It’s an unwritten rule, a moral code to go by: what happens in sparring stays in sparring. Two guys, perhaps not going at full steam, or maybe one fighter is, and the other isn’t, get each other sharp and ready with some quality sparring. Obviously, at times, the better-known fighter can get the worst of it, and oftentimes, ‘whistleblowers’ who were present at the spar (or, dare I say it, they claim they were there but were not) talk about what they saw (or claimed to have seen) and a big article, or a number of articles, emerges.
It happened recently with Anthony Joshua and Daniel Dubois; conveniently, it was just days before the two fight for real on September 21 at Wembley (96,000 fans will be in attendance!). Though Dubois has said himself that he has almost no memory of the so-called infamous spar that took place between him and AJ in Sheffield in 2016, one man who was there, ex-Team GB fighter Anthony Fowler, told Talk Sport that 18-year-old Dubois, inexperienced at the time, tagged Joshua with a left hook to the head and “his legs completely went.”
“Joshua went and jogged around the ring because his legs were like jelly,” Fowler added.
Dubois, Fowler then said, could have “put him to sleep,” but Dubois didn’t follow up as he “had a bit too much respect for him.”
Now, in speaking with Sky Sports, Joshua has given his side of what happened that day.
“He just cracked me with a good shot. I stood on my feet,” Joshua said of the incident. “I don’t know where this whole narrative of of someone turned my lights out came from. There were a lot of people in the gym that day as well. And people have come out and said,’ Nah, nothing [happened]. But anyway, people say what they say. With me, there’s always been like an inch that makes a mile. But it’s all good, it’s all good.”
Even if Joshua was badly hurt by Dubois in sparring, it will almost certainly have no real bearing on the outcome of the September 21 fight between the two. Again, any fighter can get tagged in sparring – the great Muhammad Ali for example, would often look quite poor in sparring but he would dazzle in the actual fight. But the whole, Dubois nearly KO’d Joshua thing has helped hype the upcoming fight, that’s for sure.
And Dubois, who can bang with the best of them, has a legit, 100 percent puncher’s chance in the fight. No doubt. No matter what happened in sparring that day in 2016.
