Dillian Whyte has until Saturday, February 19 to sign his contract to challenge Tyson Fury for the WBC heavyweight title.
The champion’s mandatory defence has become another one of boxing’s long, drawn out sagas which delivered plenty of drama during the week of the purse bids last month.
A winning bid of $41,025,000 from Fury’s co-promoters Queensberry sealed the deal for Frank Warren and his team to stage the fight. Warren, who was alongside Fury’s American promoter Bob Arum at a lunch event this week,
confirmed the deadline as well as the fight date of April 23.
“Contract’s got to be signed by the 19 th of February. I expect they’ll sign it. If for any strange reason they don’t then he’s out of it,” said Warren who spoke to Queensberry Promotions’ Dev Sahni.
“He’s got till the 19th so he’s doing nothing wrong at the moment. We’d have preferred him to have done it earlier so we can get out and do what we do together, promote, but it is what it is.”
Arum, who has staged some of the biggest boxing events in the world, revealed that Whyte tried to get more money from the deal after the WBC awarded the Brixton heavyweight with a 20% split from the negotiations.
“We’re having trouble with Dillian Whyte because first they said they wanted more money but for that they would participate in the promotion,” said Arum.
“Well, I thought they’re getting plenty of money and they should participate in the promotion but that’s not their theory. So, we sent them a bare bones contract in accordance with WBC rules and they have that contract now and the lawyer for Dillian Whyte says they will sign that contract.
“They thought they had a real threat to get more money from us by saying they were not going to participate in promotional activities for the fight.
Now, in a lot of circumstances that might be a real threat but on the other side we’ve got Fury and we don’t need anybody else promoting the fight.”