Dillian Whyte, Joe Joyce and the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the brilliant 2004 film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry, returned to UK cinemas this week, reminding us of both the power of memory and the freedom and tragedy of erasure.    

The same day it played in my local cinema, heavyweights Joe Joyce and Dillian Whyte just so happened to be appearing at a press conference in Manchester, where they not only sold their fight on April 5 but also explored many of the same themes: notably trauma, memory, and the sheer bliss of a spotless mind.

“His [Joyce’s] main defense is to keep getting hit until you get tired and then he tries to knock you out,” Whyte said on Monday. “That’s his main defense. But it doesn’t work, bro. That’s why when you get asked a question, there’s like a 15-second silence before you answer. Clearly it’s not working. That’s why you blank out and go, ‘Errrrr… yeah.’ It’s not working. It’s all good now, but 10 years from now… Jesus Christ. You’re going to go to your house, the sat-nav will say you’re home, but you’ll be like, ‘I don’t live here.’”

“Maybe,” said Joyce in response. “But I’ve always been like that. I’m used to it. It’s good with the sat-nav. It makes it easier. You don’t have to get out the A to Z and all that.”

It was at that point Whyte burst into laughter and together they made light of what, on the face of it, is a quite serious subject and a fear of many who receive punches to the head for a living. 

Perhaps, for them, it was the best way to tackle the issue without having to look inwards or consider the true price of the damage that has been done to them both. Or perhaps, for Joyce, the damage, or simply his personality, will not allow him to think about such issues on any deeper level. 

When, for instance, it was explained to him, by his next opponent, that the reason for his stuttering and inability to answer a question with haste is due to his questionable defense, Joyce just said, “I’m buffering,” whereupon more laughter was heard in the room.

In truth, it was a good line, albeit one with some rather dark subtext. It was certainly better than Whyte’s earlier line about Joyce being so boring he is the only man he knows who can “put coffee to sleep.” It also showed that Joyce, as well as self-deprecating, retains, at 39, some sharpness, as well as an understanding of both his own reality and the ways of coping with it. 

For Joyce, ignorance truly is bliss. Without it, he would find it difficult to fight the way he does and he would have found it difficult on Monday to listen to Whyte’s comments without either retiring on the spot or picking up the table at which they sat and throwing it at Whyte in anger. 

Indeed, while some heavyweights might become unnerved and unsettled by an opponent’s concern, there was a sense with Joyce that the conversation regarding damage did no more than bring him and Whyte closer. In Whyte’s concern, Joyce was able to find a hint of camaraderie. Meanwhile, Whyte, instead of going for the jugular, eventually called Joyce a “good guy” and said it was impossible for anybody to hate him. You knew then that his concern, rather than an attempt to get under his opponent’s skin, was in fact genuine. 

Whyte himself is hardly slick, by the way, nor a heavyweight impervious to both short- and long-term damage. In fact, there is every chance that much of what he said to Joyce could have been merely a projection of his own concerns and insecurities. 

For Whyte, 31-3 (21 KOs), isn’t just 34 fights into a hard professional career. He has also been knocked out – badly – three times (by Tyson Fury, Alexander Povetkin and Anthony Joshua) and is now 36 years of age. He is one defeat away from possible retirement and is, like any boxer, one punch away from retirement being an even scarier proposition than it already is. 

Is it any wonder, therefore, that the dangers of the sport are larger in his mind at this stage of his career than they have ever been? Even if using Joyce, his next opponent, as the target or the trigger, he himself will not be oblivious to his own damage and deterioration. He will just deflect, that’s all. He will look for a man in a worse state than him and use them to perpetuate his own necessary delusion. 

To fight, you see, a boxer must forget to some extent. They must forget their previous setbacks, they must forget their humanity, and they must forget, or just leave behind, any fear or real emotion. They must also forget what can potentially go wrong in a ring, both to them and to their opponent. Sometimes, especially when starting out and then again towards the end, it is imperative that a boxer calls upon a certain ignorance just to get them from the changing room to the ring. Their mind, at that moment, must be almost spotless, with much of its history sanitized, if not wiped. 

Whyte, for his part, is as well-versed in this practice as anyone. If in doubt, just watch his interview on DAZN shortly after Monday’s press conference in which he said, “I want to fight three times this year. I need to be busy because inactivity has killed my career over the last couple of years. It’s been fight, a potential fight, and then nothing… it’s very hard. It’s like I’ve been walking the wilderness in my mind. I have been training, but it’s different. I’m just training to be mentally sane instead of training for a purpose.”

Of course, anybody familiar with Whyte’s career, or simply the last two years of it, will know that the primary reason for the Londoner’s inactivity, both recently and historically, owes to his tendency to post positive tests for performance-enhancing drugs. They will be just as aware that had Whyte posted a negative test in 2023, he would have fought Anthony Joshua in a money-spinning rematch that August. 

That never happened, alas, and now, with enough time having passed, there is a feeling that Whyte wants to forget the Joshua rematch was ever scheduled in the first place. That, after all, is often the only way of coping with either rejection or the disappointment of missing out. It is also the only way that Whyte can tempt others to forget, move on and pretend like nothing happened, as so many, including his interviewers, are apt to do.

In that respect, he may have found the perfect ally and enabler in his next opponent, Joe Joyce – a man either too nice to say something, too slow to say something or just too damaged to remember.