Chiselled Chisora ready to rile Whyte
AFTER weeks of calm, the storm arrived yesterday when an angry confrontation erupted at the weigh-in ahead of Dillian Whyte’s rematch with Dereck Chisora.
The heavyweight rivals had just left opposing ends of the stage when a shouting match broke out between Chisora and Whyte’s brother Dean.
Out of the view of the Sky Sports cameras, dozens of handlers from both sides then piled in to keep the pair apart, with Chisora inadvertently pushing his own trainer Don Charles through a partition wall in the melee.
The British Board of Control are highly unlikely to pursue the matter, in which no punches were thrown, though the coming together did mark an escalation in tensions before today’s showdown.
Chisora had promised to be on his best behaviour throughout the build-up having received a £25,000 fine for throwing a table at Whyte ahead of their first fight, a compelling brawl which the latter won by split decision two years ago.
However, the mask slipped slightly when he branded Whyte ‘s***’ at the prefight press conference on Thursday and it disappeared altogether when the veteran stepped on the scales yesterday with an offensive message to Whyte printed on his boxer shorts. Earlier he wore a bizarre T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon of Donald Trump holding Whyte’s severed head.
While that can be bracketed with the crass attention-seeking that tends to accompany pay-per-view boxing, Whyte will have been more concerned by Chisora’s physique. Stripped down, he weighed in at 17st 8lb — the same as Whyte — but with a far more toned physique than he has carried in years.
His training has been altered since he started taking on the guidance of David Haye, who has spoken of conditioning Chisora for ‘12 rounds of war’. While it remains to be seen if Chisora at 34 can live up to that pace, it was nonetheless surprising to see him at his lightest in more than two years and 4lb under what he weighed for the first Whyte fight.
Whyte himself was 12lb lighter than for his fight against Joseph Parker in July, which would indicate a game plan geared more towards boxing and moving, having been drawn into a dogfight the last time he faced Chisora. Plenty of observers felt Chisora did enough to at least merit a draw in their 2016 encounter and the clamour for a rematch grew significantly after he resurrected his career with a shock stoppage win over Carlos Takam on the same night that Whyte beat Parker.
But aside from that Takam knockout, prior to which he was losing the bout, there has been little evidence to support an argument in favour of Chisora for this fight. Indeed, Whyte, 30, has emerged into a world-level fighter since the only loss of his career against Anthony Joshua in 2015 and will rightly start as favourite for this one.
However, Chisora is convinced he has a unique ability to irritate and unsettle Whyte and revealed a surreal incident in the filming of Sky’s Gloves Are Off show, in which he claims the younger fighter cast a ‘voodoo’ spell at him.
‘I said something to him and he started shouting in voodoo curses and black magic and stuff like that,’ Chisora said. ‘I was saying the Hail Mary, “Let the curse go back” or whatever. It was a bit weird. Everyone in the studio was looking at each other.’ Whyte responded: ‘I just spoke to him in his own native tongue and he doesn’t know it because he doesn’t understand where he’s from. Dereck is a silly guy – two bricks are smarter than him.’
Whoever wins will be in pole position for a mega payday against Joshua in April, though Jarrell Miller and a New York showdown is an option for Joshua, who is searching for contingency plans in the likely event that Deontay Wilder snubs him in favour of a Tyson Fury rematch. Both Miller and Joshua will be ringside tonight, so some theatrics can be expected in and out of the ring. TV: LIVE pay per view for €24.95 on Sky Sports Box Office from 6pm.