By Johnny Walker
WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko was given a harder than usual time by UK challenger Dereck “Del Boy” Chisora last Saturday night in Munich, Germany.
Klitschko won in a unanimous decision, but the fight was not without some real moments of intrigue, as Chisora showed a rock solid chin and a desire to keep pressing the champion until the final bell.
And given Chisora’s provocative actions before and after the fight, the champion has now found himself another rival that he loathes as much as Chisora’s UK counterpart, David Haye.
Chisora and Haye, who fought each other in a press conference brawl following last Saturday’s title bout, are “both cut from the same cloth,” Vitali tells the Associated Press.
“I saw everything from the podium. I thought I was in the wrong film,” Klitschko says of the scrap in which Haye belted Chisora in the face with a beer bottle.
“You can’t behave like this, neither in a sporting way nor as a person. It was below the bottom drawer.”
Klitschko injured his left shoulder during the fight in the ring with a very competitive Chisora, making him virtually a one-armed fighter at times. But after Chisora slapped him in the face at the weigh-in and spat water in his brother Wladimir’s face in the ring, Vitali says the idea of stopping the fight was “never” in the cards.
“I’d rather have died than to give him anything,” he says.
And Vitali now has two fighters from the UK on his to-do list for the future, two men who he badly wants to hurt in the ring.
“I want to knock him out in the ring. This account is still open,” Vitali says of Chisora.
And what about old nemesis David Haye?
“For him, the same goes as what I said about Chisora.”