THERE WAS A catharsis to watching Joseph Parker beat Deontay Wilder from pillar to post in Saudi Arabia on the Saturday before Christmas.
It was nothing against Wilder who, behind his often brash ‘Bronze Bomber’ persona, has always seemed a decent fella.
And it wasn’t even because Limerick’s former world champion Andy Lee trains Parker and, in shocking the boxing world, bolstered his already burgeoning reputation as a coach.
It was instead gratifying because, after seven years across which the prospect of a fight between Wilder and Anthony Joshua was teased relentlessly, the whole thing was conclusively blown to smithereens. Wilder versus Joshua was dead and the stakeholders who stood to make millions from it had instead made gobshites of themselves.
And that includes the two protagonists who actually mattered but will now never trade leather.
With the quality of modern-day heavyweight boxing fairly thinly spread, the fact that the professional careers of Wilder and Joshua have overlapped for 11-and-a-half years and yet they’ll never meet in the middle will always be a black mark against both of their legacies.
Both former beltholders boast extraordinary courage by ordinary human standards, of course, but they fall short of the standards set by their forebears for the simple fact that neither ever quite had the balls to smoke the other out.
For the bones of a decade in which they were two of the world’s three leading heavies, each was too disturbed by the prospect of losing to their transatlantic rival to force the fight into existence.
When they both finally signed over Christmas to fight in the spring, their prospective meeting was no longer such a daunting prospect for either man: the 38-year-old Wilder had spent one round in the ring in two years and, before that sub-three-minute destruction of Robert Helenius, he had taken a couple of pummelings off Tyson Fury. Joshua would have been mad not to fancy his chances. But this was equally true of Wilder given that, until Joshua’s one-sided Christmas victory over Otto Wallin on their shared Saudi card, the Englishman had appeared partly broken by his back-to-back defeats to Oleksandr Usyk.
For all we know, we could have been staring at boxing’s first ever 0-0 draw. But we’ll never know, because Joseph Parker didn’t care much for Wilder’s spring plans. He put the American, and the Joshua contract for good measure, through the shredder.
It was up to Eddie Hearn to pick up the pieces and rearrange the heavyweight picture. With Fury and Oleksandr Usyk tied up in an undisputed meeting scheduled for 17 February — a fight which could yield anything from a rematch to the retirement of one or both men — Joshua suddenly had nobody to fight in 2024.
Parker himself was the obvious candidate on merit but Joshua had already soundly outpointed a far greener, more gun-shy version of the Samoan-Kiwi on a forgettable night at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium five years ago. As such, the Andy Lee-revamped Parker is probably still one signature win short of commanding a commercially viable rematch with ‘AJ’.
Caught between a rock and a hard place with his flagship fighter, Hearn did two things he’s good at: he improvised, and he ate his own words without hesitation.
Back in July, Hearn said of Tyson Fury’s then-upcoming boxing match with UFC convert Francis Ngannou that Fury had turned down “the most important fight in boxing” — against Oleksandr Usyk — “to fight an MMA fighter who’s never had a [boxing match] before in his life, in Saudi Arabia.
“We’ve got to be honest”, Hearn added. “Tyson Fury cares about one thing only: the money.”
It is any wonder that he and Fury have always gotten along so famously behind the scenes?
In fairness to Hearn, he had changed his tune on Ngannou as soon as the former UFC heavyweight champion had come within a round of bringing the contrived plot of Creed III to life on his ring debut and shocking boxing’s best big man. And in fairness to Hearn, a boxing match between Joshua and Ngannou began to make sense as soon as the Cameroonian mixed martial artist dropped Fury in the third round, not to mind when the judges’ controversial verdict was read out in Riyadh.
With Joshua unable to square off with Wilder, Fury or Usyk, a knock-around with the still-novice Ngannou was an absolute tap-in. The Saudis, infatuated with Ngannou and already fond of previous guest Joshua, immediately laid down the capital. Backs were scratched, wheels were greased and, on 6 January 2024, Joshua-Ngannou was born at a healthy 56 million pounds: roughly 40 million of them (€46m) for ‘AJ’ and 16 million (€18m) for ‘The Predator’.
Eddie Hearn’s little miracle received virtually none of the same backlash as Fury-Ngannou before it.
Whatever about Ngannou being catapulted into 10th in the World Boxing Council’s rankings (feck it, why not), he has in a solitary fight broken the mould containing a slew of bluffers from the worlds of mixed martial arts, YouTube and OnlyFans who have tried to make a fist of things in the squared circle.
The 37-year-old has been roundly embraced by boxing’s base not only for putting the increasingly tiresome Fury on his ass but separately for putting the will-they-won’t-they culture of modern heavyweight boxing to shame.
Ngannou has bounded straight in from the Octagon and in his first two boxing matches, he’ll have taken on half of the best heavyweights of the past decade. Deontay Wilder fought only one of them (albeit three times) in 47 fights, while Fury and Joshua have conspired to avoid each other across a combined 65 outings.
The only heavyweight to have previously taken on Fury and Joshua back to back was a man who went by the name of Wladimir Klitschko, who did so 17 months apart. Once the first bell sounds at Riyadh’s Kingdom Arena on 8 March, Ngannou will have done it inside 19 weeks. (The great Oleksandr Usyk, meanwhile, will by 17 February have embarked on a four-fight run of Joshua x2, Daniel Dubois and Fury, and so deserves to be untangled from these crosshairs).
There are a couple of caveats to Ngannou’s courage, granted. For one thing, he doesn’t have a years-long boxing reputation to protect and so, aside from his health, he has nowhere near as much to lose in the ring as a Wilder or a Fury or a Joshua. For another, he is set to have pocketed from two boxing matches somewhere in the region of 10 times his total earnings across a 14-fight UFC career.
Mixed martial arts famously changed Ngannou’s life when he was a homeless immigrant in Paris at the age of 26. But by the time he’s finished with boxing, he will have set his descendants up for life.
And fans of his new sport will continue to embrace him for as long as he puts his clout where the money is.
That the money is doled out by Saudi Arabia seems less of an issue now than ever before. In a rare defence of the most diseased sport from this boxing writer, its stakeholders are hardly alone in having brazened out the once common questions about moral scruples, human rights, and a willingness to become a geopolitical play-toy.
Even sport’s most famous remaining bastion, Rory McIlroy, has begun to acquiesce, although it’s becoming increasingly clear that his discomfort lay not with the origin of golf’s cash injection but with the arm into which the cash was injected.
And whether Saudi Arabia’s incursion into world sport was designed to launder the country’s reputation on a global scale or, as seems more likely in retrospect, to simply gain more soft power in the Gulf region, professional boxing has assisted its efforts with unrivalled compliance.
It speaks to the sport’s abysmal levels of function that Saudi Arabia is now unabashedly championed for achieving such feats as organising a fight between the world’s no.1- and no.2-ranked heavyweights, or getting Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren to physically shake hands (the pair had astonishingly never met in person until they bowed together before their new overlords).
Saudi Arabia’s role in these apparent triumphs is trumpeted not only by the people who stand to gain directly from them. It might sicken your shite to learn that several respected boxing reporters from Britain and the USA have begun to refer to Saudi minister and boxing dealmaker, Turki Al-Sheikh, as ‘His Excellency’. Somewhere in the Gulf, Daniel Kinahan wipes away a tear.
It should be stressed that boxing in general enjoyed a marquee 2023, its lighter weights replete with meetings of elite, long-term rivals and the unifications of several divisions across both male and female codes. And the reality is that this ongoing Saudi takeover will not hinder the sport’s revival within the mainstream sporting consciousness but help it along.
Much in the same way as the world will watch football’s inevitable World Cup in Saudi Arabia in 2034, its eyes will be drawn to Riyadh on 17 February of this year when Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk decide between them who is the best heavyweight of their era. The same will happen again when one of Anthony Joshua and Francis Ngannou earns first dibs on the winner three weeks later.
Perhaps only by the time that the Saudis move beyond sport, and when our grandchildren boot up old YouTube footage to consume these generational fights at venues filled with millionaires and dignitaries, will there exist a sense of shame about it all.
‘At least Zaire and Manilla had a bit of atmosphere about them,’ they’ll think.