It took some time but a fight between Joseph Parker and Joe Joyce has finally been made, although here Parker details his excruciating experience in the negotiations to make this fight possible, pointing directly to Frank Warren as someone who essentially tried to exploit him.
“It was very tortuous to be dealing with Frank Warren and Adam Morallee and all their team,” Parker said on making the Joyce fight. “It was tortuous. Listen, if we shake someone’s hand on a one fight deal and you change to a three fight deal, then the contract keeps changing. How tortuous is that?! You know, you promise this, you promise that, all the sudden the contract comes back has changed.
“So I’ll only sign the contract if it’s the right terms and what we all agreed to. But when you agree to something and it keeps changing, why would I sign the deal?”
On the changes that were presented in the actual contract
“While I shook his hand for a one fight deal, Joe Joyce, then the contract came as a three fight deal. And then things like flights, accommodations — all these things that fighters are supposed to get, the wording in the contract, things keep changing, and we weren’t happy with the terms. I got my lawyer and my manager looking at it and it wasn’t something I was happy to sign...when you’re not happy you can’t go into a contract that doesn’t make sense for you.”
On Warren’s position that Parker could have tried to renegotiate the proposed deal if he wasn’t satisfied
“He was (nonnegotiable). He wouldn’t move, he wouldn’t budge. I tried to say ‘hey, listen, can we do this and do that?’ — wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t move. So he can say I should’ve talked to him and (I) could’ve renegotiated, he wasn’t willing to from the beginning. It was either take it or leave it, that’s the stance that we had.
“When I did the deal with Dillian Whyte, it was a handshake. When I did the deal with Joshua it didn’t take that long. Like the fight shouldn’t take that long to lock in.”
On if he has a soured relationship with Warren now
“No, it’s not frosty, this is part of boxing. It’s boxing business. If the business side of things was easier to deal with it would be great but everyone’s got to be happy moving into a fight and I’m glad that we’re here now. I’m glad that I’ve signed with Boxxer and Sky and they’ve allowed me to fight on BT. So they have my best interest because they’re not stopping the fight from happening because it’s a different network. And I’ve signed with them because they want to make me their fighter, not the B fighter like Frank was gonna make me.
“Frank didn’t care about me, ‘he’s the B fighter, he’s gonna come in and fight our fighters’ and he wanted me to get smashed up and move on.”
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