The Curious Case Of Anthony Joshua
April 1st is the date that has been chosen for Anthony Joshua’s redemption story to begin. It is curious that a man who has twice been the unified heavyweight champion of the world would need a redemption story but then again, Joshua’s career has been a truly curious one when you actually examine it.
Joshua came straight to the professional boxing ranks from the London 2012 Olympics with a gold medal and a million dollar smile, and effectively had the same commercial effect for Matchroom Boxing as Hulk Hogan did for the WWE in the eighties. Joshua was a mainstream star straight out of the gate, and with that would come different opportunities and challenges. The greatest opportunity obviously being that Joshua was fast tracked to a world title shot against the worst heavyweight champion in recent memory, that man, Charles Martin traveled to London and more or less handed Joshua the IBF belt. It’s not Joshua’s fault that the opponent he defeated to win his first world title was beyond a lame duck, Joshua is there to fight and not pick opponents, but the fast tracking on the part of Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn can be classed as a stroke of genius or a rushed project that’s now grinding to a halt depending how you look at it.
Regardless of what happens next in Joshua’s career, even if he loses to Jermaine Franklin on April 1st, the career that the Londoner has had already has been incredible by any metric. Inside the ring, Joshua has won Olympic gold and is a two-time world heavyweight champion. Outside of the ring, he is a commercial giant with a plethora of highly lucrative endorsements and has filled stadia and broken pay-per-view records for years. But curiously, after all those achievements, Joshua is still searching for the respect which he doesn’t receive from the boxing community. Joshua’s craving for respect is probably tied into many of the criticisms that get flung his way, such as; his path to the world title being easy, that he beat Wladimir Klitschko after Tyson Fury already had, that his rematch win against Andy Ruiz was a cowardly performance. The list goes on. The genius of Hearn’s promotion of Joshua is in that very few sport’s stars every generation reach the commercial heights that Anthony Joshua has. He’s up there in the highest echelons with the likes of LeBron James and Lionel Messi. Commercially Hearn, along with Joshua’s own management company, 258, could not have hit more of a home run with Joshua as an in-demand commodity. So, why does Joshua seem so downhearted and despondent in recent interviews? What triggered his emotional monologue after the rematch loss to Oleksandr Usyk? The simple answer, it would seem, is respect.
