With ex-champ Tyson Fury seemingly out of the picture due to retirement, Turki Alalshikh, the chairman of the General Entertainment Authority of Saudi Arabia, posted on Twitter that he now intends to make a different battle of ex-champs, Anthony Joshua vs. Deontay Wilder. Alashikh's tweet read: “I want to see Joshua and Wilder now. If Tyson is not available, why not Joshua and Wilder?”

 

Fury, age 36, announced his retirement in an eighteen-second video posted on social media on Monday: "Hi everybody, I'm gonna make this short and sweet. I'd like to announce my retirement from boxing. It's been a blast. I've loved every single minute of it. I'm gonna end with this: Dick Turpin wore a mask! God bless everybody, I'll see you on the other side." The cryptic reference to Turpin is unclear but Turpin apparently was a British highway robber in the 1700s who became immortalized in a famous novel that was written in the 1800s. Time will tell whether Fury, coming off two competitive losses to Oleksandr Usyk, will  remain retired or whether this is a bargaining ploy.