According to Dan Rafael of espn.com, a heavyweight title bout is close to coming to fruition between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury.
Rafael reported it after Showtime Sports President Stephen Espinoza on his weekly show called the Boxing Beat on ESPN+.
It is very, very close. There isn’t anything signed yet between Tyson and Deontay or their respective promoters, but it’s very, very close,” Espinoza said in an interview on this week’s The Boxing Beat, the weekly ESPN+ boxing news and interview show. “Whether it’s 95 percent or 99 percent, it is very, very close. I think we’ll have paperwork imminently and the plan is for a Showtime Pay-Per-View [card] — pair it with a really interesting fight. We don’t know what it is yet, but something that will definitely communicate that the fans are getting their money’s worth.”
“You have two big personalities like Tyson and Deontay. It’ll be a fun promotion because if there’s one thing those guys can each do it’s talk,” Espinoza said. “They’re two of the most entertaining guys in the entire sport, so I think not only will the fight be interesting but it’ll be a really fun promotion.”
“That was a disappointing one,” he said of Joshua-Wilder falling apart. “I know fans are disappointed as well, but I was pretty optimistic. I thought we were on our way to getting there.”
“That is arguably the biggest heavyweight fight since [Lennox] Lewis-[Mike] Tyson [in 2002] and even at that point it was at the tail end of Tyson’s career,” Espinoza said. “You’d have to go back even farther when you had two physically dominant, popular, charismatic heavyweight champions in their prime fighting each other. That’s one that we’re not going to let go, and I don’t think it’s going to take that much work to put it back together. Yes, there’s going to be some maneuvering to do it, but it can happen.”
