It is both mad and maddening that Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury are fighting.
I should rephrase that. I’m pleased it’s happening.
I am.
It is one of the three fights of the era remaining that we have not had, the others being Joshua versus Deontay Wilder and Wilder versus Oleksandr Usyk.
But what is maddening is just how big it is, in that it has never been bigger and yet the fighters have been on a downward trajectory for years.
There’s plenty wrong with the sport, as we’ve recently addressed, but one of the things that seems to be irreversible is for fighters to cash in at the end of their career, only then taking the bouts fans have dreamt of for years.
Yes, we saw it with Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson, we saw it with Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao, and more recently in the UK with Amir Khan and Kell Brook.
The thing is, the way it all works, the money and interest grows despite the fights not being what they would have or should have been.
Floyd’s right-hand man at the time, Leonard Ellerbe, would always point to the timing of Mayweather-Pacquiao and say it happened when it should have as it made more money then than it ever would.
I get it. It really is a checkmate argument.
