We’re living in an era where MMA fighters and boxers all want a piece of each other. You can blame Conor McGregor for showing the world how possible (and lucrative) the whole endeavor is. Before him, it was widely accepted than anyone crossing over to the other sport would get nothing but embarassment out of the experience. These days, everyone’s just looking at the dollar signs and not really worrying about the rest.
Floyd Mayweather sounds like he’s seriously preparing to give mixed martial arts a try, and then there’s heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua, whose quest to unify the boxing world’s many championship belts comes first. But after that? Superfight time, and why not a boxing vs. MMA superfight at that? Sky Sports asked him about the possibility of trying out MMA and he sounded very down.
“A fight’s a fight at the end of the day, so yeah man, I’d do it.” Joshua said. “A good scrap would be that guy from Congo [Francis Ngannou], he just lost recently. Then you got Jon Jones, that would be a good scrap.”
Of course, Joshua noted he’d need some time to “learn the submissions and stuff,” but that no longer seems like such a daunting task for boxers any more. Welterweight champ Tyron Woodley estimated it would only take him a few months to teach Floyd Mayweather what he needed to know about stuffing takedowns. And no one expects Joshua to come out with Gracie level jiu jitsu. Honestly, just staying upright through the first round would be considered a pretty big success.
But for now, we’ll get to continue seeing Anthony Joshua do what he does best: knock out other heavyweights in the boxing ring. His next fight against WBO heavyweight Joseph Parker goes down on March 31st from the 70,000 person Principality Stadium in Wales on March 31st. After that, the obvious next fight would be WBC champ Deontay Wilder, who has been putting on some epic performances of his own across the ocean in America. That sounds a whole lot more exciting than any cross sport freakshow fight in our books.
