With Anthony Joshua vs. Tyson Fury, is it ‘better late than never’ or ‘better never than late’?

This past weekend was meant to be an aperitif in boxing, as both Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury were fighting, yet not against each other. It turned out to be a great Teaser of the Geezers for their upcoming fight, as Joshua got dropped twice against Kristian Prenga in the first round of his tune-up bout (before storming back to win a round later), while Fury, looking like the Rancor Keeper in “Return of the Jedi,” put some slow dents in 46-year-old Mariusz Wach out in Thailand.

Not exactly the table-setter everyone had in mind.

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Last year, in the middle of Times Square in New York, I watched a similar setup when Ryan Garcia and Devin Haney appeared in the same boxing ring with different time slots. It was meant to be a build back for Garcia-Haney 2, yet Garcia lost to Rolly Romero in unspectacular fashion and Haney beat Jose Ramirez in spectacularly unspectacular fashion. The only fans that got flamed were those watching, and — I can tell you firsthand — none of them were talking about Garcia-Haney 2 after the fact.

In neither case did these blue-balls specials enhance the essential effect. In fact, they served to pound home a point I’ve been trying to make in the fight game for the past 20 years — namely, that it’s more fun to see the fighters we want to see fight each other actually fight each other than to watch those same fighters fight other people. And it’s far more fun to see them fight at the upper-most reach of their vitality and relevancy, when the outcome matters.

Because … what are we even doing here? Playing with fire just because we like to get burned?

Boxing has been dealing with this kind of thing since Jack Dempsey steered clear of Harry Greb, but it got to me thinking — now that it seems we’ve finally cleared the way for Fury-Joshua — if a fight like that is better late than never at all. 

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At least in the “never” scenario, the imagination is left at the controls. You can argue what would’ve happened had they squared off in 2021, when both were still very much in their primes with England the center of the boxing universe, and at least hold onto your romantic notions. 

The thing is nobody goes around saying “best to strike while the iron is cold,” which is what they’ve let happen here. The iron is cold with Fury-Joshua. Oleksandr Usyk is in large part to blame, as he has both scalps, but then so is Deontay Wilder — and that word “arbitration,” which I’m told means “anti-fun” — as well as the promoters themselves, and Fury, whose footwork as a businessman is quicker these days than his footwork as a fighter. 

If this weekend reminded us of anything, it’s that they are older, too. Joshua is 36 and Fury will be 38 by the time they meet. Muhammad Ali was 38 when he fought Larry Holmes, and what happened there wasn’t something anybody needed to see. In fighting as in life, expiration dates change the dynamic considerably. If you’re pouring out old milk, it’s hard to get past the curdle.

I guess this kind of thinking is a summertime theme, as even in MMA the plans we had for some of our twilight idols feel a little … to put it nicely, outdated now. Earlier this month Conor McGregor injured himself while attempting a kick against Max Holloway in the opening seconds, which for him was a brutally mortal thing to do. He turned 38 just two days after blowing out his knee that night at UFC 329, which didn’t exactly make the long-awaited trilogy with Nate Diaz a festive thought. 

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In fact, when Nate Diaz got bloodied up and busted open by Mike Perry at MVP’s first MMA show back in May, any thoughts of that rubber match already felt borderline sadistic. The McGregor-Diaz rivalry, which we’ve held onto for a decade like an ace up our sleeves, belongs to a different day. 

Yet you get the sinking feeling that … once McGregor comes back from his latest injury and fights out the final bout on his UFC contract … awaiting him in the free world will be Diaz, who by then will either be 42 or 43 years old. The head, which deals with numbers and remembers McGregor and Diaz breaking the UFC’s pay-per-view mark at UFC 202, says it’s better late than never. 

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The heart should be screaming just the opposite.

Because we’ve seen some bad stuff with the “better late than never” matchmaking that can’t be easily scrubbed from the brain pan. When they wheeled the husk of Chuck Liddell out there for a trilogy fight with his rival Tito Ortiz, it was like watching a helpless uncle get looted. When Gina Carano came back to meet Ronda Rousey after 17 years out, it wasn’t the fight we’d been waiting for.

It was, in fact, exactly the fight many feared it would be.

That is, non-competitive, anticlimactic, and a little greasy. When the dust settled, the upshot of it all was that Rousey, who spent a decade in exile from MMA, could go out on a win.   

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There are other examples of fights taking place too late — when Jon Jones finally fought Stipe Miocic, it was as though Miocic was serving out a sentence — but nobody wants to read a 10,000-word column. Yet prizefighting is about the prizes, and some of the best prizes are to be found at the end of a career. 

Fury and Joshua are likely to meet later this year, at least six years too late. There was a strong need to see it for a long, long time, as it was one of the biggest fights that could be made. Back then they could hit, and shatter, anything within their reach.

But somehow, they missed the window.