Boxing, like the protagonists, is a perennial survivor, and its silent return will be welcomed back warmly
Before coronavirus turned the world on its axis, myself and 70,000 boxing fans would have found ourselves seated at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Saturday night, with Anthony Joshua defending three heavyweight world title belts against Kubrat Pulev under the lights and open sky.
Soon after, there was to be the scheduled transatlantic trip to Las Vegas for the trilogy heavyweight title clash between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder in mid-July. Not now. The mega-money fights have been pushed back to a time when social distancing is relaxed and large crowds are comfortable attending arenas that host tens of thousands again. There are some fights which simply cannot be considered behind closed doors.
Instead – I can reveal – we return first under the banner of Frank Warren within broadcaster BT Sport’s largest studio in Queen Elizabeth Park, East London, on July 10 and July 17. Both are Friday nights and chosen around the Premier League football schedule. The prosaic return of five fights will be headlined by relatively unknown boxers in Brad Foster and James Beech, with 50 or so essential people in attendance.
For Beech and Foster it is a huge moment. History-making even. Foster, 23, will be defending his British and Commonwealth super bantamweight titles, while Beech, also 23, is undefeated in 12 fights. Both, of course, will have to return a clean bill of health with negative tests for Covid-19 before they can enter the boxing bubble four days before the event: tested first for Covid at the point of entry, then locked down in a sealed-off hotel in east London, tested again on the day of the weigh-ins, and then able to fight.
Through the necessity of behind-closed-doors events, and finances, July, August and even September will be a showcase of up-and-coming fighters, none of whom have made a name for themselves yet, with silence inside the arena allowing spectators on television to hear every punch to the body and head. In the four events that have already taken place in Las Vegas, under 88-year-old Bob Arum’s Top Rank Boxing and on ESPN, there have been times when you can even hear the fighters breathing.
Eddie Hearn will return on Saturday, July 25, outdoors on the lawns of his 15-acre headquarters in Brentwood, Essex. Hearn’s ‘Matchroom Square Garden’ will feature four weeks of action culminating in a fight between heavyweights Dillian Whyte and Alexander Povetkin. This fight will be the exception to the current rule, with Sky Sports Box Office attempting to dip its toe into the waters with a pay-per-view event. The reason? To cover the costs of the estimated £1 million to put the four events on. With the public hungry for fights, the pay-per-view numbers will be an interesting experiment.
Warren, meanwhile, has told me that he applauds Arum for “getting boxing up and running” in the United States, but admitted that it has been a long and complex procedure to get over the line, and is really just “philanthropy for the sport” because there is no money to be made in the process.
“With the safety factors, housing the boxers and their teams in a hotel, and the testing procedures, it’s very expensive,” Warren told me. “But the sport has to remain relevant, so we needed to get it back on television.” The Boxing Board of Control will agree separate guidelines and protocols for both Hearn’s outdoor and Warren’s indoor cards.
What was poor, in my mind, is that that neither BT Sport nor Sky Sports picked up Arum’s fights that were shown on ESPN in the last two weeks, when fans were crying out for new contests. Instead they flooded us with nostalgia and great fights of the past during lockdown and – worth putting to bed – the endless enthusiasm for the fatuous return of Mike Tyson at the age of 53, 15 years after he quit on his stool against Kevin McBride in Washington. Forget it. Done is done. ‘Iron’ Mike had his time.
Arum’s cards might not have had the major names but nonetheless it was the first global return of the sport and the opening fight on June 9 was Shakur Stevenson, a brilliant southpaw boxer who is already drawing comparisons with Floyd Mayweather at the same age and who is on a collision course with Leeds’ Josh Warrington.
The sport, like its protagonists, is a perennial survivor, and its silent return will be welcomed back warmly by boxing’s aficionados.