Via Brian Webber: WBO interim heavyweight champion Joe Joyce weighed in at 256 lbs on Friday at the weigh-in to defend his title against Zhilei Zhang in their bout this Saturday, April 15, at Copper Box Arena in London. For his part, Zhang is 6’6″ (24-1.19 KOs) tall and weighs 278 lbs. The event Joyce vs. Zhang will be shown live on ESPN+ this Saturday.
Joyce (15-0, 14 KOs) looked pretty tense the entire time staring as if he was trying to intimidate Zhang, but it didn’t seem to work. Zhang has too much amateur experience to be afraid of malicious looks. After the confrontation, Zhang appeared to want to shake hands, but Joyce quickly turned away before he could reach out.
“No one can complain about this war. Joe is ready for the top guys in the department, and when I say that, I mean Fury and Usyk. I think he’s ready to fight them now,” Carl Frampton said Monday about Joe Joyce.
“He could have sat and waited [for Oleksandr Usyk] and had a real gimme fight. This is a fight that I think he will win, but it is a tough fight for him. Zhang is a southerner; he’s big and he’s over 19 years old.
“He can really fight and is very tough, durable and strong. It’s a crack war, it really is. So you have to give Joe a lot of credit for getting this.
“I think he can beat both of you [Fury & Usyk]. Defeating them or not is another matter. I think Usyk caused him problems in the first place, but with Joe’s motives, I think he’ll meet Usyk at some point and start winning rounds and even potentially stop him.
“His engine is unbelievable, and his endurance is unbelievable. We saw a fight between Usyk and Joyce in WSB [World Series of Boxing], and Joe was headed for a couple of rounds, and then he went into the fight. He ended up winning a few rounds, so it was a pretty tight fight for five rounds. Now let’s expand it to more than twelve loops.
“Yeah, Joe has a chance to beat Fury and Usyk. I think he has a better chance of beating Usyk. I don’t think Joe Joyce was ever afraid of fighting anyone, never mind fighting anyone,” FFrampton said when asked about Joyce fighting Anthony Joshua.
“I imagine AJ was number 1 in the amateurs while he was there, and I imagine he will have some success with Joe in the amateurs. Shorter combat.
“I think if you were anyone in the heavyweight category, you wouldn’t want to fight Joe Joyce. He brings you a night of terror, and he is a terrible man to fight. The blows off the top of his head didn’t seem to affect him at all,” Frampton said.
