On Thursday morning, Claressa Shields and Savannah Marshall were preparing to headline an all-female card on Sky Sports. At night, everything was in balance. Steve Bunce explains it all
PICTURE this please. It happened, it’s true.
In the hotel lobby by the Thames, the best female boxers in the world gathered in the corners. Their teams protected them, men and women bundled up close to them in red, black, or blue tracksuits and T-shirts. There was the edge that I like, the feeling of a special night just hours away. A little hostility in the air.
It’s noon on Thursday. The day the Queen died. But, in that hotel lobby, at that moment, there is absolutely no idea what was about to happen. No idea. It was a typical gathering of boxing people before the fight. There was talk of revenge, of lost fights, of fights carried out and of dream fights.
A wall of tripods had been erected in the hotel ballroom. Thursday’s conference was so large that it was divided into three sessions. The O2, by the way, is on the other side of the river. It is our place for history. There are so many fighters in such a small space; Sky is live, the BBC wants an extra fast podcast. This is a royal event.
“Have you seen this?” my producer, Paddy, asks me and hands me his phone number. It’s a line about the Queen and her health. It is a disturbing warning; she doesn’t look like she’s sick, it looks like she’s near death. There is no panic, there is no fear at that moment. The first fighters on the card are on the podium. There are many of them.
It’s 1pm on Thursday and we still have a fight. And there are a few tickets left at £25.
“These are my Olympic sisters,” said Ginny Fuchs, a billboard attraction. “I grew up with Mikaela and Claressa.” Fuchs was part of the US Rio team alongside Claressa Shields and Mikaela Mayer. Later that day, when innocence still reigned, the three would recreate a photograph from the Olympics. Everyone is still smiling in the photo; no one had officially declared the Queen dead at the time. We still had a fight night.
The first group of women left the stage and Mayer, Alycia Baumgardner, Bob Arum, Al Mitchell, Caroline Dubois, Karriss Artingstall and Lauren Price took their seats. That’s an Olympic table, trust me. Mitchell was in charge of Team USA in 1996 and his personal fighter, David Reid, won the home nation’s only gold. Price won gold, Artingstall bronze.
Meanwhile, rumors of the monarch’s death had begun. A BBC editor was deep in quiet conversation by the coffee machine, and several of the Sky team had blank faces. Still, four Olympians and Arum were on stage. The show kept rumbling, the quotes crashed.
“This is history,” said Arum, once one of women’s boxing’s biggest critics. “In the future, people will talk about tonight. It will be history.”
Ben Shalom, the promoter, praised the multiple and rival teams that had come together to make the show happen. “This collaboration would not happen in men’s sports,” he said. It has become a theme throughout the build tonight that men have too many options, too many easy ways to avoid each other.
“Our group is not that big, we have to fight each other,” Dubois said.
Al Mitchell received the first of several standing ovations when he said, “Women are changing boxing. I just hope I’m not 90 when Crawford and Spence fight.” At that time, that wildly innocent moment, we still had a rodeo and we had a very special night.
Baumgardner and Mayer would present themselves as a great fight, a possible fight of the year. They are two different boxing beasts. “She talked about this fight,” said Baumgardner, who looks at Mayer with something close to hate. Mayer, meanwhile, just wants respect. “She has ignored what I have achieved,” Mayer said before the latest cold confrontation. The night was getting better by the second.
It was close to 2 in the afternoon when the main event took to the stage. The Queen’s death was being foretold. She was getting bad signals from a couple of my BBC colleagues. “Everyone is dressed in black on TV,” they told me. Looking back, that was more of a warning.
Shields and Savannah Marshall complied. There were one or two fabulous lines from Peter Fury. He was nervous, obnoxious and serious. Shields was angry. It was an old-fashioned, cranky conference between two fighters with a lot of hatred. Marshall is great under fire.
There is a rematch clause, we were told. “There’s no need for that,” Shields said. “If the public wants it, there will be a rematch,” said Mark Taffet, Shields’ manager. Next, Fury talked about diamonds in a bag. You know the quote. The large crowd loved it. We still had a fight. It was around 3 in the afternoon.
That first day, I talked to Shields, Marshall, Baumgardner and Price. They were ready, Shields squeezing in weight, Marshall almost finished the circus side of the fight. I also talked to Arum when he came off stage. He was in great shape and he told me that Tyson Fury would not fight Anthony Joshua this year, that he would fight in December and that Oleksandr Usyk is the plan for April or May of next year. The BBC pod that day was very good. It was never released, obviously.
We still had a fight the next morning, about 12 hours after the death was made official. The weigh-in was changed from a public event to a closed event, not even open to the media, at the fight hotel, the one next to the O2. I was there around 10am on Friday. The guidelines for canceling sporting events were discretionary. The clock was ticking. Weigh-in was at 1pm and then changed to 3pm. Some of the fighters were getting nervous, the weight was an issue and the extra two hours would be hell.
The weigh-in was changed back to 1:00pm and then at 12:43pm it was changed again to 3:00pm and the long wait continued. There was a problem in making a final decision, a split between the Board, the promoters and Sky, the main broadcaster. The boxers waited in the lobby, some excited, some calm. Mayer and Shields were in their rooms awaiting updates.
At 11:30 a.m. on Friday, the Premier League postponed its matches. That was meant to be the signal, but when it was announced, nothing ever changed. Boxing was still happening and that’s worth noting.
“We hope, there is nothing else we can do,” said Mikaela Mayer’s manager, George Ruiz. Mayer is underweight and that’s why she came to London so early; Mayer needed to control her weight during the last days and hours. Suddenly she had to wait two more hours and that’s a significant number, a decent percentage of her recovery time.
At about noon, Robert Smith of the Board was still driving from Cardiff, Sky officials were on site, Shalom floated, Andre Ward and the entire ESPN team were in the lobby. The tension was mounting; the atmosphere was getting a little ugly. There were many boxers worried about the weight and waiting for the scale. No one was talking about money at the time.
“Buncey, they have to let us know soon, they have to make a decision, these fighters need to rehydrate,” said Kerry Kayes, the master of nutrition. The tension and conflict would increase as the minutes passed. Ruiz approached with a shrug. Artingstall needed to eat. Dubois was walking. Steve Gray arrived and checked in. He looked as puzzled as anyone, and then there was a slight relief when Conor Benn and his partner, Victoria, arrived at the hotel check-in counter. “I’m not here to fight, I have a couple of days off and I just came for a massage and a couple of days of relaxation; a break”, he told me. He booked the wrong hotel for a quiet retreat; he made me smile.
On the first floor of the hotel, the final meeting to discuss the status of the show had begun around noon. At 1:32 pm, Smith arrived and was rushed upstairs, flanked by two members of the security detail. The fight was still going on at the time.
“We all need to know soon,” said Al Siesta, a fight expert and pundit. Siesta had three in the count and had also lost some boxers in the postponed count Friday night at York Hall. The Board had made the decision Thursday night to scrap the Friday night fights.
Not long after Smith climbed the stairs, there was an announcement. “All fighters and trainers, please come to the weigh-in now,” Clifton Mitchell said.
It was around 1:48 pm when the horde went upstairs to receive the news. At first, the weigh-in room was packed with boxers, their teams and their attorneys in some cases. There was no official word yet. At 2:00 p.m. the room was emptied and only the boxers and one member of each team could remain. I saw the defeated faces of the men in charge as they came in to deliver the news. The official word came around 2:04pm it was off. It seems the Premier League’s decision was vital.
It’s too easy to say that it was inevitable that the fights would be scrapped. I really think that the program was still discussed until the end. There are others who insist that it finished late on Thursday.
“I’m a big girl and I get it,” Shields said. “The country is in mourning.”
The new fight date is October 15 and that could collide with a variety of commitments and issues. Shields has an MMA concert planned for November. There’s the Devin Haney and George Kambosos rematch on ESPN that night. There’s no time to set up the venue for 20,000 people because Roxy Music is at The O2 the night before it’s due. All problems can be solved in the boxing business if there is will and will for tonight. Mayer and Shields promised to return.
And then it was really off. It was a strange environment. The entire ESPN team had gone to lunch. There were many faces of resignation. A lot of people lost a lot of money. A lot of fighters had spent a lot of money to make this happen, and not just the four women in the two world title fights. Security, trainers, videographers, freelancers, they all lost money. Fans lost thousands. Everyone just accepted it.
At the fight hotel on Friday afternoon, the first boxing teams began to pack up and leave. It was quite emotional.
Conor Benn would get his peace, his rest.
