Eddie Hearn says Dana White has no one to blame but himself for how nasty things got between them while trying to put together the upcoming Tyson Fury vs. Anthony Joshua fight.
For months, the promoters have gone back and forth through interviews and public appearances arguing over White’s involvement—or lack thereof—in the highly anticipated fight now happening on Dec. 11. In the end, Hearn took a victory lap on Wednesday when White skipped out on the first press conference for the event but that
doesn’t mean the two sides are suddenly on the same page.
Hearn says none of the ugly rhetoric had to happen if White and Zuffa Boxing had just come to the table for a negotiation before everything spiraled out of control.
“What do you expect me to do when it’s a breach of the agreement?” Hearn told The Stomping Groundon Thursday. “Just go, ‘Oh these guys are coming into boxing, I suppose I better just lay down and let them walk all over me and tickle my balls.’ No, obviously not. I’m going to turn around and say f*cking no way, son, not on my watch. Are you f*cking serious? Everything that they did made me fight harder.
“Really what they should have done and I told SELA this originally. What you need to do is tell Dana White when he speaks just to say, ‘I understand contractually we can’t be involved in the event, however, Turki Alalshikh, Netflix, I think would like us to be involved in the event so what I’m going to do is sit down with Eddie and Turki and we’ll talk about it and try to find a solution.’ That’s it. I probably would have had that meeting and just gone ‘Sweet, we’ll find a way.’ You expect me, the way we were disrespected, to allow that? No way.”’
Hearn promises he was more than willing to sit down and discuss how exactly White and his team could get involved in the Fury vs. Joshua fight but that never happened.
Instead, Hearn believes White just wanted to bulldoze his way into the event because he’s partners with Saudi money man Turki Alalshikh and the situation only escalated from there.
“We can talk, we can get over things,” Hearn said. “We can find a way that’s good for everybody. But when you come out and you goad me and you disrespect me and you want to breach a contract without even having a chat, it ain’t going to play out like that.
“There’s an arrogance, they’re control freaks, they don’t like it when things don’t go their way.”
With the fight now official, Hearn is moving on but it remains to be seen if the burnt bridges can ever be rebuilt.
“They think you can just walk in and take over,” Hearn said. “It’s not going to play out like that.”
