THE world wants to see Anthony Joshua versus Deontay Wilder for all the major heavyweight titles. But in the meantime promoter Eddie Hearn is keen to get one of his other heavyweights in the ring with the WBC heavyweight titlist.
“[Wilder] has lost the plot at the moment. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s got a team of people around him that can’t pay him any money. We’re offering him a load of money and he thinks I’m an arsehole so he doesn’t really want to deal with me. But when he realises I’m paying him three or four times more than everybody else,” Hearn said. “But now I can put it on a plate, you’ve got Dillian Whyte, you’ve got Dereck Chisora, he might look at ‘Del Boy’ and go, ‘I’ll have Del Boy.’ Imagine Wilder against Chisora at the O2.”
“Or Brooklyn. If I get the visa,” Chisora quipped.
Chisora, after an extraordinary victory over Carlos Takam, is well placed for a major heavyweight fight. “He didn’t just win. He won in an epic fight. I think he has so many options now and it’s remarkable at this stage of his career,” Hearn said. “Takam’s a very good fighter, f****** tough. He would have walked through 90 percent of the top 15 in the world [on Saturday]. He was motivated he had a 10 week training camp. He knew that if he could beat Chisora he could talk about other big fights.”
“I’m not going to lie to you, I tried to take the centre of the ring [against Takam],” Chisora noted. “If I start moving my feet and get caught with anything clean, it’ll just drop me. So let me go on the ropes. So I used the ropes. Every time he opened up, I don’t want to trade with him, I’m going to catch 95 percent of his punches and I’ll just land clean shots basically. And that’s what I did. I was landing more to the body. I hit him a couple of times to the head. He didn’t budge. I was like, Jesus Christ, this is a long night.”
He absorbed a hellacious volume of punches but uncorked a tremendous knockout finish in the eighth round. “It was more emotional. Before I went through a lot when I was preparing for this fight,” Chisora said. “It was very emotional because I was reading everything and people were just writing me off. But the man upstairs, he didn’t write me off. He told me believe in yourself and all will happen.”
Chisora credits turning his life around with leading him to this victory. “I’m Born Again. I spend my whole time going to church and stuff like that. I’ve changed completely, done a 360 degree turn on my life. Things I used to do before I don’t do any more. I don’t drink anymore, I stopped drinking. I stopped doing so many things. When you find God things change in your life, so that was it basically,” Chisora said.
The win over Takam will be crucial for the next step in his career. “I see big fights for Del now in London. The Dillian Whyte fight [in 2016] was a very close fight with Del. I know everyone’s got their views, it could have gone either way. That fight could have turned everything if he’d won but this was a much bigger win I feel than what that fight would have been at the time,” promoter Eddie Hearn said. “If Wilder said I’ll fight Chisora but only in Brooklyn, I don’t think you’d have to ask Del many times. We’d put it on DAZN, we’d put it on Sky Sports Box Office, the money would be there for everybody.”
“That’s if I get a visa,” Chisora added cheerfully.
A further complication though would be that Tyson Fury, by his own account, is in advanced talks for fighting Wilder himself. Read on HERE.
