WBO heavyweight titlist Joseph Parker continues to press his case for a world heavyweight unification with Anthony Joshua, the WBA and IBF boss.
“I want to test myself against the best, so this is a fight I really want,” New Zealand’s Parker declared. “David Higgins is doing everything possible to make it happen and he seems to be flushing out AJ’s real position. If he won’t entertain a 35-65 split, then it’s pretty obvious he doesn’t want the fight to happen.
“It seems like I am such a big risk that he needs more than 65 per cent – and a rematch clause.”
Parker’s idiosyncratic promoter David Higgins, who drunkenly interrupted his own press conference with Hughie Fury earlier this year, is insisting that he won’t take less than a 35-65 split with Anthony Joshua, while drawing up a shortlist of people he believes have put Joshua down in sparring or competition, and also offering a £20,000 reward for anyone who can find footage of Parker ever being dropped.
“We’ve said all along that a 35-65 per cent was both fair – and our bottom line,” David Higgins of Duco Events maintained. “Now it seems that Eddie [Hearn, Joshua’s promoter] is pretty close to agreeing with us. That’s very encouraging.”
He continued, seemingly trying to goad the hugely popular Briton into a fight, “It’s no wonder ‘glass jaw’ Joshua doesn’t want to take a chance on getting in the ring with Joseph Parker – a genuine world champion who has never been knocked down at any level in his life.
“We’ve put a sizeable bounty out there for anyone who can produce evidence that Joseph Parker has ever been knocked down, and we haven’t heard boo from anybody. That offer still stands, by the way.”
