Frank Warren contends that Francis Ngannou—formerly the UFC heavyweight kingpin but utter boxing newbie—was the best available option for Tyson Fury on the calendar.
Fury, the WBC heavyweight champion, will be taking on Ngannou Oct. 28 in Saudi Arabia in a highly anticipated “crossover” bout that will be contested using professional boxing rules. The fight will go on their records but Fury’s title apparently won’t be at stake.
The announcement of the fight earlier this month sent ripples through the sporting world, in what will be the latest installment in the long series of fights pairing a boxer against a mixed martial artist in a boxing match. (The boxer, naturally, has historically won these events.)
For hardcore boxing fans, the fight perhaps was received more tepidly. While Fury-Ngannou figures to be a mammoth financial event, critics have pointed out that it is far from being a serious sporting contest. In Fury’s case, the issue is compounded by the fact that he was recently unable to come to terms with unified heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk (WBA, WBO, IBF) for the undisputed heavyweight championship earlier this year, despite multiple efforts. The two camps have levied contradictory accusations at each other with regards to the reason for the breakdown in negotiations.
In a recent interview, Warren adamantly insisted that his team genuinely tried to make fights with not only Usyk but also former champions Andy Ruiz and Anthony Joshua but were ultimately rebuffed by the other sides.
“What can you do?” Warren told SecondsOut. “We’ve been trying to [make credible titles defenses for Fury]. First of all, it’s got to make commercial sense. You know, you can’t have Ruiz saying you want $20 million and that’s the one coming over here, so that’s a dead duck. You also got a situation where fighting for the title doesn’t seem to be what guys want to do. Joshua would much rather—he just had a warm-up fight—would much rather go and fight a guy that Tyson has beaten, rather than fight for the WBC title on a 60/40 basis.
“Think about all the nonsense they come up with for excuses, you know? We went down that road last December, we wasted a lot of time on it. One person on the other side (Joshua camp) was honest about it, saying they never thought it was going to happen, [Joshua] never had a trainer at the time, etc.
“Had we known that we wouldn’t have wasted any time on it. What can we do? The fight everybody wants to see including us, including Tyson because he called it out and made the offer and they accepted, was Usyk. And they walked away. And they walked away because they thought they were walking away into better and bigger things. That’s why they did it. Now they are where they are and we are where we are.”
Sean Nam is the author of Murder on Federal Street: Tyrone Everett, the Black Mafia, and the Last Golden Age of Philadelphia Boxing.