By: Sean Crose
“Eddie Hearn has diarrhea of the mouth,” Bob Arum tells Fight Hype. “He can’t stop talking and he doesn’t think.” Arum is responding to Eddie Hearn essentially blaming him in large part for the highly anticipated heavyweight title fight between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua falling through. The two fighters, who are represented by Hearn and Arum respectively, were supposed to meet in Saudi Arabia this August, with the winner of the bout being declared the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. An American arbitrator subsequently ruled, however, that Fury would have to have a third fight with former WBC heavyweight titlist Deontay Wilder by September.
That ruling put the Fury-Joshua fight down for the count. Now Fury will be facing Wilder once again this summer while Joshua is all but set to face Oleksandr Usyk as his next opponent. “We specifically had a section (in the contract for Fury-Joshua) talking about the arbitration and talking about the possibility that the arbitrator would order him to fight” says Arum. The veteran promoter then goes on to blame Hearn for Fury-Joshua falling through. “Eddie Hearn was the guy who screwed everything up,” Arum says in the recorded interview.
“The Saudis,” says Arum, “were happy to pay a tremendous amount as a sight fee. Eddie got greedy and he said not only pay a bigger amount and take all of the television and everything.” According to Arum, this needlessly complicated things…and also slowed things down. “I truly believe that if it had just been a site fee,” Arum says, “we would have signed it, we would have announced the fight, and the arbitrator if he felt the way he did would have given Wilder some damages but wouldn’t have enjoined the fight.”
Arum admits in the interview that everything is now being viewed through the lens of the present, which has a way of making things more clear. Still, it’s obvious in the interview that Arum feels Hearn isn’t handling the fallout the right way. “Eddie should shut up,” he says, “and stop blaming other people. Instead, he would be well advised to shut his mouth and look in the mirror.” With both Fury and Joshua going their separate ways, it’s uncertain if and when they’ll ever meet in the ring. There’s also the big question now as to if and when an undisputed heavyweight champion will emerge again.
