I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Total Boxing with Tris Dixon – the next chapter in a journey that began 30 years ago when I covered my first amateur fight.

That first assignment sparked a passion that would ultimately become my profession. Three decades later, boxing remains as fascinating, unpredictable and compelling as ever, and I’m as driven as I’ve ever been to tell its stories.

As the former editor of Boxing News, I’ve experienced almost every side of this sport. From world title fights to the small halls, from the gyms to the corporate offices, and from organised crime to the politics and business that shape boxing, I’ve written about it all. I’ve been fortunate to meet extraordinary people, witness remarkable moments and gain an insight into a world that never stops giving you something to talk about.

For much of that time, I’ve done it for other people, other publications and other brands. Now, it’s time to build something of my own.

When I launched The Boxing Stack on Substack three months ago, my priority was simple: get started, create great content and challenge myself creatively. I wanted to see what I could build by doing things my way, and the response has given me the confidence to take that next step.

That’s why I’m rebranding as Total Boxing with Tris Dixon.

This is about more than a new name. It’s about building a distinctive boxing media brand that reflects my experience, my perspective and my passion for the sport.

You can expect more content, more opinion, more debate and more interviews, alongside the quality writing and broadcasting that have always been at the heart of my work.

Plans include new content both on Substack and YouTube, too.

I have plenty of ideas I’m excited to bring to life, new subjects I want to explore and a long list of people I want to sit down with. I’ll still be taking you ringside and covering the fights, but I also want to take you beyond the ropes and into the stories, personalities and issues that make boxing what it is.

Most importantly, I want to give you something different. My perspective, my access and my experience, delivered with honesty, curiosity and a genuine passion for the sport.

Thank you to everyone who has supported The Boxing Stack and helped me get to this point. Your support means more than you know, and I’m excited to take you with me on what comes next.

This is Total Boxing with Tris Dixon. This is my next chapter. And I’m only just getting started.

The announcements have come thick and fast today and everyone is claiming to be making it.

Team Joshua, Matchroom, manager Freddie Cunningham, promoter Eddie Hearn and, of course, Anthony Joshua, as well as PR agency Soapbox, have all announced that Tyson Fury will fight Anthony Joshua on December 11 at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff.

We knew it, but it hadn’t been confirmed.

“WE DID IT,” Hearn triumphantly wrote on social media. “Forever indebted to the U.K. public for their support of @anthonyjoshua. We couldn’t have got this over the line without you.”

Well, that’s all well and good. Hearn has gone public many times stating they were fighting to have the contest in the UK, despite many powerful forces attempting to lure the bout towards New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Then there was the equally triumphant announcement from Turki Alalshikh, who said: “For 15 years no one has been able to make this fight. Back in April, I said that any announcement would come from me. I can now confirm that Fury vs. Joshua will be coming to the UK, as I promised British boxing fans. The time for talking is over.”

Let’s not mention that 15 years ago fight fans were talking about Tyson Fury fighting David Price and Anthony Joshua was still an amateur, let’s not talk about the replies blowing up Turki’s X account (far from congratulatory, I will say), and let’s not talk about it being a ‘British fight’ if we are to believe Hearn, who told IFL today: “TKO started getting involved in the Netflix deal, Turki Alalshikh, Netflix, they all wanted to do the fight at Madison Square Garden in November… Everybody wanted the fight in America.”

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Ryan Garcia smoked Conor Benn in two rapid rounds in Las Vegas on Saturday and while Garcia was a significant favourite, not many saw it as being a quick rout.

Benn got caught early and often and had no answer for Garcia’s speed. But it was a huge event, a massive build-up and, on the face of it, a commercial success.

What does Garcia-Benn mean now for the fighters and the sport moving forwards.

How good is Ryan Garcia?

Look, take away the social media following, the failed PED tests, the zany behaviour, the derogatory stuff he’s said and all of the crazy and when you focus on the fighter, he’s really bloody good. It helped that he was not in against a world-class fighter on Saturday but he appeared levels above Benn. Garcia’s electric left hook is both beautiful and ferocious. His right hand is the shot that buckled Benn. His movement kept him out of harm’s way. He was a top amateur. In short, he’s really bloody good. Does he have the minerals for when the going gets tough, as it did against Tank Davis? Can he be consistent and condemn performances like that against Roly Romero to the past?

Of course, there will rightly be an asterisk next to the Devin Haney fight, but when he’s good, he’s exceptional. At 28, he’s in his prime – particularly with his tools – but he needs consistency and activity.

Where did it go wrong for Benn?

When the first early left hook landed. I’d love to know what Benn thought then. He was taken to hospital as a precaution but Benn did what he could. I’d suggest he did all that he could. I can’t volunteer anything he should have done differently. The gap in class was too great. One doubts he will stay at 147lbs, though, and that might have been his biggest mistake.

Was the stoppage correct?

I thought it was bang on. The bloodlust of a fan is strong and I can see why many wanted a couple more clean shots. But that Benn did not complain about the stoppage and that he still wound up in hospital indicated he did not need anything else to land to determine the outcome or to validate Thomas Taylor’s intervention.

Can Conor Benn become a world champion?

At 147, it looks very tough. At 154lbs, it looks impossible. At 168, I can’t see it. Is he too small for 160lbs? I’m not sure. One could see him getting the chance for a belt at some point, at some weight, but there are some hard, hard fights out there. And, as things stand, who do Zuffa have at those weights for him to fight? Perhaps there could be a bout at 160lbs against Denzel Bentley in London for the WBO belt? I could see that. But I’m not convinced Benn wins.

But the likes of Janibek, Boots, Vergil Ortiz, Crawford (who I’m sure came up on a DAZN graphic as a future foe, along with Canelo!), Adames, I don’t make him better than and 80/20 underdog in any of those.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see him stay in the “attraction” bracket. You can’t tell me him against Kell Brook and, yes I’m saying it, Conor McGregor, wouldn’t do big business.

He’s 29. I can’t see a rebuild, an eight-rounder, a drop down in levels. Zuffa will surely want to maximise his audience and that list of possible opponents won’t include anyone who is not a big name.

What next for Ryan Garcia?

We are led to believe he has one more fight left on his Golden Boy contract, so could that be the Teofimo Lopez bout? Lopez was making his presence felt at ringside on Saturday and Garcia said that was the fight he wants. With Teo signed to DAZN and Garcia to GBP, it’s do-able. The money and the storyline might still lie with the Haney return, but that’s not going anywhere, either. You’d assume Garcia could still make 140lbs but the big fights for him are by name, not by division. Was Tank watching?

What does Benn need?

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You can’t please all the people all of the time and, with that in mind, promoter Eddie Hearn has his supporters and his detractors.

I like Eddie. We are a similar age. I probably was the first person in boxing to interview him, or certainly to write a significant feature about him.

We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, but damn, I respect his hustle. I was there when Prizefighter kicked off at Bethnal Green. I was there when David Haye steamrolled Audley Harrison.

I’ve been with him messing around with people in Las Vegas, taken pictures of him and Don King when they first met, have been to his family home – Matchroom HQ – countless times, and I’ve spoken to him in Vegas, New York, Atlantic City, Kiev, Germany and probably half a dozen other places – including all around the UK.

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DUBLIN – When you cover a fight, you want to live and breathe it. You want to see it everywhere. You want to know it’s captured the imagination.

If it’s a fight in London, you want to see adverts on t…

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So Saturday night, ringside at the O2 Arena, marked my final show as a member of the BoxingScene/ProBox TV staff.

I’ve been working for Garry Jonas for about four years, and the role’s been challenging and rewarding.

It would be easy to list the fights I’ve covered, the places I’ve been and the interviews I’ve done since I’ve been there, but that wouldn’t take the story on much. That said, for those wondering, being in Japan for Naoya Inoue-Luis Nery was an obvious highlight.

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LONDON – Social media erupted after Moses Itauma was stopped in the ninth round by Filip Hrgovic on Saturday and Itauma’s world changed overnight. He is now 14-1 (12 KOs), and I’ve seen talk about hype trains being derailed, asking whether the 21-year-old should retire and comments that “Itauma is already done at high levels.”

Let’s take a more measured look at what happens next, and why Saturday night went the way it did.

Where did it go wrong?

The eighth appeared to be the most pivotal. While there were signs beforehand that Itauma was feeling the pace, he invested an awful lot into the eighth and – with hindsight – he pretty much emptied the tank. The eighth might have been his biggest round, aside from the second-round knockdown. He was really troubling Hrgovic to the body and it seemed the big Croat could be on his way out. But Hrgovic weathered the storm and started the ninth with a startling freshness that an exhausted Itauma couldn’t match.

Can Moses Itauma still be a world champion?

Undoubtedly. We wanted to see him tested for a reason, and to see the kind of resolve he had. And he showed us plenty of courage and spirit to finish the fight on his feet. Of course, lessons must be learned, but I have no doubt they will be. Part of the fact that Itauma reads a lot for his own enjoyment shows he is keen to learn, and no doubt he will be trying to work out how to fix what went wrong. But Hrgovic insists Itauma is a world champion in waiting, as too does David Haye. Remember, he had a similar experience in defeat to Carl Thompson and had to rebuild. He did that. He didn’t change teams. And Itauma is only 21.

If they had a rematch, what would happen?

There is no rematch clause, but if they had an immediate rematch in a few months, I’d favour Hrgovic. If Itauma had a couple of fights and went rounds, got the experience he needs and learned to pace the rounds, then I’d lean towards Moses.

What does it say about the culture of boxing?

Well, for the sake of balance, I have seen plenty who are quick to make sure Itauma is not written off. But goodness me, the landscape can be toxic. On Facebook, I saw a post asking whether Itauma should retire. In one comments section, I saw one that started, “Itauma is already done at high levels…” and I’ve seen many say that he is a spent bullet because he can’t go 10 or 12 rounds. How people think a 21-year-old can’t get the fitness in the future to do 12 rounds is beyond me. If he was a nervous fighter, who clearly invested a lot of energy in his emotions and controlling the fear you get on fight night, I’d understand it. But he can improve his gas tank. He can also learn to pace himself, not to load up on every shot, how to hold and become a ring general without being a destroyer.

What is the damage?

On the night, I thought it was a far more grave and shattering outcome than I do now I’ve had time to digest it. That was probably seeing him reeling around the ring a few feet from me, unable to protect himself as Hrgovic hacked away at him. I liked the video he put out. “Fucking good fight,” Itauma called it, before saying he wanted to get back in there and get back to work.

Sure, there is work to do, psychologically and physically, but nothing that is unattainable. If his lights had been turned out by one more huge shot, maybe things would have been different. But we had questions about him before, and no one is saying anything about his heart or courage under fire.

Don’t get me wrong. These days are not going to be easy for Moses. But one day, he might well look back on this aftermath and believe it’s the making of him.

What does it mean for boxing?

I mentioned pre-fight how Moses was starting to ‘blow up.’ DAZN certainly would have wanted him to win, and so did Queensberry. Frank Warren made no secret of that. But the fact that he lost is not the end of the world and, a glance online at some of the astronomical numbers going up on YouTube and socials shows plenty of people are paying attention. And when you look at the heavyweight division, it opens it all right up. I’d like to see Hrgovic against Sanchez, Kabayel, Dubois again, and Wardley. And I’m fascinated to see what happens next for Itauma. What happened on Saturday was not catastrophic for the sport.

Who deserves the blame?

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Jake LaMotta’s reputation preceded him.

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I really like this weekend’s bout between Rolly Romero and Teofimo Lopez.

Romero is an underrated fighter, though he looked overrated when he came up against the marauding Isaac Cruz, and Teofimo is, well, he’s Teofimo. He’s also moving up in weight for the challenge and, skill for skill, is the better fighter.

Rolly has a weird, wild-card energy to him.

Sometimes he sounds thoughtful and considered, sometimes monosyllabic and monotonous.

Lopez is rarely anything but colourful.

In the ring, both have dazzled and both have been in fights that failed to deliver.

In the category of the former, watch Teo against Vasiliy Lomachenko or Josh Taylor.

For Rolly, watch maybe Manuel Jaimes or Anthony Yigit. That said, Rolly is ungainly, unorthodox, but clearly a handful.

He’s also benefited from a decision here or there, and you could say the same about Teo.

All things considered, it’s compelling.

What is far less compelling is the undercard.

Sure, Benjamin Johnson is a nice prospect. Yes, Yoenli Hernandez appears to be going places and Gary Antonio Russell has some traction in the US market, and he takes on WBA interim 122lbs champion Victor Santillan.

But even for me, I’d be going out of my way to want to catch up with all of that the next day.

I don’t want to say it’s a stinker of a bill, but what am I dying to see on it?

And even with the main event, there’s no way I’d consider either staying up for it or setting my alarm to wake up and watch it live.

Veterans to The Boxing Stack will know that, on Sunday morning, the dogs will be let out at around 7am. I will do a few laps of the garden after them, come inside, put their bowls down, make a coffee, and sit on the sofa to enjoy the fight ‘as live’ several hours after it’s finished – while staying off my phone to avoid spoilers.

Of course, I can’t be sure there is a fight to be made at present worth setting my alarm for, but I digress.

But if this is what I feel about the bill, what would those less-than-hardcore fans feel about it?

And I think this is where DAZN is going wrong, in part, and before I get to that, I want to talk about what they are doing right.

Firstly, they are consolidating talent, be it promotional entities or individual boxers, like Lopez and possibly Devin Haney, and stables including PBC, Top Rank, Golden Boy, Queensberry, Matchroom, Salita Promotions, MisFits and MisFits Pro.

Secondly, they now have an appealing price point for fans like me, who subscribe to their Ultimate package, and an audience that has more than a passing interest in boxing.

But this is where things get a little murky.

With all of this talent, how do we get bills like this Saturday?

And if you’re trying to attract new fans, the value proposition has to be extended into real value, onto bills that are at least three or four fights deep. And I don’t mean world title fights. I don’t mean the biggest names. I mean good fights, featuring boxers people are interested in or invested in.

This, in part, is another part of the problem. We, in the media, often hear that there are no storytellers left, but much of what is produced and wanted by platforms is clickbait content in the pursuit of views, hits and numbers.

But the real investment from fans comes when they care.

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There is a big story unfolding in boxing, but it seems like the ending has been written and we are working backwards.

The end result is Tyson Fury fighting Anthony Joshua in Madison Square Garden on F…

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Waking up on Sunday morning to the news that Lee Reeves had been taken to hospital after his fight with Gary Cully was an extension of a nightmare that you never fully recover from.

Reeves had lost a punishing fight in the 10th round at the 3Arena in Dublin, and there were worrying scenes immediately afterwards.

It is around these times that Chinese whispers start to form, but it is also during these times that you can’t help but recall where you were when news of a serious injury trickled through to you.

Fortunately, and so fortunately given the many thousands of fights I have covered, I have never been present for a ring fatality. But I remember every near miss, every whisper, every concern, as though it were yesterday.

For instance, in 2008 at Bethnal Green, someone tapped me on the shoulder.

“Gilbert Eastman’s collapsed in the changing room.”

Eastman had been stopped in the eighth round by the very good Sam Webb, and I won’t forget the feeling that coursed through my body when I was told the chilling news.

Eastman recovered. I think he became a bus driver, but he never boxed again.

A year later, I knew Z Gorres had been badly injured in his win over Luis Melendez at the House of Blues in Las Vegas. Just because Gorres won on the cards didn’t mean he didn’t merit a full examination. I saw him looking groggy. I saw him missing steps. I saw him finding it difficult to have his arm raised by the referee, and I saw him collapse as he tried to step between the ropes.

He spent months in a Las Vegas hospital and was eventually flown home to the Philippines.

Then there are the nights when you think something has happened, only to be relieved it has not. Case in point was Manny Pacquiao getting drilled by Juan Manuel Marquez in their fourth fight in Vegas.

I was only a few feet away and I saw Pacquiao motionless. Still. Perfectly still. And I thought the absolute worst.

It was a miracle to me that nothing tragic had happened.

On Sunday night, Queensberry Promotions, who hosted the show in Dublin and staged Cully-Reeves, issued a statement saying that Reeves was “critical but stable.”

The thoughts and prayers of the sport are with Reeves. They are also with Cully, who wrote on Instagram: “... right now my thoughts are with Lee and his family, just praying for his full recovery.”

We all are.

It also serves as a reminder that, beyond the rumours, gossip and politics that dominate boxing conversations, there are moments when none of that matters.

(Photo by Leigh Dawney/Queensberry Promotions)

A GoFundMe has been set up for Lee and you can contribute here https://gofund.me/bb671f645

The rest of this week’s notebook – including Joshua-Fury, Matchroom and MMA, Dalton Smith, Frank Sanchez, Moses Itauma, and more – is for paid subscribers.

Subscribe to read on.

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Usually, when two fighters compete in what are dubbed semi-finals before eventually facing one another, it’s supposed to be a taste of what’s to come.

It’s a commercial, an advert. The boxers exhibit their wares and the masses are lured in.

They’ve seen fighter A destroy fighter C and fighter B decapitate fighter D, and A and B will now fight. Everyone is excited.

Yet what we were left with after Friday, as Tyson Fury apparently limped by a 46-year-old Mariusz Wach, and last night, when Anthony Joshua rose from two calamitous first-round knockdowns against Kristian Prenga, is anything but as appealing as it once was.

Should we eventually get to the point where Joshua, who turns 37 in October, and Fury, who is 38 next month, fight later this year, many will watch. But they will know it is not a clear indicator of who would have won in their primes, when it really mattered.

Like Lennox Lewis obliterating Mike Tyson, Floyd Mayweather negating Manny Pacquiao and Kell Brook besting Amir Khan, you will watch thinking what might have been.

We should have had an AJ-Fury trilogy by now. They should have made more in three fights than they will in one.

They could have done one in Old Trafford, one in Wembley and the decider on the moon (you get the point).

For the sake of going over old ground, again, about how this fight is too late, let’s look at what we might have in front of us if they box in 2026.

Joshua was expected to steamroll Prenga. Thirty seconds into the fight, he was on the canvas courtesy of a right uppercut. Joshua was all at sea. His legs had ‘gone.’ His brain was scrambled.

Prenga, at one point, seemed to slam him to the deck, and then he put a now weary and wary Joshua over again.

The Fury-Joshua fight, which we’d been told was on tap if they won their fights, looked more of a pipedream than ever before. Eddie Hearn was sweating bullets in the front row in Jeddah.

However, for those wondering whether AJ would emerge on his shaky legs, and for those carefully observing the creaking Olympic champion from 14 years ago, the focus fell on Prenga as the second round started.

He looked strangely reluctant in the second. Sure, Joshua created some space to work and put some distance between them, but Prenga had not been perturbed by those attempts earlier. He had swamped Joshua, hitting anything that moved.

His change in approach was curious.

As the second progressed, Prenga ate a little more leather here and there before he gulped down two huge rights. The third right put him down hard and awkwardly as he crashed onto his back in a heap on the ropes.

It was all over.

Now we won’t, I doubt, ever see the full fight from Thailand (it was likely filmed for a glossy montage on Fury’s next Netflix series), but footage has, of course, done the rounds. Fury guzzled on Wach’s right hand a couple of times, wrestled and jostled with the big Pole and even kissed him on the head during one exchange.

What he didn’t do was wipe out Wach, who in 2024 was obliterated in two by a then 9-0 Moses Itauma.

What Fury didn’t do was look anything close to his best. That is not just from the clips but from the reports from those there ringside.

What neither he nor Joshua did was look like either of the world’s leading heavyweights any longer.

What they did prove, as I suspected might have been the case a while back, is that when they do finally meet, the scales are probably as even, in terms of who wins, as they’ve ever been.

Not because they are both at their best. But because the question is now who has more left.

Mileage

Joshua can likely add another concussion from last night to what must comfortably be well into double figures.

He was rattled a few times in the amateurs, clouted by Klitschko, dropped, hurt and stopped by Andy Ruiz, and had the same thing happen against Daniel Dubois. Those 24 rounds with Oleksandr Usyk wouldn’t have done him many long-term favours, either.

He’s boxed 34 times as a professional. He had a hard and fast amateur career and has sparred through long, hard camps.

Fury had the three-fight rampage with Deontay Wilder. He was turned into a spinning top in the ninth round of the first Usyk fight, dropped heavily by Steve Cunningham and Neven Pajkic, and was all at sea against Francis Ngannou and, more concerning from a neurological standpoint, has been doing it since he was a child.

Legs and neurology

“It’s their legs,” former Boxing News editor Matt Christie, messaging me about the two British heavyweights, said last night. “Neither seem to be able to use them correctly anymore.”

It’s an old phrase, that a ‘shot’ fighter’s legs have gone, and I get it, but I’m convinced – after looking into this for years – it’s neurological.

Fury and AJ would have run their miles. They would have done their squats. Their leg lifts and running times might not be far off where they were at their best. They may even be right up there.

But the legs ‘go’ when the brain has taken too much.

Then it doesn’t matter what you’ve squatted, how many times you’ve leg-pressed or how many hills you’ve sprinted up. If you get hit in the head and you no longer have the same capacity to hold a shot, your legs show the observer what has happened; they don’t show how it happened.

The legs betraying them are a sign of a far greater problem.

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Here we are. It’s Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury fight week.

No, they aren’t fighting each other. Not yet.

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The immediate aftermath of the confirmation that Ryan Garcia would defend his title against Conor Benn sparked so many early questions, and none of them were particularly related to what might happen in the ring.

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There were very few signs that Joe Joyce’s best days lay ahead of him before he travelled to Russia to fight this weekend.

There, in an 11th-round stoppage loss, the 40-year-old Putney man was beaten for the fifth time in six fights, with Artem Suslenkov becoming the latest to profit from the big Englishman’s career capitulation.

That surely has to be it for Joyce now.

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Everything changed when I had kids.

I know that sounds a little broad, but it’s another way of saying times change.

In the 1990s, I’d think nothing of staying up all night for big boxing events in the USA.

I remember hosting a pay-per-view watch party at my parents’ house for Bruno-Tyson II, really the first UK PPV, charging my pals a couple of quid each and watching them all fall asleep before the main event.

I was glued to it. Then, as time goes on, you stop pulling the all-nighter and start going to sleep at around 9-10pm, but set your alarm for your best guess of the ringwalk time, so around 4am.

Once you have kids, however, neither of those are particularly realistic because you don’t want to be moody or exhausted the next day.

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Well, once the kids start growing up, it is not fights in the US that you have trouble staying up for but even the ones in the UK.

The dreaded 11pm ringwalk has become a non-negotiable ‘no’ for me unless it really is a big, significant or likely thrilling fight. Or I’m covering it. I no longer want to lose half my Sunday or break a decent sleep pattern. And staying up is a challenge and a chore, especially with so many terribly thin undercards that do so little to keep you invigorated, let alone the horrific, never-ending 45-minute breaks between fights when everything that has to be said about the upcoming fight has since long-been said.

These days, I get way more enjoyment out of staying away from my phone early on a Sunday morning, putting the previous night’s fight on and watching it “as live” with a coffee.

So yes, the struggle to stay up for fights in the US has been replaced by the struggle to stay up for shows in the UK. I’m happy to admit that.

I’m sure, by this point, you all know where this is heading.

Unless there is a minor miracle and I feel particularly spurred on at the last minute, there is no way, given where I am in my life now, that I’ll watch Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua if they walk to the ring at 2am.

Maybe that doesn’t make me a hardcore fan but it does, in my book, make me sensible. The idea of sitting in a stadium in the bleak English winter at 2am is also less than desirable, as is the journey home. Hell, the short walk upstairs after the fight is too much to imagine right now.

My outrage is not palpable. I don’t feel particularly strongly about it, but when Eddie Hearn said if people will stay up until 11pm they will stay up until 2am, he’s wrong. My wife and kids might have stayed up for Fury-AJ at 11pm. No way will they watch at 2am.

I don’t reckon any of my casual fan friends would stay up until 2am, either.

I put a poll out on X yesterday asking whether 11pm or 2am made a significant difference.

From 630 votes in a few hours, 73 per cent felt it changed things, and there were almost 30 comments.

Here were some of the points highlighted…

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Sports Book Reviews
@SprtBookReviews

US boxing audience at 9pm or 6pm probably almost identical. Boxing fans will seek it out while casuals won’t. Pandering to US market makes no sense.

John
@seagull1974

Can you imagine how cold it will be in that stadium at that time?! In November. I’ll watch it at home but won’t attend. Last saw AJ-Klitschko at Wembley in the cheap seats and it wasn’t great.

Jamie Ellison
@jamieellison29

I’d have been there if it was at a normal time. Won’t even bother watching live on Netflix if it’s on at 2am. I’ll catch it in the morning.

Liam Russell
@LiamRNumeroUno

If the US audience wants to watch it, they will. Same way we all did for the US fights we wanted to watch! The fighters themselves should be adamant they want the best for UK fans as well. Obviously won’t happen but it’s a UK fight!

Joe Andrews
@TotallyBetting

Yes. I have two young kids and am too tired to be up at that time.

The England game killed me the next day. 11pm is late enough. 10pm is fine. If someone else in another country wants to watch, they can go out of their way like everyone else does if they want to watch a US or Australian fight.

Heavyweight Father
@Heavyw8Father

It’s the fucking trains that’s the problem.

Rob Gee
@robgee_1

With the fight being past its best, I’m debating whether to go watch it live as it is.

There’s no way I’m going to watch that live, in the winter, in the UK, in the middle of the night.

Ian Mason
@Ian__Mason

I would attend in person if it was a normal ring time. I’m not even sure I’ll watch it live with the middle-of-the-night start.

P/T
@Toms_PaulT

If I’m off the next day, 2am is fine by me.

Huckleberry
@RightJDH

Always confused me why boxing has to be so late. How can you expect to grow the support when fights are scheduled for when kids are in bed and casuals asleep?

What legit reason is there for it (or any main event fight) not being 8pm prime time on Saturday?

Phil Cron
@cronny91

Normal time for a UK fight, and yes it makes a huge difference as the precedent it sets is disgusting and we are being taken for a ride. All British fight fans need to boycott this. They are two British fighters fighting. The Americans don’t even care about it.

Osmosis28
@Osmosis28

Rather it had happened 10yrs ago, not interested at all now...

Bladesman
@AdySmart1889

11pm a lot of people will watch it. 2am people won’t bother. They will realise this fight doesn’t actually mean anything, five years too late and nobody cares about either of them.

THELUFCDIARIES
@THELUFCDIARIES

No, hardcore fans will watch it at any time.

Tim Rickson
@TimRickson

I’d watch at 11pm, defo not staying up till 2am.

It is a mix. Some people won’t care. Some people will protest. Some will take their medicine and watch the next day. Others will get very, very rich.

Of course, we have been told that it is Netflix who want the broadest possible market and that means making it as easy to consume for the Americans as possible. But I’d contend if they’re going to watch it at 5pm, they’re going to watch it at 2pm. Touché. The fight isn’t being moved for boxing fans. It’s being moved for casual American viewers, yet this isn’t a fight that casual American viewers have been waiting years to see. And they’re really taking a punt on Americans being fussed about a fight that many British fight fans have long since grown weary of and fatigued by.

Fury and AJ both have to win their knockovers later this month first, obviously.

But it’s funny, after all this waiting, it’s finally apparently time to settle it with these two when, actually, they can’t even settle on a time.

We are about 17 days away from Anthony Joshua’s return to the ring in Saudi Arabia against unheralded Kristian Prenga, and do you know what is on the undercard?

No, me neither.

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I remember learning from some top-class newspaper sub-editors about the importance of the cover of a print product that would go onto the shelves.

I remember learning about the positioning of words, headlines and pictures.

Of course, some of that came from the college course I completed in Radio and Journalism and some from my degree, but much was from being on the desk with some great journalists at the Hampshire Chronicle.

It was a crash course, for me, in what mattered, what sold, and they weren’t always the same.

I suppose it’s the same now with the front end of a website, but it was also the case when I was in ‘the chair’ at Boxing News.

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When Claude Abrams departed Boxing News at the end of 2009, I had a few of my own ideas, and had come up with something of a mandate about how to put my own stamp on things.

Before I knew it, we were being tasked with a mandatory redesign, bringing out new publications and God knows what else – while embracing the advent of social media, YouTube and podcasts etc. – with a staff the same size as when the only concern had been a weekly print issue.

I digress.

Claude would occasionally share sales figures with me, and you could see the spikes when a Ricky Hatton or a Joe Calzaghe was on the front. They were considerable, in the region of 10-15 per cent per issue.

But times were changing and print media was starting to toil.

And with Hatton and Calzaghe gone, I was looking closely to see how we could match or surpass those spikes, and three fighters came to mind: Amir Khan, David Haye and Carl Froch.

Haye and Froch have been good friends since the amateurs, and Khan was not the divisive figure he apparently became, and at different points I tried different things with them.

Anyway, I remember putting Khan on the cover before his US debut fight with Paulie Malignaggi.

The fact it was Khan, fighting in New York against a recognisable name, I thought made it a banker. But it fell jarringly short and made me realise that Amir, as good as he was with the media, was not the next guy.

Froch, meanwhile, toiled on ITV4 or Primetime and had not broken through or across the divide from the hardcore. He also wasn’t the outspoken beast that he’d later become!

I felt I really pushed Froch through the mag, not because I liked him – although I did – but because he deserved it.

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It was Aesop who was quoted as saying: “Every truth has two sides; it is as well to look at both before we commit ourselves to either.”

Errol Spence is known as “The Truth,” and he presented his version of it in a near two-hour Art of Ward sit-down with Andre Ward that was released this week via All the Smoke.

It was interesting, enlightening and entertaining.

Spence covered a multitude of topics, from his start in boxing to the infamous Floyd Mayweather spar, from the Terence Crawford camp and fight to why he still wants to box.

Ward was his usual poised self, and the two riffed through some 120 minutes.

In an era of clicks and hits, there is an art to long-form storytelling — something journalists and writers often hear is no longer done — where context becomes everything, and the journey is often enjoyed by the interviewer, the subject and the audience. They settle in for what is to come; they don’t brace themselves for a barrage of headlines and gotchas.

They are taken on a journey, with inevitable peaks and troughs.

The problem is, there are outlets out there waiting to clip 20 seconds from a two-hour interview and die on a hill by posting it to thousands of people.

It happens all the time, and there is little you can do to protect yourself from being “clipped.”

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As subjects turn serious and you reach those high and low moments – and emotions come into play – a paragraph or two might be lifted and churned out on a social page without the backdrop of what came before or after. The context has gone, and it is rough being on the wrong side of it.

Both sides can’t help but feel like trust has been broken by a third party. Someone was overhearing their conversation, and the Chinese whispers and gossip then set the internet on fire.

For an interview, you set up hard questions; it’s a skill and a process. You tease the response out. The problem then is others don’t bother with the set-up, the execution or the follow-up. They grab a line, a moment, a headline, and send that one item out to an audience that wants to be outraged and have their knees jerked instantly in reaction.

Long-form is an art, but digesting it the right way is a different form of enjoyment. It’s not about instant gratification. It’s about the investment of time, the understanding and the payoff. You don’t get any of that with the clickbait stuff. That is not art. Sure, it works for those outlets, but it often harms meaningful relationships and sells quality work disastrously short.

I remember a long sit-down with Chris Eubank Jr that was very easy to set up at his home in Brighton a few years ago. We did around 90 minutes, and Eubank was great.

A day or so after the interview came out, someone who handles his PR sent me a piece that appeared in The Sun newspaper. Eubank and I had discussed his erratic teenage years, and that was pretty much all they took — nothing about who he had become, how he’d turned his life around – which was all discussed, or the pressures he’d felt as a teenager.

I felt I’d been thrown under a bus. And so did they. The only problem was they felt that, by giving me the time, that I’d contributed to the throwing.

Of course, it wasn’t like that, and while we’ve made amends, neither side has forgotten it.

But I saw the lines from the Spence interview go far and wide.

There’s clearly context behind the split with Derrick James, and clearly Spence has more to say. He didn’t quite bury his old coach, but he also admitted he was ill and injured through different camps, and that could explain certain things he discussed, like the lack of sparring for the Crawford fight. Either way, their relationship eventually went a legal route.

But there were many moments in the interview when you could have butchered the content.

I could see the headlines as they talked.

“Errol Spence told Bob Arum where to stick his $250,000,” without talking about how he felt once he’d met, got to know and understand Al Haymon. There’s context and balance to what actually happened.

As it turned out, Top Rank’s quarter-of-a-million-dollar signing bonus offer was not the be-all and end-all to Errol’s father, who preferred Haymon’s pitch about longevity, retirement, a good life after boxing, protecting fighters over time, and warning Errol Jr about the pitfalls of fast money and fame.

It was all interesting. None of the long-form needed to be bastardised.

There was no need to take “The Truth” and try to make your own fiction a reality.

Spence was raw. He was likeable. You wanted him to open up even more. You wanted him to operate in that safe space but, alas, he said more would follow once he retired. Even so, anyone watching that would be invested in his future and — unless they were Australian — rooting for him to succeed against Tim Tszyu in Sydney at the end of July when he returns from three years out of the ring.

That type of content is so much of what is needed now: building meaningful profiles and stories rather than generating clicks about Mount Rushmore this, blind-rank that, and winning fantasy knockout tournaments between fighters that those being asked about clearly know very little about or care about. Clicks and hits have come at the cost of getting to know the guys and girls the public are supposed to care about.

While Aesop’s pearl of wisdom started this reflection, it is George Orwell who will conclude it. “In a time of universal deceit,” he wrote, “telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

And, to that extent, Errol Spence clearly had a lot to say. He also has a lot more left in the basement. “The Truth” will eventually set it free, but when he does, it would be helpful for him if it wasn’t broken down into little pieces and misrepresented.

So, I was doing some cardio yesterday (humble brag?), and as I sat on my rowing machine, I got to thinking.

Well, that was dangerous.

As the minutes went by, I thought of all these crazy things in boxing: the possibilities, the eventualities, what might happen and what could happen.

Unlike my rowing, it was all gas, no brakes.

Of course, a lot of my current thoughts in the space concern the old guard vs. the new guard.

The old guard is the standard promoters, the traditional ones, so familiar we can call them Eddie and Bob, Al and Frank, and Oscar, and maybe you’d include Ben in there.

On the other side, the names are so mainstream you can do something similar with Dana, Nick, Ari and, of course, Turki.

The sport seems to be at a tipping point, but I appear to have been saying that for years. Here are some of the random thoughts I thought I’d share.

• If Zuffa Boxing triumphs and everyone else goes away, will the others literally be put out of business, or do we think Zuffa actually acquires some of these entities, tape libraries, film rights, etc.?

• Don’t quote me on this, but is boxing now like The Sopranos, where each season gets more heinous villains?

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