Marquez reportedly turned down $100 million to fight Pac a 5th time. More recently Wilder turned down a three-fight deal that was worth that same amount of money. It was to fight Breazeale, who he ended up fighting anyway, and 2 fights against Joshua.
I wouldn't because I don't have any significant brain damage. If I had been fighting for decades and worn down, probably? You know fighting actually hurts your body, right. It's not a video game.
Health should always be a fighter's top priority. Earning money is secondary. If you don't have all of your faculties intact then it doesn't matter how much money you've made in your career. You can't fully enjoy it. Top fighters like Usyk already have enough money to retire ten times over. I don't see money keeping him in the game or bringing him out of retirement. Maybe if he was a westerner. Eastern fighters like him tend to have a different mentality. He views professional boxing mainly as a competitive high level sport rather than a business so he sees it more like the amateurs. That's where he came from so it's not unusual from his perspective.
Fury was a much bigger star
Fury also only had 1 belt while Usyk had 3 and he'd just beaten AJ twice. Fury didn't deserve 70%. At most 60% if not an even purse split.
Indeed
Yeah, I mean Fury earning more than double what Usyk would have is no big deal. Fortunately the Saudis fixed that shit sandwich of a proposed purse split.
He was a cruserweight who had beaten a neutered Anthony Joshua .
Usyk even back then was more accomplished than Fury. A two-division champion with recent high profile wins. He also sold plenty of PPVs over in Britain. A 70/30 split for Fury would've been treating him like a mere contender when he was an established champion.
And? We've seen bigger upsets than that in the heavyweight division and the sport of boxing as a whole. Joshua immediately rematched him and pretty much pitched a shutout. He avenged it just like Lewis avenged his losses to guys that had no business beating him.
He probably overlooked Ruiz for obvious reasons and paid the price. Joshua dropped him and thought he was more hurt than he actually was. When he rushed in to finish him he got caught and never managed to recover from that first knockdown. That's one of Joshua's biggest problems. His recovery isn't very good. Against Wlad he recovered but that's because Wlad let him back into the fight.
That wasn't the case here. Even a guy with mediocre finishing skills could've taken out Joshua at that point. He was spent. What happened is that Vitali gave him bad corner advice. He publicly took much of the blame for Wlad losing.
No Joshua did well there. He moved around and was a difficult target to finish off.
