enough to make him quit,” Hearn said.
It’s academic that Dubois quit against Joyce, and he didn’t want anymore by the time he took a knee in the tenth.
The telltale signs were there by the ninth when Dubois stopped punching and begin to get lit up by Joyce.
Charles Brun was surprised that Dubois’ corner didn’t pull him out after the ninth round had ended because that was the perfect opportunity to get him out of there to save his dignity.
Dubois was no longer punching back at Joyce, and it was painfully obvious that he was going to quit in the tenth. For Dubois’ training team to leave him out there with him looking like that, it was a mistake on their part.
Joyce is ready or Oleksandr Usyk
“I think so,” Hearn said when asked if Joyce is ready to face Oleksandr Usyk. “Joe is getting on.
“When you watch Joe Joyce fight in the first couple of rounds, my mates, who don’t know boxing, say, ‘Who is this geezer?’ But they don’t understand is, he’s tough as old boots, his engine is unbelievable, and he boxes really well.
“Joe is a strong, strong, tough man. Dubois is a puncher, and he hit him with everything he had. He didn’t even blink. So Joe Joyce is a handful; he’s going to be very difficult to beat.
“But he’s also 36 or something like that, so he’s got to go. Sam [Jones] wants him to go. They don’t want him to defend the British title. So if I’m Sam and the team, I’m looking a the WBO.
“If that belt comes up, I might be put in a position to fight Oleksandr Usyk for the vacant title. They should take that 100%. He’s boxed him before in the WSB.
“Usyk is probably going to box Joe Joyce’s earholes off, but Joe has got to what he does in coming forward. Joe is a big lump. Joe has got to keep trying to beat him up, pressure, pressure,” Hearn said.
You wouldn’t expect to tell it straight in discussing a potential fight between Usyk and Joyce. Yeah, Usyk got the better of Joyce in a five-round fight in the World Series of Boxing in 2013, but a lot has changed since then.
Joyce weighed only 230 lbs back then, and he very green in going up against Usyk, who had just captured a gold medal in the 2012 Olympics. Usyk looked beaten up by the end of the fight in the fifth, and he was lucky it was a short fight.
At this point, Joyce will likely batter the smaller 33-year-old Usyk and beat him up to the point where the fight will need to be stopped.
What we saw in Usyk’s recent fight against Dereck Chisora last October is a fighter that is too weak, too small, and too limited to compete against big heavyweights.
Hearn: Warren and BT sunk a fortune in Dubois
“Everything was against him [Joyce] last Saturday. “You’ve got Frank Warren and BT,” Hearn said.
“They sunk an absolute fortune in Daniel Dubois because everything they were doing was resting on this young man, and that’s why they made the mistake of pushing him a little bit too fast before he was ready.
“But for Joe, he was the opponent. He was walking out first. They didn’t want Joe Joyce to win; you could see that after.
“It was a massive win for him, a massive win. One judge gave Daniel Dubois the first five or six rounds, so they were up against it. I’m delighted for him. He’s very unassuming, Joe, isn’t he?” said Hearn.
That’s got to be tough for Dubois’s management and training team, as he seemed a ‘can’t miss’ blue-chip prospect, but he clearly wasn’t ready for the moment.
Dubois looked like he lacked in the most basic boxing fundamentals, and it was troubling to watch. It would be a good idea for Dubois to change his training team and go with some proven coaches to help him work on the flaws that Joyce exposed.