Eddie Hearn says he will blow up the biggest fight in British boxing rather than let it be announced for New York.
Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua have both signed, and both have their tune-ups behind them. Fury stopped Mariusz Wach in Thailand on July 24. Joshua was floored twice in the opening round by Kristian Prenga in Jeddah before stopping him in the second. What is left is a venue fight, and it is getting ugly.
Reports point to Madison Square Garden on November 20. Hearn says the contract does not allow it, because Joshua made him write in a clause requiring the fight to happen in the UK.
Speaking on The Punch Podcast, Hearn described being leaned on by the money.
Everybody wants to do the fight in New York apart from Anthony Joshua and me. We are under a huge amount of pressure and we are being told by Turki Al-Alshikh and those guys that Netflix, in particularly, really want to do the fight in the US.
It’s like, “we are partners, we are paying a lot of money, you have to understand that we need to put the fight in where we feel is, commercially, the best place.” I don’t agree with their arguments, but I am not paying the money.
He then said the other side had written asking to announce New York, and that he refused.
I promise you, if they announce that fight without an agreement in place to change the venue, there will be no fight and we ain’t bluffing. We feel really strongly that this fight should be in the UK.
His stated tactic is to price the move out of reach.
We kind of want to say, “well, if you want do it in America, you have got to pay us all of this money to change,” because we are not really bothered about the money. We want it in England.
Dana White has said publicly that TKO, which owns WWE and UFC and runs Zuffa Boxing, did the venue and television deals for the fight. Hearn has separately rejected letting TKO attach itself to the promotion, saying he will not hand a role to his biggest competitor. Hearn wants Wembley.
