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David Haye thinks this weekend’s big heavyweight fight between Joe Joyce and Joseph Parker is too close, but he thinks Joyce has to improve his defense if he wants to beat Parker or have any chance of winning a world title.
Saturday’s fight in Manchester is for the interim WBO title, but Haye, who will be part of the broadcast team at BT Sport Box Office, has plenty of knowledge of both. Parker enters the fight after two wins over Derek Chisora, whom Haye used to manage, while Haye was Joyce’s promoter during the early days of his pro career.
“No matter how good your chin is, you can’t take it in 10-ounce gloves for 12 rounds against a world-class puncher,” Haye said. “As impressive as it is to get punched in the head and not get hurt, it’s not the smartest strategy.”
Haye says much of his time promoting Joyce was spent telling him to get better defensively.
“He has no real regard for what’s coming his way and on some level you can get away with it,” Haye said. “I have never met a heavyweight champion who has won a world title just by absorbing blows to the head. It’s not smart to do that.
“The way I’ve always seen it is that shock resistance is like cutting down a tree. No matter how big the tree is, if you hit it with an ax a thousand times, sooner or later the tree will fall. You don’t know what punch he’s going to do, but in my opinion, he’s taken unnecessary hits from fighters he could have avoided by stepping back, moving his head, or blocking.
“He has received bloody headshots and they don’t hurt him at the moment, it doesn’t bother him. But it should bother him and it used to bother me when I was working with him, all my energy at the time was talking to him and his trainer about not taking hit after hit. “We know you can throw combinations, we know you have a huge engine and we know you can take a hit. How about we try not to get a clean hit to the face with somebody’s best shot?”
“He was doing it and at some point it was working pretty well, but looking at his last two fights, I don’t know what they say to him in the corner. It could just be ‘this is you, this is your style, let’s move on'”.
Part of the problem could be Joyce’s age. While she has only had 14 professional fights, she turned 37 this week, 30 when she won a silver medal at the Rio Olympics.
“I’ve always been amazed at his work ethic, his toughness and his resilience to punches. I wish he was in the position he is in now three years ago,” Haye said. “But everyone chooses the path that they feel is best for them, you only have one career, but he just turned 37 and is fighting in a final eliminator, it has taken a while.
“His style has been established from the fans, he hasn’t adapted much since the Olympics, you watch a tape of him there and his last fight and not much has changed.
“But he was a grown man when he went to the Olympics, just like Audley Harrison. He peaked out of him in the Olympics and now he has to get a world title shot as fast as possible because those years go by so fast if you have two or three fights a year. I would have loved for him to be more active.
“He was trying to get some lateral movement, hit a counter because he has really good reflexes and he’s a dynamic, explosive person, he can do a full backflip. So he has the explosiveness to do all the things that he needs to do, he just needs to practice and implement them, in sparring and in fights. He’s going to need to evade punches against a guy who hits as hard as Joseph Parker.”
Haye also believes that many people underestimated former WBO champion Parker, whom he describes as a “formidable opponent.”
“Parker has seen it, he’s done it, he’s been there,” Haye said. He has been a world heavyweight champion and has the hair of Andy Ruiz Jr, who just beat King Kong Ortiz, so everyone knows how good he is. He has been in some tough fights. His two fights with Chisora ​​show that he has the motor and the chin, because he took some massive hits, but the changes before the first fight and the second fight show that he is improving.
“This is a great opportunity. We know that at European level he takes the shots, but he uses his physicality to get results. The biggest name in his history is Daniel Dubois, but that performance against Dubois I don’t think is good enough to beat Parker. He should be a lot smarter, a lot more cunning and he won’t get hit by as many jabs as Dubois seemed to have. Then Joyce will have to do something he hasn’t done before.
“We all know what he can do, which is take obscene amounts of abuse and hits to the head. The only crack I’ve ever seen in Joyce was against Bryant Jennings when he took a left hook to the body and seemed to flinch.
“Everyone has been so focused on how good his chin is, maybe they should attack the body. Parker can shoot well to the body and showed against Dillian Whyte that he keeps the power from him for the full 12 rounds. Parker had deceptively fast hands and if you’re easy to hit, he’ll hit you. If you leave a gap, he’s quick enough and smart enough to counter.”
BT Sport Box Office will show Joe Joyce v Joseph Parker exclusively live on Saturday in the UK. Learn more at bt.com/sportboxoffice
