Now over a week removed from their enthralling if hardly immortal Sky Sports Box Office carnival, Tony Bellew and David Haye refuse to leave us in peace.
In case you've been living under a rock (any room, by the way?) Bellew stopped a crippled Haye in the 11th round of an utterly bizarre contest at London's O2 Arena yesterday week, with the fighters' respective purses proving the event a massive financial success having drawn hoards of casual sports fans to their tv screens.
Haye ruptured his achilles in the sixth round of his heavyweight contest with Liverpool's WBC World cruiserweight champion, rendering him utterly immobile for the remainder of the contest. Despite the admirable survival instincts and heart displayed by the conversely abominable former heavyweight champion, Haye eventually succumbed to a combination of his debilitating injury and Bellew's timely assaults.
It could - and indeed should - be argued that Bellew's greatest achievement on the night was surviving the first five rounds with a man who had been expected to bomb him out in three. Ultimately, it took him five rounds to dispose of a borderline helpless Haye, not that you can blame the Liverpudlian for playing it safe on occasion given the nuclear power in his foe's brick fists.
Bellew is largely misunderstood by the baying public; his brash persona is not everyone's cup of tea, but he's regarded by most in the sport as a gentleman and family man away from the ring. Since the fight, his giddy reaction to surviving his bout with Haye relatively unscathed has been akin to that of a man who has just returned from a bungee jump, and that's not to disrespect Bellew, who's priority all along was to secure his family's financial future, which he did. There's an argument to be made, however, that it might be time to retreat from the headlines and enjoy his victory as opposed to continuously wax lyrical about it in public as if he's still in disbelief.
That argument grew stronger when Sky Sports for some reason opted to speak to both fighters on the one-week anniversary of the fight, which while it was entertaining, was far from the legendary encounter Sky have retrospectively made it out to be. Amidst the tirades of guff from Bellew in particular, one quote from the victor beamed brightest above the swamp of bullshit; he claimed he didn't even realise Haye was injured during the fight:
I had no idea he was injured - I thought he was tiring, round-by-round.
If I knew he was injured I would have really put my foot on the gas.
While fighters themselves have an entirely different, adrenaline-fuelled view of the fight than the rest of us, it seems highly unlikely that Bellew didn't notice Haye hobbling from rope to rope for the bones of five rounds, particularly when he absolutely did see Haye violently turn his ankle and retreat to the ropes in the sixth round, and visibly acknowledged it.
#Bellew 's face as he realises #haye is injured #HayeBellew pic.twitter.com/bzBndp1Rk0
— Phil Owen (@flowin74) March 4, 2017
It strikes an even more unusual claim when, later in the same interview, Bellew mentions noticing Haye 'buckling', albeit in the 11th round:
When I stopped him, and put him through the ropes, I knew what I'd done to him. I said to him in the 11th 'David, stop, just stop'. I saw him buckle. I looked at Shane McGuigan and I said 'stop it'.
I saw a man hurt, and I wanted to help.
Bellew would have emerged from the interview with more credit if he simply admitted he didn't want to 'put his foot on the gas' due to Haye being one of the hardest-hitting boxers on the planet, and his own chin not exactly renowned for its granite-like durability.
But then again, a bit of chicanery goes a long way in a sport where a non-title event between two athletes of different weights sells 19,000 tickets in a matter of seconds, and generates £13m gross revenue.
