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Mike CoppingerESPN
Tyson Fury is planning a July return for a defense of his WBC heavyweight title, sources told ESPN, with London’s Wembley Stadium on hold for July 15 and July 22.
Former heavyweight champion Andy Ruiz Jr. is in the mix for the Fury fight, as is China’s Zhilei Zhang, sources said.
Zhang, 39, is coming off a major upset victory over Joe Joyce on Saturday; Joyce owns the contractual right to an immediate rematch and was considered the front-runner for a summer Fury fight before the sixth-round TKO loss.
Fury, Zhang and Joyce are all aligned with Frank Warren’s Queensberry Promotions, so it’s conceivable the rematch clause issue could be sorted if there’s a desire from all sides to match Fury with Zhang.
“Zhang has already expressed he wants to fight Fury in China,” Terry Lane, who co-manages Zhang with his brother, Tommy Lane, told ESPN. Zhang (25-1-1, 20 KOs) dropped a controversial decision to Filip Hrgovic in his previous bout. “We would love to make that happen one day. But the heavyweight division is very much all up in the air right now.”
Earlier this year, Fury and Oleksandr Usyk were closing in on a deal for an April 29 super fight at Wembley Stadium for the undisputed heavyweight champion. The negotiations collapsed at the 11th hour and left Fury and Usyk scrambling to plot their first fights of 2023. There remain talks to match Fury and Usyk in November or December in Saudi Arabia, sources said, but Fury (33-0-1, 24 KOs) isn’t interested in waiting one year to fight again.
Fury, 34, last competed in December, when he scored a 10th-round TKO victory over Derek Chisora in a stay-busy trilogy fight.
Usyk, meanwhile, is involved in talks for a summer bout in the U.K. against mandatory challenger Daniel Dubois.
That leaves Ruiz as the most viable available challenger — commercially and competitively — for Fury, ESPN’s No. 1 heavyweight and No. 7 pound-for-pound boxer. The 33-year-old Ruiz last fought in September, when he floored Luis Ortiz twice en route to a tight unanimous-decision victory.
Ruiz (35-2, 22 KOs) has an ardent following of Mexican American supporters and is a known commodity in the U.K. after he shocked Anthony Joshua in 2019 to win the unified heavyweight championship. Joshua defeated Ruiz later that year in Saudi Arabia to regain his three titles.