When Daniel Dubois lost for the first time as a professional, back in 2020, the only thing worse than the loss itself was both the manner of it and the subsequent reaction to it.
To simply lose to Joe Joyce, a fellow unbeaten heavyweight, was no great shame. However, to lose the way Dubois did – down on one knee, waiting out the count – was considered sacrilege among disciples of the holy church of fight sports and he received much in the way of criticism as a result. Whether it came from fans or fellow pros, terms such as “quitter” were thrown at Dubois following that first loss and many suggested he had shown a chink in his own armour no amount of weight-lifting of bag-hitting would ever remedy. Quit once, they said, and you will do it again. It is in you, that urge to give up. In your mind. In your body. In your blood.
Since then, of course, Dubois has gone some way to proving his detractors wrong. He has won seven fights and in a few of them – notably against Jarrell Miller, Filip Hrgovic and Anthony Joshua – had to ride out a few storms to ultimately prevail. Against Hrgovic, the storm lasted a few rounds, during which Dubois was nailed repeatedly by right hands, whereas with Joshua the storm was brief – a matter of seconds – and served only to tee up his own fight-ending right hand in round five.
Even when he lost for a second time, Dubois escaped being called a “quitter”. On that occasion, against Oleksandr Usyk in 2023, he was simply out of his depth. He was outboxed, he was befuddled, and he was eventually broken down and put out of his misery in round nine. At worst, some claimed he had been finished by a jab – the suggestion being that he had crumbled perhaps a little easily – but there was still nothing like the backlash he felt when staying down on one knee with a fractured eye socket against Joyce. In Usyk, he had lost to a better man, that’s all. He could still come back. He was still respected; still a fighter.
Two years later, he fought Usyk again, this time at Wembley Stadium, and the aftermath of the fight would share more in common with the Joyce loss than Dubois’ first loss to Usyk. Stopped in round five, having been dropped twice, many have since Saturday either insinuated or accused Dubois of looking for a way out once he realised he could neither hit Usyk nor evade his smart counterpunches. They say that all Dubois was waiting for in round five was the right shot to make his exit plan appear legitimate, understandable.
In the end Dubois received his permission to leave in the form of a Usyk left cross: a hard shot, a heavy shot, a decisive shot. For most, those who shared Dubois’ concerns and sense of foreboding, it was every inch the curtain-closing punch. Yet not everybody was convinced. There were some, particularly fellow fighters, who felt that Dubois still had his wits about him and that he could have beaten the referee’s count if he had been that way inclined. They said that the clue lied less in the second knockdown than the first, which is when Dubois was seen shooting a glance to his corner as though looking for either advice or permission to give up.
Even if that’s wide of the mark, there was certainly enough ambiguity, following the first and second knockdowns, to reopen the case come Sunday morning. Better yet, there were now more eyes on Dubois and more ways for one to express one’s opinion on the degree of his pain. There were not only more platforms available but a legion of self-serving hosts and commentators on hand to ensure that his “exit plan” would be analysed in microscopic detail.
“He was still able to get up, I feel,” said former WBO heavyweight champion Joseph Parker, speaking to talkSPORT. “Even though he got knocked down off a heavy punch, he was still able to get up.”
“Does that mean you think he swallowed it?” said Simon Jordan, the show’s host, reaching for the headline.
“I think so.”
Lawrence Okolie, meanwhile, was a little more guarded. He too had boxed on Saturday’s show at Wembley Stadium – beating Kevin Lerena by decision – and was evidently warier of being walked on to a Simon Jordan punch.
“It’s hard to say,” Okolie, a one-time WBO cruiserweight champion, admitted. “I don’t know what he actually experienced on the ground. But he did seem cool by the count of ten. He was able to walk to his corner and so on. So I don’t want to say he swallowed it, but it was tough.”
As for Spencer Oliver, a former European super-bantamweight champion, his overriding emotion was one of confusion. He didn’t know what he had seen, but whatever he had seen was not something with which he was familiar, much less something relatable.
“I’ve not spoken to Don [Charles, Dubois’ trainer] about this, but I think he’s thrown the towel in because he’s recognised Daniel’s not getting up,” he said. “We’re gladiators. We go down and no matter what you’re getting up; you’re falling around, whatever. But Daniel looked like he was on focus. He was not looking at the corner. He was looking elsewhere. So he’s taking an instruction from someone. That’s what I’m thinking. I’m looking at him and I’m thinking he’s not going to get up. So Don Charles has taken that decision, and fair play to Don for doing this. He’s gone, ‘He’s not getting up.’”
Simon Jordan, by the way, thinking it mattered, was eager to have his say, too. “I was annoyed they threw the towel in,” said the former chairman of Crystal Palace Football Club. “This is the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world.”
Implicit in that statement is a belief that boxers should stick around longer when there is more at stake and that pain is something softened, if not entirely negated, by the size of the prize. In other words, according to Jordan, a professional boxer must earn their defeat in a fight of that magnitude, not merely accept it.
In some respects, the talkSPORT host is right, and is not alone in thinking this. Yet there will always be a level of unease one experiences whenever hearing a man who has never boxed before tell a boxer how they are supposed to behave or react to either individual punches or the pain of defeat.
That is not to say only boxers can comment on boxers, or on fights, but there are clearly some matters of the ring more alien to a dilettante than others. Relating to Daniel Dubois on Saturday, for example, is not a job for the casual observer who has never been punched, let alone defeated in the ring. It is instead a job for other people, those with first-hand experience – of feelings, not images.
Interestingly, too, most of these men or women with first-hand experience appear reluctant to comment on a boxer supposedly “quitting” and do so only when pressed by platforms realising the clickbait power of the word in question. In fact, even when they are forced to comment on the issue there is often a look of discomfort on the face of the boxer, as if they know they are breaking some sort of code, or simply on dodgy ground. Say too much and there is a fear that you might tempt fate; that your words will come back to bite you. Refuse to comment, however, and your own toughness is somehow challenged.
It is perhaps for that reason that retired fighters are always more comfortable venturing into that territory than active fighters. If nothing else, they have a lot less to lose.
“Daniel Dubois is a brilliant fighter on the front foot; he’s what’s called a flat-track bully in boxing,” said Tony Bellew, a former WBC cruiserweight champion, on Monday. Like Parker, Okolie and Oliver, he was also speaking with talkSPORT, who by now had the issue on the ground and were refusing to remove their knee from its neck. “When things are going his way and he’s landing punches, he’s an absolute nightmare for anybody, as we’ve seen in the AJ fight [Dubois’s stoppage of Anthony Joshua in September].
“But the minute you start to manoeuvre around him, make him miss a couple of times – and make him pay, by the way – he starts doubting himself; he starts feeling sorry for himself. And I’m sorry to use these words. This isn’t my opinion. This is a fact.
“What you’ve seen in Daniel on Saturday was a fighter who takes a really heavy shot, but doesn’t want to get up. When he gets into these really hard moments in fights, that’s when the real Daniel comes out – and the real Daniel doesn’t want to fight. I’m sorry to say that, and it sounds harsh and really bad, but that’s just the truth. And I’m a massive fan of him.”
It does sound harsh and it does sound bad, Bellew is right. But he is also right to voice this opinion because he has been there and he has done it. He has not only shared a ring with Usyk, Dubois’ conqueror, and gone out on his shield, or his back, but he suffered a variety of defeats – three in total as a pro – and never once engineered his own exit from a fight. Against both Usyk and Adonis Stevenson, to whom Bellew lost in 2013, he very much left the decision up to either the referee or his corner and was content to endure whatever pain he had to endure until the decision had been taken out of his hands.
Some will call that kind of behaviour brave, heroic, and expected of a boxer, while others might call it reckless, negligent, or short-sighted. Either way, fighters like Bellew, Parker, Okolie and Oliver earn the right to pass judgement on other fighters by virtue of them knowing how it feels and therefore having a greater understanding of what it is they have seen. Without that feeling, you couldn’t possibly know. You couldn’t possibly know what Daniel Dubois felt when his eye socket was fractured against Joe Joyce in 2020, nor could you possibly know how it felt to have every one of his mistakes punished by a stinging southpaw counterpunch in front of 90,000 fans on Saturday.
