Matchroom promoter Eddie Hearn took a few minutes to talk to Fight Hub TV about what it’s going to take to make huge heavyweight showdown between Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder.
Hearn on where he left off in the talks for a potential Joshua-Wilder fight:
“They said ‘oh we’ll take the Dillian Whyte fight if it means the Joshua fight.’ I said ‘ok, well let’s talk about that.’ Wilder made it very clear he wants 50/50 in the Joshua fight, which is not gonna happen. So once he said that we had the Parker fight there, we said ‘look, we’ll deal with the people who want the fight.’
“This guy Wilder, he talks about ‘I’m willing to fight anybody, I’ll fight them all’ — have you ever made an offer, or a serious offer, to Joseph Parker, another world champion? He says he wants all the belts, he wants the one champion. [Did he make an offer to] Joseph Parker, no. Have you ever made a serious offer to Wladimir Klitschko when he had the belt, or Tyson Fury? No, you haven’t. Have you ever made an offer to us, to fight Anthony Joshua? No.
“So how serious can you be and how keen to unify this division if haven’t even made any serious or considerable offers to the champions? Can’t be that serious. And we could make the Joshua fight [with a snap of the fingers] against Wilder, if he was just serious. Or if he was, you know, sensible. But we’re doing our thing, we’re going for a belt and then we’re one away, and hopefully — listen, Ortiz might be it. I don’t think [Ortiz wins] but that, at least, is the first time that Wilder’s been in a proper fight.”