Eddie Hearn has confirmed that a contract has been sent to Dillian Whyte for a fight with Anthony Joshua this summer.
Whyte has been skeptical about the proposed rematch, claiming that Hearn, his own promoter, was using his name as pretence with AJ gearing up for a mega-money fight with Deontay Wilder in December this year.
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“The fight’s just collapsed, there’s been no communication on the fight,” Whyte told White and Jordan on talkSPORT on Friday.
“It’s just weird, it just never seemed real from the start. AJ’s in a position of transition and they don’t want him to have serious fight, but they’re trying to keep his name good and make it look like he’s trying to have big fights…
“We’ve had one three-line email about the fight, no conversations at all. We’ve been trying to contact Eddie Hearn for one month, multiple phone calls and emails, they’ve just gone missing.”
Whyte continued: “Listen, I’m no warm up fight for no-one, I’ll give anyone hell on the night. One advantage I have over anyone fighting AJ is I’m able to get in his head mentally, I’m able to offset him and I’m able to drag him into a scrap because we have that energy and we have that history.
“Just that alone makes me a massive danger for him and they don’t wanna risk the Wilder fight.”
However addressing Whyte’s claims, AJ’s promoter Hearn says that the fight is there to be signed off, should The Body Snatcher be truly interested.
Speaking to Boxing Social, Hearn said: “They say no contact has been made but they’re happy to accept the offer, so they’ve obviously received the offer.
“Obviously what’s happened is that that’s the fight I was asked to make.
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“We made an offer to Dillian Whyte four or five weeks ago and they came back and the exact wording was ‘absolutely not, this is unacceptably low’ and basically nowhere near a number that they’d accept.
“I funneled that back to AJ and the team and we said, ‘okay, we’ll move onto another opponent’. That was it.
“Now they come out today out of the blue and say ‘we accept that offer’, right when we’re about to announce or are in final negotiations with another opponent.
“We went straight back to Dillian and said ‘can you confirm that you accept that offer’ and they said ‘yes, we do’ and I said ‘fantastic’, so we’re getting them a contract.
“They’ll have a contract today, we need to move at pace but if they’re serious that fight can 100 per cent happen.
“It’s still the fight that AJ wants for August 12th so again, if Dillian is serious, that fight is going to happen.”
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Asked how quickly things would need to move, Hearn added: “This contract is not going to be difficult. It’s a set purse, there’s no travel or obscene media obligations – he’s going to have to attend the press conference and get whatever tickets he wants and things like that, but it’s pretty simple.
“We don’t want to come back with a million things on the contract. We do have to move at pace because it’s seven weeks on Saturday, but I’d love that fight to happen and hopefully they’re real.”
