Risk and reward: How Daniel Dubois trampled the path of most resistance

When Daniel Dubois was stopped by the great Oleksandr Usyk in August 2023, the young heavyweight and those around him felt at their lowest ebb.

His promoter Frank Warren and trainer Don Charles raged from the ring in Wroclaw, Poland, at the sense of injustice they felt at a punch Dubois had thrown that had dropped the defending champion being ruled low. The following day, when the paternal Charles and his then-assistant James Ali Bashir were available for interviews at their hotel, Dubois was nowhere to be seen, and was said to be distraught and being comforted by his father Dave.

The heart of the athletic, heavy-handed fighter once declared the future of the heavyweight division was, regardless of how the defining punch of the previous night’s fight was being viewed, being questioned. 

When in 2020 Dubois had little choice but to take a knee against Joe Joyce, as a consequence of suffering a fractured eye socket, criticisms of his heart were both unfair and premature. Three summers later, there was little question that his temperament had undermined him, regardless – and perhaps because – of him sharing the ring with the finest active heavyweight of them all.

“After that fight, I said to him, ‘That mental attitude is going to get you nowhere’,” Warren told BoxingScene. “Mentally, he wasn’t mature. He just wasn’t – and that happens a lot with the big guys. He had to toughen up. Forget about the referee – you’ve got to be your own referee in those situations. You’ve got to take it out of the referee’s hands.

“I felt he could win it. He allowed that to get to him, rather than disregard [the occasion and circumstances]. He was in the lion’s den, but he could have won that fight. He lost focus, and I think he got disheartened, and that’s not acceptable, and it’s not good enough. After the fight, I told him that. ‘You had that fight won.’

“On the night of the fight, I wasn’t quite happy with how the dressing room was. It was like a morgue, and I didn’t like that. I had to say – I tell them how it is – what they’re supposed to be doing and what’s expected of them. ‘That fight was yours to lose and yours to win.’ Up until Usyk fighting Tyson [Fury], that was Usyk’s toughest fight. He was disheartened, entirely, with the referee.”

When on Saturday, at Wembley Stadium, Dubois walks to the ring to fight Anthony Joshua, he will perhaps be confronting an even more intimidating fighter. Unlike, however, against Usyk, he will do so with the self-belief generated by his victories, as the underdog, over the previously undefeated Jarrell Miller and Filip Hrgovic – victories that disrupted the best laid plans, and that left the 34-year-old Joshua with little choice but to risk his reputation against someone until recently considered a pretender, at a time when Joshua and those around him had expected to have to prepare for Hrgovic instead.

“I think that fight [against Usyk] was actually the making of him.” Warren continued. “There’s not many at that level who have fought three undefeated fighters [in succession].”

Dubois, 27, and Charles worked together for the first time when they were preparing for Usyk. The sense of the most thankless of tasks was then extended to their preparations for Miller, an inferior fighter but a fight they accepted off the back of a defeat, and similarly to Hrgovic, another dangerous opponent he was expected to lose to, when they had had so little time to gel.

“He’s fought three undefeated fighters,” Warren said. “World-class fighters. Better opposition than ‘AJ’ has in his last three fights, no doubt about that, and had to dig deep. They’re all guys who’d give Joshua a problem.

“Don’s a very stable guy and given him a lot of stability; he’s got respect for Don, who’s done a good job for him. With that, the voice that he does listen to is his father’s. Knowing that, you can use him as a conduit and get what you need with tactics through. His old man’s a Svengali figure to him.”

The promoter, a both cautious and astute matchmaker – one often proven astute by his caution – will have known the risk that both the Miller and Hrgovic fights represented. Unlike against Usyk – even in the context of how troubled Dubois immediately was by what unfolded – defeat on either occasion would thereafter have left the lucrative picture formed by Usyk, Joshua and Tyson Fury beyond his reach. With Moses Itauma having replaced him as Britain’s – and Warren’s – most promising and exciting young heavyweight, he would have been left in the type of no-man’s land that, of all rivals, Joyce finds himself in following successive defeats by Zhilei Zhang that included him suffering an eye injury, and Derek Chisora then inflicting another defeat. 

Instead, Dubois fights Joshua at a time when he is considered capable of upsetting the fighter who represented the world’s leading heavyweight when Dubois was making his professional debut. In many respects, to revisit 2017 – when at Wembley, Joshua retired the great Wladimir Klitschko and when Dubois was being paraded by Warren and BT Sports as capable of reaching their rarefied level – Dubois is finally justifying the hype.

“At that time [he was Britain’s best heavyweight prospect],” said Warren, “and he was doing the business until – and I’m sure if that fight had taken place when it should have done, before it got pushed back because of Covid, I’m sure he would have come through – the Joe Joyce fight. He was in front on the judges’ scorecards and only had to stand up, but unfortunately he had an horrific injury.

“I felt that he would be the future of heavyweight boxing. He’s done extremely well; he’s done everything that was asked of him, and he’s done well coming through. He was a powerhouse; there were stories about him. 

“I was told by three people that were there that he knocked [Joshua] out [in sparring], and he was 17. What a big puncher he was; that he was phenomenally strong; how he was sparring with seasoned pros and how he was handling and hurting them. He was giving everyone problems. I heard he did the same to David Price. 

“He suffered an horrific injury, and a lot of the stuff that was being said at the time was a bit over the top. I just stayed on the programme with him; we did what we had to do and got him back into a situation where he wound up winning the WBA regular title and then in the ring with Usyk.”

There were two victories, over Bogdan Dinu and Joe Cusumano, with Shane McGuigan as Dubois’ trainer after the defeat by Joyce had contributed to the heavyweight separating from Martin Bowers. The opportunity to challenge the unremarkable Trevor Bryan for the lightly regarded WBA regular heavyweight title proved a higher profile occasion than was justifiable, largely on account of the nostalgia provided by the deteriorating Don King’s involvement with Bryan, who like Dinu and Cusumano was stopped with ease. Then followed the fight with Kevin Lerena, on the undercard of Tyson Fury-Chisora III. 

“I thought McGuigan got it wrong on the night of the Lerena fight,” said Warren. “He was stone cold in that opening round and he got caught on the top of the head when he wasn’t warmed up properly. 

“He had to show a lot of character that night, which he did do, and he had to grit his teeth. The big problem he had there was he tore his Achilles; he was out after that for months. 

“He done what he had to do there. It was good that he got up. He was in trouble, and he gritted his teeth.”

Three times Dubois went down in the opening round, and three times he returned to his feet, before impressively stopping Lerena in the third. But if he answered some of those questioning his chin, he provoked more questions about his abilities by, when sharing the ring with a fighter of the forgettable caliber of Lerena, so nearly being stopped. 

There then followed the unsettling fallout with his sister Caroline, a professional lightweight he is still not on speaking terms with, and partly as a consequence his separation from McGuigan and therefore move to Charles – more recently assisted by Kieran Farrell.

Whether the rebuilding process, post-Usyk, would have been anywhere near as rapid or dramatic as it has proved without the influence of the investment of the General Entertainment Authority – and Warren’s influence on the GEA – is unlikely, but if it is the promoter’s job to create opportunities for his fighter, then he has delivered as effectively as Dubois has ridden the significant risks.

“He found a bit of confidence [around the Miller fight],” says Warren. “He’s grown up, and matured. Mentally, he’s matured. He done a job that night [in December 2023] and showed how dangerous he is from the first round to the 10th round. That 10th round, when he caught him with that hook – he’s ‘gone’. 

“He showed a couple of things, that fight. He showed a bit of heart; he showed he’s dangerous at any time, and he showed he’s got a good engine.

“After that fight, the Hrgovic opportunity was there, and nobody was fighting Hrgovic. He was an avoided fighter; he had a very good amateur background. I really did fancy him to knock Hrgovic out. He’s young, he’s big, and I felt it was a win-win for him – the worst case was he was going to get some tremendous experience from it. 

“The first couple of rounds Hrgovic was moving well, and he was catching [Dubois] with a lot of right hands, which I didn’t like. But he gritted his teeth, then started throwing his own shots, caught him a couple of times – you can see there was a slight change in the way the fight was going; the momentum – after that he just got on top.

“The consensus is that Joshua’s going to beat him, so Joshua’s gotta live up to that. The pressure is on him.”