There’s always a distinct charge before any fight, but it’s different with heavyweights, especially these heavyweights. Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois are both big hitters, both woundable, beatable. The expectation is that, probably quite soon, one of the men currently giving each other unbroken eye contact in the ring will be unconscious. There’s an appetite for it tonight, with the lights on and Wembley Stadium’s arch above us, the songs sung, the fireworks and sparklers and LED wrist-lights dwindled to a solitary point of focus. We’re three hours and five bouts in, and all of it has been leading up to Joshua vs Dubois. At this point of the night we just want harm done on our behalf.
Dubois made his entrance to the sound of drums, walking behind masked performers spinning flaming circles, in a Mike Tyson-inspired black poncho, black shorts, black boots. If he didn’t quite manage to glower, he at least looked focused, as his entrance song, ‘Lucifer Son of the Morning’, a dubby reggae number, drew muted boos. Then came Joshua, all in white, as ‘Oh Anthony Joshua’ filled the stadium, chanted to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’. Such is Joshua’s star power, his seat-filling charisma, that Dubois – despite holding the title of ‘world champion’ – agreed to walk to the ring first tonight, usually the role of the challenger. As he walked, the sense of anticipation grew – if not bloodlust, then an outsourced potency, a collective will, for this strolling giant to get in there and do some damage for us. Now, Joshua gives his opponent an unblinking glare as he readies himself for – he hopes – restitution.
Anthony Joshua has been filling stadiums for nearly a decade. He rose to prominence as one of the poster boys of the London 2012 Olympic Games, winning Super Heavyweight gold at just twenty-two years old. From the beginning, he was an advertiser’s dream – enormous, aggressively handsome, with a physique that suggested tectonic plates. He had enough backstory to make him seem gritty – a bit of drug dealing, trouble with the police, boxing as the straight path towards his new-found love of a motivational truism – but not so much to be off-putting or divisive. He’d only started boxing at eighteen, the age many boxers consider going pro. Within five years he’d beaten the best of his fellow amateurs and won that London gold – an extraordinarily rapid rise, testament to his ability to absorb and act on instruction, as well as his natural athleticism, determination and explosive punching power.
Joshua might have had a reputation as a star boy, but there were always doubters who pointed to his late start, suggesting it might prove his undoing as he ascended the ranks. He never had the amateur schooling most of his peers enjoyed – the junior years, in gloves too big for the growing frame; those long months in cold gyms, transmuting repetitive drills into muscle memory. His early style relied, instead, on ferocity: fast hands, brutalising combinations of punches which blasted his early opponents out, delivering the coup de grâce, usually, with his preternaturally concussive right hand. His rudimentary grasp of the essentials didn’t matter when he could hit that hard, that often. The purists could complain that his movements were a little robotic, or that his footwork was wrong, after they woke up.
Over the years, however, Joshua’s star power has threatened to outstrip his skill in the ring; fans connected immediately with the man’s story, his persona, his humbly arresting feats. He has never been a skulking, threatening sort of fighter; he doesn’t go in for trash talk or baby-threatening, so much as old-fashioned respect, fair play, parliamentary procedure. In his early twenties, he was still living with his mother, in Watford, and you got the sense that while he would knock people out, he’d feel bad afterwards. After his gold medal, lots were cast for everything that went on or into his hulking frame, with clothing brands, headphones, sports drinks and other conglomerates ensuring his leaving the house required rigorous planning. He turned professional with an expectation that he’d stroll through his first dozen fights. And that’s largely what happened – but not just because of Joshua. It happened because of the team around him, which matchmade and built Joshua into an unmissable attraction, handpicking opponents to highlight his best aspects, and keep any flaws well hidden.
Matchmaking is one of the most important tasks for the team behind a fighter – it’s a dark art, picking the right tests. There’s no fixture list in boxing, and few demands are ever made at an organisational level that can’t be negotiated around. Joshua’s potential – as a fighter, but also as a brand, a commodity, was apparent already in his Olympic days. The last thing the brains behind his operation wanted was to risk pushing him into deep waters too soon, before he’d learned more of the tricks of the trade, or developed an ability to navigate the longer duration of professional fights, to compete in contests where the aim wasn’t to score points but to end the night as early as possible. ‘You don’t get paid overtime in boxing’ is a familiar, pragmatic, adage.
His promoter, Eddie Hearn, and the wider team behind him, had one chief goal: to make him, and themselves, as much money as possible while taking as few risks as they could get away with, at least until he had made it to the top of the mountain. His education was important, but far more important was gilding his box-office appeal, preserving his unbeaten record, and maximising his ability to wow fans in highlight reels of him putting tall men on their backs, out for the count.
Those hoped-for knockouts came, but with them went the chances of Joshua amassing big-fight experience, or gauging the limits of his stamina. Instead, Joshua’s early professional career followed the age-old pattern of any bankable prospect, especially in the heavyweight division, where one clean shot can ruin everything. In the tried and tested manner of any hot up-and-comer, he was fed baggy men in kit from the lost and found, served up to fall down. And if he mostly struggled to get out of first or second gear, the men who might be able to challenge him to do so, to raise his game, were kept away, too risky a proposition while he was finding his feet as a pro.
Boxing is still the Wild West of sport. FIFA, in football, may have its grave flaws, but at least it gives the appearance of some centralised order, of an adult – however nefarious – being somewhere in the room. In boxing, there is no overarching global authority. Instead, four main sanctioning bodies each award their own belts, creating a multitude of ‘world champions’. This means that at any one time there can be (at least) four fighters with a claim to being the ‘world champion’ in their weight class. A canny promoter, such as Hearn, thrives on this ambiguity, and will capitalise on this proliferation of worlds by targeting the weaker ‘champions’ to fight against his hot prospects.
The system is so opaque that the fighters’ rankings can effectively be bought, or at least bargained over, at annual conventions by their promoters. A promoter might say, ‘My fighter deserves a title shot. You may disagree, but perhaps this money will change your mind.’ Business interests often take precedence over sporting ones, to the point where the leading fighters of their day need never fight one another to prove their superiority, but can instead enjoy lucrative and garlanded careers, claiming throughout to be the best in the world, while facing only hand-picked opponents unlikely to expose their weaknesses. Think of what tennis would be if Federer could have chosen never to play Nadal, and you’re getting there. Now picture it happening in casinos, late at night, with funding from people with links to organised crime, and big bets riding on the outcome. Shockingly, there have been instances of corruption over the years.
The worst thing to happen to Joshua early in his career was his victory against the hapless American Charles Martin, a woefully reluctant opponent wearing what appeared to be his daughter’s shorts, who just so happened to be in possession of a world title. By defeating him, Joshua became a ‘champ’, but the title came too early. His education, until that point a process of learning on the job, was abruptly curtailed. With the belt around his waist, Joshua was a ticket-shifting cash cow, with several capable suitors wanting to test his lucrative mettle.
In boxing, there’s a constant balancing act going on. If, as a promoter, you’re in charge of someone with Joshua’s earning power, who can routinely sell out stadiums, the last thing you want to do is allow that gravy train to hit the buffers before it’s made you a fortune. Fighters who make the forgivable mistake of merely being good at the sport, but not achieving some sort of wider, marketable profile, are often filed in the ‘who needs him’ club. For promoters these are the boxers who pose a real risk of beating their star, while not offering anything like the sort of money it would require to take that chance. These sorts of dangerous propositions can – thanks to the freedom promoters get to matchmake and cherry-pick – be avoided, perhaps indefinitely, or at least until they manoeuvre their way to being a mandatory challenger in the eyes of one of the sanctioning bodies. Becoming a ‘mandatory’ means the boxer in possession of the belt has to agree to fight you, or hand back his title. But deals can be struck, ‘step-aside’ money paid. Even then, promoters can often find a way around giving challengers a shot at their prize possession – ‘they don’t bring enough to the table’, ‘we’re going a different way’, etc. Honour, or anything approaching it, sits vanishingly low on the priority list.
But at some point you have to take the brakes off, or at least appear to. Otherwise, the public mood is liable to sour as fans begin to suspect that your star has been too mollycoddled. The trick is to pair him with people who are almost as good as him – fighters with enough name recognition for the occasion – while avoiding the ones who are as good or better for as long as possible, especially during those prime earning years.
As a fighter moves up the ranks, activity also decreases. In their early days, they might fight five or six times per year, largely against soft targets. But by the time they become a prominent name, a headliner, the frequency can dwindle to two or even one fight per year, such is the massive marketing and promotional effort required to hype each of their events. For Joshua, this meant that it wasn’t until 2017, at the age of twenty-seven, five years into his professional career and in his nineteenth fight, that he faced his first significant test in a fight at Wembley against the Ukrainian Wladimir Klitschko.
Since Floyd Mayweather’s time at the top of the sport, remaining unbeaten has become a sought-after, and heavily protected, status in boxing – often at the expense of meaningful pairings between leading fighters. Mayweather was a remarkable fighter, but even his final years became testament to preserving his record rather than taking risks. On the whole, going unbeaten for a decade or longer is more likely to mean you’ve avoided your chief rivals than that you’re a generational talent. This is one of the reasons why Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury – the two standout British heavyweights of their generation – have never fought one another, despite all their overlapping years at the summit. That fight would break all financial records, especially if it happened in the UK. It has almost happened several times but, in the ‘red-light district of sport’, nothing is guaranteed until the bell goes and the fighters meet in the centre of the ring. Until then, injuries happen, contracts collapse, promotions fall apart.
This version of purity was never set at such a premium in the past – the great fighters showed their mettle through how they recovered from their defeats. Sugar Ray Robinson, arguably the greatest boxer of all time, avenged a loss to Jake LaMotta twenty-one days later in February 1943. Even more staggeringly to post-war eyes, he managed to fit in a tune-up fight between the two bouts. Today, the rarity of fights and the fear of losing them go hand in hand.
The 2017 fight against Klitschko was the first real risk to Joshua’s unbeaten record. Klitschko, another former Olympic gold medallist, was the real thing. If nagging worries about Joshua’s durability or skill were valid, this fight was sure to expose them. What occurred was an instant classic – Joshua won, after an up-and-down battle, halting a flagging Klitschko in the eleventh. However, the win came with revelations. Joshua had shown he could be hurt – badly – and that his gas tank took an age to refill, time he might not be granted by sprightlier opposition. People started to wonder out loud if all those muscles were a hindrance. Klitschko was forty-one. What would happen if Joshua had been in similarly dire straits against a younger, hungrier man?
Joshua’s first and most traumatic loss came in the spring of 2019, at the hands of a man whose hunger bordered on carnal. On what was meant to be his triumphant American debut at Madison Square Garden, Joshua met the near-spherical Mexican American fighter Andy Ruiz Jr, who was greeted with pity, scorn or incredulity as he entered the ring. Ruiz, at least to people who’d never seen him fight, seemed an unserious proposition. Dismissed as a lazy, demotivated or generally unthreatening fighter, Ruiz nevertheless defeated and concussed Joshua in one of the biggest upsets in the history of the sport, his fast hands and unexpectedly nimble footwork giving Joshua conniptions.
Joshua’s career can be divided into two distinct eras: before and after his loss to Ruiz. While he avenged that shocking defeat later that same year, and reclaimed his title belts in the process, he emerged from the ordeal a different, more cautious, at times even reluctant fighter. It was now understood that Joshua had the potential to unravel – to his winning smile and explosive right hand was added an even more appealing quality: an air of fragility. In a sport that strongly favours the home fighter, the marquee name, the possibility that Joshua might unravel against someone who wasn’t an obvious destroyer, that he might find a way to lose even with all his advantages – athletic and otherwise – now gave his fights a compulsive tension. And there would always be something in the British sports fan’s psyche that favoured the flawed over the impervious, that gravitated towards the one who – perched on the brink of glory – could supply the ingredients for his own poignant undoing.
Joshua cycled through several trainers in an effort to backfill his technical nous. Trainers are key to every fighter, but for Joshua – the late-adopter, the non-natural – they’re more important than most. In action, he tends to hang on the cornermen’s every word between rounds, fighting precisely to instruction, incapable of the in-fight flowing improvisation which marks out those boxers whose movements were hard-wired at a much younger age. For a while, Joshua’s newfound self-protective streak came at the cost of what had made him such an eye-catching knockout merchant. The memory of Ruiz still fresh, he was less willing to take necessary risks to subdue opponents.
Joshua seemed stuck. He hoped to evolve into a more mature, defensively sound heavyweight but had lost the fire – and firepower – of old. He was out-thought and defeated by the balletic Oleksandr Usyk, twice, despite being the much bigger man. On those nights, there was a sense that had he been a bit more willing to take risks, to go for broke, he might have troubled the Ukrainian stylist. Instead, he lost a battle of skill, without really making a dent. Second-guessing himself, Joshua seemed to have lost his edge.
Around October 2023, Joshua started working with Ben Davison, a chirpy Essex-based smiler. Davison, his fifth trainer in two years, seemed to have found the right formula, reconnecting Joshua with his inner finisher. In March 2024, he fought the former UFC star Francis Ngannou. As a confidence-building exercise, it couldn’t have gone better. Ngannou, for all his combat experience, was a novice in the boxing ring, and Joshua treated him as such. He dominated, walking through Ngannou and almost beheading him. Had Joshua finally cracked it? Had he reconnected with that KO specialist of old but with added seasoning, a bit more hard-earned wisdom?
No one can really tell how good a fighter is until it’s all over – while they go on, there’s always that chance of the redemptive comeback, the unlikely, against-all-odds victory snatched from defeat. Joshua is entering the legacy phase now, the defining period. He hasn’t proved to be the untouchable steamroller he seemed to be in those early years, but nor is he the fragile, overprotected charlatan he risked morphing into after his blow-up against Ruiz. Most likely, at thirty-five, he doesn’t have another big rebuild left in him.
And so we find ourselves here tonight. Daniel Dubois might not be the world champion, but he is a champion, and if Joshua can beat him, and look good while doing it, he will have enough momentum to merit a tilt at one or both of the other giants of his era, Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk. The time was right for him to march on, now, to have a final say in cementing the way we’d look back at him.
It will all build from what happens tonight then, at Wembley; this last, defining, era of Joshua. This mega-event was only possible because of an influx of capital from Saudi Arabia. As part of an attempted rebrand, the Saudis have, over the last few years, bid to become major players in boxing, co-opting the sport as part of a seemingly endless ‘Riyadh Season’ – a raft of entertainments designed to paint the nation as a come-one, come-all tourist destination. For decades, a number of the best possible fights in boxing have proved impossible to make happen due to promotional and TV network rivalries, and other frustrating, fan-denying politics. The Saudis, led by Turki Alalshikh, chairman of their General Entertainment Authority, have thawed these cold wars, to a point where insoluble bigwigs such as promoters Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn can be photographed holding hands, looking like lottery winners who’ve waived their right to anonymity. Riyadh Season is now branching out and aiming high, wanting a bit of the famous English atmosphere. One of the downsides of the events in Saudi Arabia has been the subdued energy in arenas filled with invited celebrities and local dignitaries but lacking the boozed-up rabble-rousers needed to create the familiar late-night racket. Tonight, Wembley has been transformed into a temporary outpost of Saudi soft power. Adverts encouraging us all to visit Riyadh play on an endless loop between fights, and lovingly produced brochures have been arranged at the bar.
There are few fighters now who aren’t hoping to catch the eye of Alalshikh, drawn by the promise of their own turn under lights at this wattage, and cheques they couldn’t otherwise dream of. Yet, it wasn’t until Liam Gallagher took to the stage before the headline fight, rasping through three Oasis songs, that Wembley felt packed out. If the reported 96,000 seats – a figure which would make it the biggest-selling boxing event in post-war Europe – had all been sold, as we had been told all week, a lot of their buyers must have been detained, or forgetful. The air of 1990s nostalgia Gallagher brought was apt given the talk all week comparing the fight to Lennox Lewis’s 1993 bout with Frank Bruno, one of the last – and most notable – times two Brits contested a world heavyweight title. That night a beefed-up Bruno came unstuck, after a bright start, unravelling at the hands of the younger, more skilled Lewis. Now we are witnessing a new generation of UK big men, as they act out those familiar roles of challenger and champion.
Daniel Dubois, Joshua’s opponent this time, is a fellow Brit, but their similarities end there. Dubois first caught the attention of boxing fans as a teenager, amid rumours he’d knocked out Joshua in sparring, when he was just nineteen and Joshua twenty-six. As with all sparring scuttlebutt, details were hazy and conflicting, the Omertà of the gym difficult to penetrate. Apparently, this kid was a real puncher, a danger-man, the next one. Unlike Joshua, he didn’t go down the amateur Olympic route. He turned professional early, opting to punch for pay, rather than sink years into linking up with Team GB, earning a pittance and hoping to earn a place in the Olympic squad. Former Olympians tend to transition to far greater fanfare, and far larger signing-on fees, than those who choose to fast track towards the professional side of the sport. The Olympic fights allow them to get to compete against most of their future opponents, over three rounds, in far-flung locations and with very few eyes on them. And Olympic champions achieve a clarity almost never found in the professional ranks – proving themselves the sole best at their weight, in their time. But even Olympic champions must start fresh as pros – adjusting to a longer, more gruelling format and facing unpredictable opponents. These fighters, who were never given government funding to hone their skills, are often less refined but they can be more dangerous – resentful, wily, survivors, keen to leave a mark on their hot-housed and fast-tracked counterparts.
On the face of it, Dubois has been offered up to Joshua to get him back to the top table. He is seen by those in the Joshua business as another in the line of those tantalisingly beatable champs. He offers Joshua a quick route towards being able to call himself (and earn the wages of ) a champion again. Admittedly, his belt was won not in the ring but via email, boxing being one of the few sports whose governance resembles a phishing scam. Oleksandr Usyk, having beaten Tyson Fury to briefly hold all four heavyweight belts, was almost immediately stripped of one because he chose to honour a planned rematch against Fury rather than agreeing to fight Dubois, his mandatory challenger. With the belt vacant, Dubois became a ‘world champion’ by default, having been sitting in the chair when the music stopped. Dubois’s title got him the payday dream ticket of fighting Joshua at Wembley, but he didn’t really belong in his company, did he? Wasn’t there something a little bit second-rate about him? Had you seen him being interviewed?
Both are in the ring, now. Dubois pacing back and forth, always staring directly at Joshua, who seems less willing to go in for any of this fronting out. Dubois is keeping himself warm, bouncing on his toes, having had to wait for his opponent. Joshua looks zoned in, used to it all, staring somewhere into the distance. Dubois’s mouth opens, flashing his black gumshield. The referee is between them, giving final instructions, before standing back to let them go. As the fight begins, it’s clear this is a confident, unloosed Joshua – that he, like most of the crowd, believes he operates on a different plane to his opponent. Joshua holds his left hand low, his chin high and unguarded, and acts like Dubois is a problem he’ll soon, simply, solve. Dubois comes out looking to punch respect into him, taking the centre of the ring, leading with stiff left jabs – his key weapon – range-finding but spiteful, keeping Joshua at bay and stinging him as he does so. Within thirty seconds Dubois lands the first meaningful punch, a strong right hand which Joshua felt, dipping against the ropes, clenched up, affronted. The round continues in the same vein – Dubois poking, Joshua casual, on low-alert.
Dubois, despite choosing to cash in aged nineteen, was far from green, thanks to years of tutelage from his boxing-obsessed father Dave Dubois, a former market trader. Dubois was training at the Peacock Gym in Canning Town from the age of nine, but had started being put through his paces from a much younger age at home. His childhood was spartan. Home-schooled, strait-laced, thinly socialised, the Dubois who emerged on the main stage was a long way from the branded, beaming spokesman Joshua. He seemed more like an oversized, awkward boy, being pushed too fast on his bike towards a motorway. Yet there was no doubting his talent. He had fast hands, a sharp, well-tuned jab, and he clearly hit hard – as his early victims quickly discovered.
However, as Dubois did start to step up and be met with media scrutiny, something felt a bit off. His father’s overbearing influence was unsettling: those infant workouts, the other siblings also conscripted into the hurt business, the chatter that he didn’t really get out much, own a phone, or – really – seem to want to be doing this at all. In interviews, journalists struggled to get much out of him, beyond a minor remix of ‘I’m ready to fight. Let’s go.’ There’s something to be said for letting one’s fists do the talking, but tell that to the T-shirt vendors, or the sponsors.
Doubts about Dubois’s potential were seemingly confirmed in 2020 when he quit in the tenth round against Joe Joyce, taking a knee for the referee’s full count of ten, effectively conceding. The fact that the orbital bone in Dubois’s eye socket had been fractured seemed, in discussion afterwards, an afterthought. Boxers, with their ‘warrior code’, are expected to ‘go out on their shield’. The sort of maiming which would see the average citizen scream for an air ambulance is – in the course of a boxing match – supposed to be dealt with via a combination of stoicism and whatever can be resolved through the application of a rough towel. Dubois, in choosing to protect his sight and long-term health, had proven his critics right. The comeback heaped on further degradation. He won a spurious, minor belt and soon after got a shot at the seriously-big-time, against Oleksandr Usyk, but again ended the night on a knee, quitting for a second time, and further reinforcing the hunch that when the going got tough, he didn’t. Immediately before this fight Dubois had hit a bit of good form and – possibly – managed to clamber over the mental block which saw him tap out on his two biggest nights. There was talk of him having come into himself, finally.
Now Dubois has a chance to step out from Joshua’s shadow – where he has long lingered in terms of promotional weight, kudos and popular appeal. Could he strike a blow against the golden boy and claim some of Joshua’s star power for himself ? Or will Joshua show that his years of experience in the limelight are of greater advantage on this big occasion than Dubois’s focused but unglamorous years of grinding away from the glare?
In the ring, with about twenty seconds left of the first round, Joshua’s laissez-faire approach starts to create problems. He swings wildly, misses, and turns himself around with his momentum. Dubois responds by hurling a big right hand – like a fast bowler – which detonates on Joshua’s chin, causing him to slump forwards, his gloves touching the canvas, momentarily a supplicant. Had there been more time in the round, that might have been it, but the bell rings. Joshua finds his stool, looking unsteady and dazed. Abashed, buzzed, he looks trapped in the middle of a nightmare. A minute to recover may not be long enough. Dubois comes out strong in the second round, landing clean shots that rock and wobble Joshua, who looks stiff and unstable. Yet, Dubois doesn’t go hell for leather, wary perhaps of overcommitting. Meanwhile, Joshua’s survival skills buy him a bit more time to recover his compromised senses.
The third round follows similar lines, a back-pedalling Joshua circles the ring, trying, sometimes unsuccessfully, to avoid Dubois’s right hand. Dubois lands a couple of heavy shots, again rocking Joshua, but picks them cautiously, respectful of the fight-changing power still in Joshua’s arsenal. As ever, Dubois looks functional rather than arresting. Even when he’s dispatching someone, even when all the elements are there for something dazzling, the punches thud but there’s no stardust on the gloves. Then, with about twenty seconds to go before the bell, Dubois lands a left on Joshua’s temple that seems to short-circuit him. Joshua stumbles towards the ropes, legs tremblingly unreliable, and another punch forces him to touch down. A count is taken up – correctly – on the loudspeaker but not enforced by the referee, handing Dubois a chance to land more, unguarded, shots, bludgeoning Joshua to the floor, potshotting him on the ropes. For a moment it looks like this is it. But, somehow, Joshua manages to get up, presenting himself to the referee for approval. Only the fact that he is moments from another minute’s rest allows him to be waved on. In the corner, his second presses ice to the back of his neck as he sits staring into space.
It now becomes a matter of seeing how Joshua’s night will, finally, be resolved. Somewhere between the first and second rounds, he transformed from predator to prey, and now we are merely witnessing his capture, waiting for him to go to ground for good. As he comes out for the fourth round he is almost instantly down again. The referee appears to call off the fight, waving his hands in a gesture that ordinarily means ‘it’s done’. Instead, confusingly, he declares Joshua’s trip to the canvas accidental. Joshua stands, crestfallen but defiant, tapping his big chest with his gloves to say, ‘On we go.’
By now, the atmosphere has become discomfiting – voyeuristic, but in a way that feels darker, more charged. There is a feeling that, really, we shouldn’t be watching this, that this level of humiliation is bad for us to witness. Joshua isn’t just losing, he’s being punished – for his celebrity, his late start, his rediscovered confidence, his hapless bravery. And the one delivering the punishment? This quiet, dismissable non-star, this mumbling, charmless home-schooler, who knocked him down years back, and who has been itching ever since to get at him for real.
But the tide can turn quickly in a fight, on a single punch, any small sign of reinvigoration. Towards the end of the fourth round, Joshua lands his first significant shot of the night, a right on the jaw, giving Dubois pause and – fleetingly, dangerously – reintroducing hope. He couldn’t, could he? This being heavyweight boxing, where one right hand can change it all, we are forced to imagine miracles. Maybe, somehow, he’s been punched back to lucidity. Maybe Dubois has punched himself out?
If Joshua can land another right in the fifth, well, he’s always been a clinical finisher. It’s moments such as this – this sudden gear-shift, the spiralling possibilities, the imagined splintering of potential conclusions, which lends boxing its capacity for absolute immersion. From the feeling that we’ve accidentally put on a snuff film, to suddenly being back in the wish-fulfilment business.
And Joshua does seem brighter, more able to shrug off Dubois’s punches. He lands a seismic right on Dubois’s chin, forcing the younger man to step back, shakily. Joshua bounds on, sensing unlikeliest glory might be one punch off. As he moves into the corner where Dubois lurks he rolls the dice, throwing a right hand – a punch that, if it connects, will mean all is forgiven. Dubois throws his own right at the same time, and it has a shorter distance to travel. It hits Joshua’s chin like a hammer and turns his lights out in an instant – he falls face forwards, straight down; a sleeping, slain, giant.
From where I’m sitting, high up enough to need the big screens, not so far I can’t see the figures in the ring, it looked like an execution. Anthony Joshua down again, but this time not getting up. At least not in time to beat the referee’s count. His last desperate gamble to turn the fight ended in a short right hand, a brutal punctuation mark. How have we got here? the stunned silence seems to say.
There’s a lot of head-shaking going on around me, a lot of people angrily storming out. A large proportion of the crowd is up from their seats and down the aisles with Joshua barely back to his feet. Boos and thwarted expectations cascade around the cold stadium. Plastic pint glasses fly through the air, their spray going in all directions. Joshua has not just lost, he’s been run over, knocked down four times, the last for the count, all in the space of less than five rounds. This isn’t what people have paid to see.
In every sense, Joshua had seemed superior to Dubois coming in – his credentials, his gold, his charm, his crossover appeal. None of that came into the ring with him. There, he was forced to walk the only terrain where Dubois was more comfortable, and where, in the end, he knew more. It was Dubois who was sharper, quicker to the punch, lethal once encouraged. The first knockdown scrambled Joshua, and fighters when seriously hurt are forced to revert to untutored instinct, to base fundamentals. Joshua’s let him down. He became a novice again, swinging for the fences, chin in the air, reliant on the raw materials which had once turned his life around, long before he was king. Dubois couldn’t match him outside the ring – in accolades, popularity or polish – but inside, that didn’t matter.
Before the fighters could leave there’d be a press conference – Joshua would be pushed on whether this was it, or if he’d carry on and try to avenge yet another loss, try to build back after this latest, and most diminishing, setback to date. A second fight with Dubois would make even more money now, for them both, after what had just happened. There would always be an appetite for him to fight Fury, however far both fighters drifted past their primes. But could Joshua, in good conscience, face the toil and sacrifice it would require to scale the heights again, after enduring all this, at the hands of someone he’d thought he’d handle comfortably? Perhaps it was time to cash in, to set out for the no-less-terrifying waters of a life without fighting.
He might also have to question the wisdom, once again, of those around him: the trainers who’d sent him out there with too cavalier a tactical plan, the promoters who chose this brooding, younger, ambitious foe for him, and had become even richer off the back of it. Boxing forces its participants to suspend their disbelief, to discount any evidence set against their omnipotence. He would have to answer these questions, and soon, his ears ringing, his bruises still coming out.
Not quite elite, then, if this was the final sum of it. But the tragedy of Joshua is that he’s been, has always been, about 90 per cent of the way to greatness. If he could only sort out those remaining flaws, be a bit cannier, combine the early explosivity with this wiser head, he could yet, somehow, fight on until he gets what he’s aimed for from the start – recognition as the best of his time. There might be another rematch, another rebuild, but for now there is only quiet, humility, a new world order. ‘Are you not entertained?’ Dubois barks on the microphone, flying high, trying out a bit of hype, to an almost empty stadium. But it’s something heavier than entertainment. Dubois is that most dangerous thing, a man long drilled with a singular purpose, who has managed to organise things to happen on his terms. He doesn’t need any of us. He’s just taken apart the thing we loved the most – for this hour or two at least – and made us watch him do it, to show he could.
Photograph courtesy by TNT Sports / YouTube, AJ v Dubois Official Promo, 2024
