By Barry Holbrook: Eddie Hearn wants Tyson Fury to contact him to make the Anthony Joshua fight for the summer. Hearn doesn’t believe that Fury wants the Oleksandr Usyk fight next because the money isn’t there to pay him the $120 million asking price for it at Wembley Stadium, and his promoters have drawn a blank trying to stage the Fury-Usyk fight in Saudi Arabia, as they’d hoped.
Moreover, Hearn doesn’t believe Fury is keen on fighting IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Usyk (20-0, 13 KOs), realizing how difficult it would be for him at this stage of his career.
At 34, Fury’s legs are gone, and he’s become slow on his feet and mostly lazily throws a punch or two before grabbing his opponents. He’s become very ponderous and dinosaur-ish, and the quick-moving, better aerobically conditioned Usyk would be all wrong for the aging Fury, who, by the days, is resembling his chubby 58-year-old father, John Fury. That’s the wrong person for Fury to be, resembling going against a track star like Usyk.
So instead of making the fight happen with Usyk and accepting less money than he wanted, Fury is pricing himself out and will wind up fighting someone else next.
With the way Fury has become near-impossible to negotiate with, the chances of him fighting with Joshua are in the low 10%. You can argue that the only fighters Fury can negotiate with now are the fringe-level contenders, with whom he can get away with his “take it or leave it” offers.
“What’s happening is Tyson Fury knows how difficult the fight is with Oleksandr Usyk, and he has an amount of money in his head what he wants for that fight,” said Eddie Hearn to iFL TV. “That money isn’t achievable.
“If I’m Tyson Fury right now and I’m not taking the Oleksandr Usyk fight, I’m reaching out to us, and I’m making the Anthony Joshua fight for the summer,” said Hearn.
“They weren’t able to deliver the fight in the Middle East, so now they’ve got to come back at look at Wembley, which is completely impossible in terms of what Tyson Fury wants for that fight,” Hearn continued.
“Tyson Fury wants 70-30, but Alex Krassyuk came out and said, ‘We’re open to entertaining 60-40,’ but apparently that’s been rejected as well. The reality is, Tyson Fury is the bigger draw than Oleksandr Usyk, no question.
“Oleksandr Usyk has three heavyweight world title belts, and Tyson Fury has one. What should the split be? In a commercial world, which is totally irrelevant, which is what I found in the past trying to negotiate the undisputed fight, Tyson Fury should get the better split.
“If he wants the fight, if he really believes he wins the fight comfortably and makes history and creates legacy as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, he takes 50-50.
“If he thinks the fight is really difficult and ‘I’m only taking this fight if I get the right deal,’ don’t blame him for that, then he either finds a way not to make it happen or he tries to sit out for 70-30 or 65-35 or whatever he wants.
“So that is what is happening. I feel in this instance for Frank Warren and George Warren because there’s only a certain amount of money in the pot, and sometimes fighters don’t quite understand this. They want more money, they want this.
“This is the amount of money that is being generated for the fight. There’s nothing else. ‘Well, that’s not enough money.’ ‘That’s your value in the fight.’ ‘Well, I want more.’ ‘How?’ If a fight generates a 100 million dollars, that’s the money available to the fighters.
“If you want 100 million on your own, where do you think that’s coming from? So it’s all very well Tyson Fury saying, ‘I want 120 million or whatever I want.’ No one is prepared to pay it. You’ve tried. You’ve gone out to the Middle East and various countries and pitched that fight.
“You’ve blanked as far as delivering the deal. So now you have to decide whether to do it in Wembley or do you not do it all and fight someone else? I think it’ll be the later,” said Hearn.
