British pair's brawl heightens demand for fight in the ring but the only prize is bragging rights to London not the globe
Even as Dereck "Del Boy" Chisora was celebrating his freedom after seven hours in police custody, David "Hayemaker" Haye was still at large, possibly trudging the ice-slippery streets of Munich, darting from doorway to doorway, or maybe he was tucked up in a quiet suburban bar with a hood over his head, nursing a warm drink and a sore right hand, eyes and ears sharp for a tap on the shoulder from Herr Plod.
An episode of The Sopranos? No, just another weekend in the world of professional boxing, a business that hurtles with suicidal intent from one bizarre chapter to the next. In the aftermath of their scrap in the early hours of Sunday morning at what started out as a press conference high in the recesses of the Olympiahalle and ended with the police questioning Chisora about his threat to shoot Haye, the futures of the two eccentric Londoners became more intertwined than either had intended.
Only a little earlier, the willing and callow Chisora had put in the best performance of his career to lose on points over 12 rounds to the unconquerable WBC heavyweight champion Vitali Klitschko.
When the sun rose, the loser somehow believed he would be allowed to leave the city he had so shaken up in the dark but he was dragged back from a 10.30am flight to London and sat in a room to answer some tricky questions "down town". He and his trainer, Don Charles, spent all day in the company of their new friends before being allowed to fly to London, but will ultimately have to answer allegations of what the German judicial system describes as "simple assault". Haye, meanwhile, was still "on the run".
What was crystallising as police hunted for a large, loud British boxer who, more than likely, was staring at holes in the snow, was that, after the pair have been heavily fined and reprimanded by the British Boxing Board of Control, not to mention censured by the World Boxing Council, Haye and Chisora have no immediate alternative but to fight each other with gloves. They will do it in a ring, with no title at stake but considerable amounts of money and the right to walk taller on the streets of London.
It will be a fight for connoisseurs of tack, of which there is no shortage at any given time. They will dress it up as an eliminator for either Klitschko's belt or for one of the three owned by his younger brother, Wladimir. It will not matter.
Despite unctuous protests about good taste, there is an audience for this fight, a considerably bigger one than there had been before they came to blows in front of the cameras and some distance from a referee.
The handling of the post-fight ruck was poor. As burly security men hung back and the promoters sat silently by, Chisora marched on Haye, who gritted his teeth, held on to what those close to him say was a bottle of Desperados, a pale German lager tinged with tequila, and threw an inspired right hand that cracked into the side of Chisora's jaw.
Had he been so focused against Wladimir Klitschko when dancing to defeat last July, Haye might have had no need to gatecrash this press conference. As it happened, Haye turned it into a circus, which was his intention, and Chisora was dragged on to the punch, literally and metaphorically, before issuing his alarming lines of bad intentions with a gun.
The BBBofC will fine them, suspend Chisora's licence for an extended period, possibly six months, and will not give Haye much sympathetic consideration when he applies for the renewal of his licence.
Those sanctions will put them out of the picture for much of the summer, nixing their negotiating clout with each other and with the Klitschkos. But, after a period of convenient amnesia, they will collide again towards the end of the year.
Vitali Klitschko will continue to do outside the ring what he does with such telling simplicity inside it.
There is talk of him lining up the rising American heavyweight Seth Mitchell, who fought on Amir Khan's undercard in Washington in December and looked promising but, like 17-fight Chisora, a little underdone.
That is how bare the cupboard is. The Klitschkos have fought just about all the available talent. Wladimir's next outing is in defence of his three titles against the Frenchman Jean-Marc Mormeck in D�sseldorf on 3 March. Mormeck, Haye fans will remember, fell at his feet in Paris as a cruiserweight in November 2007. He has fought only three times since, winning against modest opposition.
There is the unbeaten Russian Alexander Povetkin, who defends what the WBA call their "world" title, against Marco Huck in Stuttgart on Saturday; and then a conveyor belt of unknowns or former contenders. The American Chris Arreola, much touted over there, took a round to knock out Eric Molina in Texas on Saturday night so, technically, remains in the picture, even though Vitali has already worked him over.
Which will lead us back to Haye and Chisora. The Klitschkos' hard-nosed promoter, Bernd B�nte, told me as we left the stadium around 2am that the brawl heightened rather than wrecked the possibility of either or both of them fighting either or both of his fighters.
He would not say that in a press conference because it would not set the right tone in a sport so sensitive to criticism but it had the ring of truth about it, a rare commodity in the fight game.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/feb/19/dereck-chisora-david-haye-bout
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