British promoter Eddie Hearn says a rematch between his fighter IBF/WBA heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua and Wladimir Klitschko is possible next depending on whether there’s interest in a second fight from the boxing public and whether Wladimir wants the rematch.
The way that Wladimir, 41, has been talking lately, the rematch was a dead certainty, but Hearn has not seemed nearly as excited about a second fight between Joshua and Klitschko for some reason.
Hearn said that if it were up to him, he’d like to move Joshua in another direction towards a fight against British heavyweight Tyson Fury. That’s a fight that might not be able to happen in 2017, because Fury has to get his boxing license back from the British Boxing Board of Control, and he has a lot of weight to lose. As of last week, Fury still looked very fat with a great deal of weight that still needs to be dropped before he can even consider fighting Joshua.
“I’ll remind the governing bodies, they havethe biggest star in world boxing as their heavyweight champion,” said Hearn to Fighthype.com in response to the sanctioning bodies wanting Joshua to fight mandatory challengers. “We have to fight mandatories. We’re not going to avoid them. We’ll have to deal with them at some time, but you have to remember the size of Anthony Joshua. It’s not just about the belts. If there’s a demand for a rematch, it could well happen,” said Hearn.
I don’t know if you can say that Joshua is a world boxing star the way that Hearn is talking. Joshua looked terrible against Klitschko, and we don’t know what kind of ratings it brought in on HBO and Showtime in the States. To be “the biggest star in world boxing,” as Hearn calls Joshua, he would need to bring in HUGE ratings on HBO and Showtime. If he doesn’t bring in big ratings, then you can’t say he’s the biggest star, because we have other guys that bring in big ratings in their fights in the U.S, such as Sergey Kovalev, Andre Ward, Gennady Golovkin and Saul Canelo Alvarez.
I seriously doubt that Joshua brings in big ratings when he’s not fighting a big name like Klitschko. Joshua’s fights against Dominic Breazeale and Eric Molina didn’t bring in big ratings in the U.S. So even if Joshua’s fight against Wladimir does good ratings, it could be due to Wladimir rather than Joshua. Wladimir has had his fights televised in the U.S for any years now off and on.
Joshua is a big star in the UK, but not a star in the U.S right. Hearn can label Joshua as the biggest worldwide star in boxing, but for him to prove that, he’ll need to try and monetize the different countries for PPV for Joshua so that we can really see if he is what he claims him to be. Joshua is not a PPV star in the U.S at this time, so I have to say that he’s not the biggest star in world boxing. I think Joshua is only the biggest star in British boxing.
“If Wlad wants it, no problem,” said Hearn about Joshua-Klitschko rematch. ”If there isn’t or if Wlad doesn’t want it, it probably won’t happen. So we’re not going to make a decision on our next fight until we know what Wladimir Klitschko wants to do. For me, after a fight like that, even Arnold Schwartzenegger said on his Twitter he’d love to see a rematch,” said Hearn.
Wladimir has already made it crystal clear that he wants a rematch with Joshua. Wladimir says he feels has nothing to feel about his performance, because he doesn’t feel like he came out a loser. Wladimir notes that he had Joshua badly hurt in round 6 after knocking him down, and he made the mistake of not trying to finish him. Wladimir said he didn’t try and go for the knockout because he felt it was his night.
Personally, I can’t blame Wladimir one bit for not trying to knock Joshua out, because he was dominating him so easily from the last 30 seconds of round 5 through round 10. Wladimir looked like he had made a decision to try and box Joshua to win a decision instead of going after him to knock him out. There was less risk involved in boxing him than it would have been to shoot for the knockout.
