By Steve Bunce
ALL the elements were in place for the latest Saudi boxing extravaganza.
Upstairs in the shadows, the boss was lurking, downstairs on the top table, old and bitter rivals were laughing and backslapping and, in the audience, Gary Stretch, was wandering about, posing for pictures and smiling. It’s a brand-new world of boxing.
In the bowels of the building, in the coldest corner on earth, I had been given an area to interview the four main men in the latest Riyadh jamboree.
The biggest of the big lads, Francis Ngannou never said a word about the frosty air. He has lived through ice ages. Anthony Joshua never took his hat off. Eddie Hearn and Frank Warren talked about “parking egos at the door”. In many ways, that could be the magic trick going forward. The days when a big fight required six months of talks, insults, transatlantic calls and long nights of thrashing out contracts might just be over.
It was, even by our modern standards, a true scrum at the actual conference to announce the fight. I have never seen so many people with so much equipment. Stretch bounced between camera and camera; Barry Jones had queues 10-deep waiting for his latest. By the time the conference finished, the quartet at the center of attention had been inside the building for about six hours. They had been relentlessly pinballed from room to room, upstairs, down lifts, along corridors. It was a work of genius to fit everything in. This is all new, trust me.
There were days and weeks when the boxing press pack waited for the call, waited for a word to set us off in hopeful motion. This happened in Las Vegas and Atlantic city; we waited for a call and then scrambled, about 15 of us and we were happy with 20 minutes in a fighter’s company. It shaped the way I talked to fighters, forever apologizing for having to ask them to sit down in fight week. That philosophy is ancient now.
Audley Harrison once delayed talking to the press by a day. We got to the arranged point, at the right time and were told it was being pushed back a day. We were in the middle of nowhere at a luxury retreat in Cornwall. I came home.
A week before the latest Saudi bash in London, I had been in a soulless room at a bad hotel near Toronto airport with Lennox Lewis. Our rendezvous was to do with a BBC project. Lewis shook his head when I reminded him what it was like covering his big fights and then told him what modern boxers must do to sell their fights. Ngannou and Joshua probably did more with the media on one day in London at the start of this week than Lewis did in six or more fights. He just shook his head. “It’s the promoter’s job to promote,” he said. Not today, that has changed.
Lewis did exactly what was required during the week of his big fights. He was not known as being particularly reluctant with his time – he did what boxers did. He did something at the start of the week with the written press, then the conference and finally the weigh-in. The talking was well and truly over by about the Monday night. We had our two or three stories ready and that was it. Nobody expected a sit-down with Lennox on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Not a chance.
Both Ngannou and Joshua will be fully available once they land in Riyadh. And that will include the obligatory late, late-night session at Turki Alalshikh’s palace for stuffed dates and photographs. Warren and Hearn, once frozen enemies, have bonded at these late-night gigs. The pictures of Hearn, Warren and Alalshikh all smiling and holding hands are golden.
Over 25 years ago, I was in Yemen with Warren and the Yemeni sports minister insisted on walking everywhere with Warren hand-in-hand. Nothing ever came from that mission and that is a pity; a Naseem Hamed fight in Yemen in about 1997 would have been an amazing event. That one slipped away.
In London this week, the special chicken pies were once again served. I stood by the bar with Spencer Fearon watching people getting their pies. It was a major heavyweight boxing conference and I swear I had no idea who most of the pie eaters were. There were hundreds of people, most with a piece of kit and a piece of pie. Fearon and I just shook our heads.
There was a rumor that Sly Stallone and Michael Buffer were backstage. It might have been true – it is hard to imagine what the Saudi gang will dream up for a promotional film. The apocalyptic Walking Dead tribute for Day of Reckoning was immense. What next? A Rocky theme is not a bad idea. Can you imagine Clubber Lang, Rocky, Apollo Creed and Ivan Drago all in a coffee shop discussing their fights and in walk Ngannou and Joshua. That is the face-off I want to see. And just as the tension builds, in walks Lennox and Mike Tyson and George Foreman. “Who ordered the oat milk latte?” shouts the barista, who just happens to be Wladimir Klitschko.
Sly was there last time and he took me to one side to tell me that Oleksandr Usyk was like “granite.” I told Usyk and he seemed pleased. So, Gary Stretch is back at last, Sly might have been in the building, the Saudis have come close to getting every heavyweight of note on the planet under one roof. This business is mad.