PROMOTER Eddie Hearn still hopes to snare a world title shot for former Anthony Joshua opponent Dillian Whyte. He is in negotiations with WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder to match him with the Brixton heavyweight.
Whyte is likely to have a contest in America on August 19. โHeโs going to box on the Crawford-Indongo card. Ticking over really, waiting for a big fight,โ Hearn told Boxing News.
Hearn has a had furious argument with Wilderโs representative Lou DiBella, sniping at one another publicly on social media. โThereโs been a lot of stuff with Dibella and stuff like that. Mad. Lou snaps at the silliest things. I think he gets a lot stick and he felt I was tarring him with that same brush. He just accused me of making Twitter offers when I hadnโt. Iโd made three firm offers, and I just said you havenโt been involved with those and he went mad. Mad. Heโs still going mad at me. I spoke to him last night, on email about something else. Heโs still got the raving hump. Heโs still going on about it. Maybe because I havenโt been stained by the game yet. I will be one day. I think itโs funny and I think itโs great for building fights and Iโm tweeting him, thinking this is great, and heโs tweeting thinking Iโm insulted with this person. For me itโs just way of building fights, getting people excited. Itโs just another another dynamic,โ Hearn said.
โThatโs what Iโm thinking. Whereas theyโre thinking itโs personal and Iโm taking a liberty. So he might take a swing for me the next time Iโm in New York.โ
The more fundamental problem with making Wilder-Whyte comes down to money. โNo official rejection on the last [offer] but heโs made it quite clear on his social media posts that he wants seven million,โ Hearn said. โThe problem is we paid a lot of money for Charles Martin, but it was Anthony Joshua fighting for the world heavyweight title. This is Dillian Whyte challenging Deontay Wilder. But I think in Deontayโs head he should be getting more than Charles Martin. The scenarios are different.โ
Since then the pound has also drastically devalued after the vote to leave the European Union. It makes it significantly more expensive to bring foreign fighters over here. โTheyโre not going, โYouโve got to pay me less because the poundโs gone down. Once we were going to make Kell Brook against Jesse Vargas over the period when the pound died. It was 300 grand, was the difference in that swing and all of a sudden it became impossible to do,โ Hearn noted.
While problems mount with bringing Deontay Wilder to the UK, the unified WBA and IBF heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua could be going to America. Read on HERE.