The Interview: Dan Rafael

On Fury vs Joshua, heavyweight greatness, Hall of Fame credentials, life after ESPN and building one of boxing's biggest Substacks

Dan Rafael and I go back many years. We have also had similar career paths in that we qualified as journalists and then cut our teeth on local newspapers away from the back pages as we waited for openings in the sport we were both most-passionate about.

Dan is the best-known boxing journalist in the world. He was formerly with USA Today, then moved to ESPN, and now his home is here, on Substack.

Tris Dixon: What a strange weekend in boxing. I’m not sure I’ve seen anything like it. Tyson Fury in Thailand, Anthony Joshua in Saudi Arabia. Usually when we have these sort of semi-finals, it’s an infomercial to set up something you can’t wait for. It didn’t really work, did it?

Dan Rafael: I mean, obviously it’s still a big fight because people want to see those two great names against each other in a fight that a lot of us have waited a long, long time for.

But I don’t think that these two appearances helped either one of them. I mean, that’s just being real about it. Fury kind of lumbered his way through a sparring session for seven rounds and then Mariusz Wach retired or his corner stopped the fight.

I didn’t feel like he was taking punishment where he had to stop the fight, but okay. I mean, I guess it is what it is. And not only that, but fighting in an unusual location like Thailand, not even being the main event of that card, I believe he was the second bout of the show and the rest of the show were local Thailand club fights, no broadcast. I know that Tyson had said that they were recording the bout for use on their reality series on Netflix although they’re certainly not going to show all seven rounds of the fight.

That was kind of weird. So I saw it. I’m sure like, if you’re a lunatic boxing person like myself, I went and found somebody that posted the full fight on their YouTube channel.

And then fast forward 24 hours later to Anthony Joshua. He gets dropped twice and looks like he’s about to get knocked out when the wind blows. And to his credit he came back and he got a knockout against a fighter that, in my opinion, was just abominable matchmaking.

Why would you take a fighter like Anthony Joshua, known to have some chin problems, coming off of the layoff, the mental anguish of what occurred with his friends and put them in that kind of fight with a guy who has no other possible way to win unless he can land the big bomb? And he did exactly that and came within a whisker of winning. And so it was made to me very, very clear that although Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua had been great heavyweights and are the dominant forces of this era, other than Usyk, both probably going to be Hall of Famers someday, they’re at the end and it showed every bit of that this past weekend.

Did you go from one to the other though, after Fury, did you think, ‘Oh, he doesn’t look good, this is Joshua’s now,’ and then after Joshua’s, go back to Fury and think, ‘Oh no, I think Fury wins that one’?

I mean, I’ve always sort of gone back and forth about it. I feel like that the more talented fighter, just skill for skill is probably Fury, but punch for punch, Joshua was the bigger puncher.

I know that Anthony has been knocked out in the past. Fury has never been stopped, but both guys have been on the floor. And many times. I went and I counted it up. I don’t know if maybe I’m off by one or two, but by my count, Anthony Joshua has been on the floor 11 times in his career and Tyson Fury has been on the floor seven times in his career and with any other referee in the history of boxing should have a knockout loss on his record in the first fight against Deontay Wilder [when Jack Reiss allowed Fury to continue].

So they’re both extremely vulnerable. And so if anybody can land a big shot, when they finally fight each other, that could be the big difference.

I’m not trying to sell it, but do you feel like now they’re as evenly matched as they’ve ever been? Because there was a big period of time when Fury was going through maybe the Wilder fights and Joshua was getting over the Andy Ruiz defeat where I would have lent strongly towards Fury.

Yeah, that’s fair. I mean, I still probably make Fury the slight favourite, but it’s kind of a pick ‘em fight.

They both have the power to knock the other guy out. Both guys could get knocked out. It’s a fight that we should have seen several years ago.

Anthony Joshua almost cost himself another huge fight that people wanted to see. And it was not Anthony Joshua’s fault the previous time, but not that long ago, they had a signed contract for Deontay Wilder after a long, long time with them having gone all those years without fighting each other. And finally they signed a contract.

They’re on the same card. Anthony Joshua gets a victory against Otto Wallin. And then in the previous fight on that card, it was Deontay Wilder taking a loss and ruining that fight.

He [Joshua] was almost within a whisker of losing two of the big ones in terms of getting them made. I hate tune-up fights.

I understood why Joshua took one, given what happened in December. I didn’t think that Fury necessarily needed one when he just fought in April. Tune-up fights are horrible.

Well, there are some that spring to mind that would have been there in your tenure with Baldomir beating Judah and Felix Sturm pushing Oscar De la Hoya to that very controversial one.

I remember, I wasn’t covering boxing at the time, but I spoke about this exact one when I did my own podcast with my partner TJ on Sunday night, I was thinking when Joshua was getting off the floor for the first knockdown, the first thing that came to my mind was Tommy Morrison with a signed contract for $8 million to fight Lennox Lewis and he decides to dick around and take a so-called hometown warmup fight in a defence of the WBO title against the unknown and completely obscure Michael Bent.

And like two minutes later is knocked out in the first round. And there goes the Lennox Lewis fight and the title shot against the WBC champion.

So as things stand, is Fury-Joshua a superfight?

It is for Britain. It is for boxing fans. It drives me crazy that there’s a movement for those who are financing it to insist that it takes place in the United States. As an American, I’m almost embarrassed that we’re trying to take this fight from you guys, because this fight belongs at Wembley Stadium or at the very least in the indoor stadium in Cardiff that can hold like what, 80-85,000 people. Somewhere in the United Kingdom.

We don’t really want this fight. We don’t need this fight for whatever reason. The powers that be, I think mainly Netflix, wants to fight here for our time zone.

I can’t tell you how many people that I’ve heard from on my social media, fans as well as people in the business who I’ve talked to or texting me or whatever, think it’s absolute lunacy for anybody to insist that this mega British fight between two huge names takes place in America. I mean, it will sell tickets here.

I guess if they put it at the MGM Grand or the T-Mobile Arena or Madison Square Garden, they’ll sell the tickets. And probably a lot of it will be the Brits that come over to buy those tickets the way they did when Anthony Joshua fought here against Andy Ruiz the first fight, and many Brits came out when Tyson Fury was fighting all three bouts against Deontay Wilder. But this is not an American fight.

We don’t need this.

Do you feel like it’s lost some of its lustre for that casual American audience now?

I don’t think there ever was an audience from the casual American.

Wow. Okay.

I mean, you follow boxing, you know, Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury, and you’re interested to see these two big names and long-time stalwarts of the top of the heavyweight division finally fight after a long time of not having done it. I view this fight as sort of like, however you want to date the era, but this is like the last man standing of this era of what I feel is a very good heavyweight era… Joshua Wilder, Fury, Usyk, and a few others that are more on the periphery.

I’ve said this before, the 1990s had that great era led by Lennox Lewis and ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield and Michael Moorer and Riddick Bowe and the second career of George Foreman and plenty of others, Tommy Morrison and Razor Ruddick and Ray Mercer. And they all kind of mostly fought each other through the years and that petered out.

And when Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson finally fought, although not in the nineties, briefly into the 2000s, that was the last fight. And when that fight was over, it sort of closed the era. We’re at that point with this era, when Fury and Joshua will fight each other and perhaps around the same timeframe, Usyk and Wilder fight each other, that’ll close the book, on this particular era, which has been a very good one.

That version of Joshua that we saw this weekend, and I don’t want to ignore the personal strife he’s had to overcome to get to where he’s got to, but if you’re in the ring, you’ve got to be judged by how you are in the ring, I don’t think that version of Joshua beats Kabayel, Dubois, Itauma, maybe even Wardley and even maybe possibly Rico Verhoeven after what we saw Rico do against Usyk. I think there’s five to 10 fighters, maybe Hrgovic as well, that could beat Joshua. And if Fury’s legs are gone as badly as people are suggesting, I think it could be the same for them. I’m not sure these are two top five heavyweights anymore.

They’re probably there just on name, I guess, at this moment in time. I mean, Dubois already beat Anthony Joshua and did so in spectacular fashion, but I can’t disagree with you. Sometimes when people do ratings and things like that, you kind of give the more known commodity the benefit of the doubt, I guess.

I mean, Joshua, you look at the end of the day, he did win by spectacular knockout against Prenga.

Do you give them any credit for breaking Jake Paul’s jaw in two places and getting that knockout? I mean, he did what he was supposed to do even if it might have taken a couple of rounds longer than most people would have anticipated. Hard to say, but I don’t disagree with anything you said. There are definitely a lot of heavyweights out there that would probably beat both these guys at this point, but it does not change what they have done does not change their level of fame, what they’ve accomplished, and the meaning of them fighting each other, at least when they fight each other, whether it’s now or it was a few years ago, they’re at about the same stage of their careers.

They’ve seen their ups and their downs around the same timeframe. So they’re both kind of near the end so it’s still like an even fight.

Even if they had fought a few years ago when they were at a much higher level in their careers, it would have been an even fight. I still want to see it just for the sake of the history of this era of heavyweight boxing.

Is it like Lennox and Tyson now?

The difference though, between Lennox and Tyson, is that Lennox was the champ. Fury and Joshua, neither one of them are champions and that was a fight that Lennox badly wanted for his legacy. Tyson needed it because of financial reasons. Showtime needed it for financial reasons because they had spent so much money on loans to Tyson – it had to happen for a lot of different reasons.

And, of course, they were the two biggest names at that time. I mean, Holyfield was still there kicking around, but he’d already defeated Tyson twice. I don’t think this is quite the same as that fight, even though Lennox was champ, but both guys were obviously not at their best anymore.

But at the time it was the biggest revenue fight in the history of the sport. It’s going to be hard to assess that with Joshua and Fury, because there is no pay-per-view. It’s Netflix putting up whatever they’re putting up, I’m sure many tens of millions of dollars to do the event, but we’ll never truly know from a financial point of view, does it break a heavyweight record or anything like that? And by the way, if they do it in the United States, it has no chance to do that because the gate will not come close to what it would have been in Britain.

If you were going to scale it, what would you say from a 50-50 fight, which way would you lean and towards who?

I mean, I have to lean slightly towards maybe Fury, 55-45, maybe something like that. But it’s a toss-up type fight and they’re both very vulnerable.

The only thing is, though, it’s not the kind of fight where the guy who wins, you’re like, ‘Oh, now he’s going to go on and fight for the heavyweight championship.’

I guess the guy who wins could get a shot just because of their name value and they’ll have beaten the other guy with name value, but it’s not the type of fight where you’ll feel like the guy who wins is truly like the next top contender to get the shot.

Joshua’s mantra going into this was beat Prenga, beat Fury and then unify. That’s what they wanted to do. It looks borderline impossible now, right?

I mean, nothing is impossible, I guess, but I’d be quite surprised by that. And I don’t know how much longer either guy has their heart on fighting after this Fury, even though he’s retired like a thousand times, he’s said how he just wants to keep fighting and fighting and fighting.

I think we’ll see him probably kicking around a bit longer than Anthony Joshua when it’s all said and done. I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but in the meantime, I’m not really trying to piss on the fight or anything like that, I am still personally looking forward to it. I’m just a little irritated by the length of time it took to make it and the fact that they downgraded it to some degree because of their pretty rough performances over the weekend.

These four guys, Usyk, Wilder, Joshua, Fury… say they all retire a year apart from each other. Are they all first ballot future Hall of Famers?

I mean, Usyk a hundred percent is no question about it. And I would say that Fury and Joshua probably are. Wilder, it’s going to be a tough one on him.

I covered Deontay’s entire career. I was at his pro debut, covered a lot of his championship fights, covered him for years and years. I’m just not sure he has the resume to get in. And when I say that it’s kind of weird because you would think the guy that was the WBC heavyweight world champion for five years, made 10 title defences, more title defences than Mike Tyson, for example, that it wouldn’t be a question mark. And the reason is because, and it’s not his fault, he was not in a division at the time that had a top level of premium opponents.

And then you look at what else Deontay has on his record. He lost the two fights against Tyson Fury and the first one was called a draw.

A lot of people felt that Tyson Fury was the rightful winner of that fight. So I’m not sure what’s the win that Deontay can kind of hang his hat on that’s actually Hall of Fame worthy other than a certain amount of longevity as a WBC champion. It’s a tough one.

But there’s no question Usyk is a first ballot Hall of Famer. And I would say if you said to me, rank them, it’s Usyk, it’s Fury, it’s Joshua, and then probably Deontay.

Although you can argue Joshua too. He’s got a great resume. He’s beat a lot of good guys.

People kind of, they forget wins against really quality guys. I mean, the Joseph Parker victory and the Klitschko victory and others as well.

It’s been an interesting era. And I think history will remember it fondly. I remember there have been heavyweight eras where they’ve been criticised and then they are later remembered through almost rose-tinted glasses. I think this era’s had something for everyone. I think we just would have liked this fight maybe two or three times instead of once at the end.

Yeah, it’s hard to disagree with that. I mean, the thing about when people assess the eras is they call it late. I’m proud to say that I have consistently for years talked about ‘when it’s over, you’ll look back on the current era…’

And I talked about the guys I mentioned with the big four plus a few other guys and people will look back and say, ‘Damn, that was a good era.’ I think you can really argue it might be like, what, maybe the third or fourth best era in the history of heavyweight boxing.

Most people look at the seventies of a Foreman and Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier and the other supporting contenders. And then, of course, the nineties that we talked about just a little while ago with the led by Lennox and Holyfield and Tyson and Riddick Bowe and a bunch of other guys, the older version of George Foreman. But this one, I think is not that far away.

A lot of these guys fought each other and made tremendous fights. A lot of guys that were evenly matched guys who came in with big amateur accolades and were willing to fight the other top guys. We had plenty of great action fights with all these men.

I introduced you as the King of Boxing Substack at the start. Obviously as someone who’s recently arrived here, was it a brave decision for you to do?

No bravery at all. No.

Okay. Because, because even now there’s like a little reluctance from people to step away from legacy media. I know your time at ESPN had come to an end, but I’m sure there were offers and there have been offers.

Well, when my contract was not renewed at ESPN, I thought to myself, the silver-lining was the end of my contract was right at the beginning of COVID.

So I wasn’t missing anything for the first like year, because at least for the first three or four months, anyway, nothing was happening in boxing. So I was thinking to myself when that happened, listen, being honest, I made a lot of money at ESPN. I got no complaints ever once about my paycheck on the way out the door. I was told by one high-ranking executive that I was making too much money. And I’m sure that was part of the reason why my contract was not renewed, but that’s neither here nor there.

The point was my intention was on the next day, I had said to my wife, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, but we’re fine financially. I’m going to relax. I’m going to take the spring, maybe the summer off.’ COVID was happening.

There was nothing going on and I’d figure out what I want to do. And thanks to some people that I’ve known in this business for a long time, within a few days, people called and said: ‘You want to write some stuff?’

I never had heard of Substack at all.

I didn’t even know what it was. The reason I think I heard it was because my mother mentioned it to me. She had read an article about it, maybe in the New York Times or in some story or saw something on TV about it.

And, and she’s like, ‘You should check this out. It might be something that could work for you.’ I was like, ‘Well, let me check.’

Asked my wife, she said: ‘Yeah, I know what Substack is.’ And she subscribed to like a couple of newsletters, not about boxing, but about other things that she was interested in. And then I come to realize as I’m doing my research that two of my old buddies from my days at ESPN, my good pal, Mark Stein, who was the legendary NBA writer and my old wingman for many fights, I covered for ESPN, Arash Markazi, who had left ESPN, had gone to the Los Angeles Times and then had a struck out on his own.

They had Substack, so I asked them for counsel, ‘How was this working for you guys? What do you think?’ And I got some ins and outs from those guys and I was like, ‘You know what, let me give this a try.’ So I created it in like January 2020 or 2021. I forget what year it was. It was free.

And I just wanted to kind of stay involved. I was still doing a bunch of freelance stuff. And it got to a point where I was like, ‘I can’t just keep doing this for free. I gotta make a decision. What am I going to do?’ And I was like, ‘I’ll offer a paid-plan also,’ and anybody who’s familiar with Substack, there’s a paid formula, most people have behind a paywall, but they offer some content for free just as part of the whole deal. And so I turned it as a paid product.

And Tris, let me tell you, I didn’t know if one person would buy a subscription or five people or a hundred people or a thousand people. It’s not like I went out and did market research. There were no focus groups.

I knew I had somewhat of a name within the business from my days at USA Today and ESPN. And that was obviously very helpful. And I can’t even explain in words, the pleasantness of my surprise that people were willing to support independent journalism, boxing or otherwise, and bought subscriptions to my product.

And I have been now doing it for six years and it is how I make my primary living. Even if I got rid of my other stuff, I do my podcasts and some other occasional freelance things I did, I can make a living doing it the way I’m doing it. So I’m thrilled and I’m happy. I tell people I don’t work for myself, but I really work for the readers.

They’re the ones that buy the subscription. And so, fortunately enough, people have done it and it’s worked out great for the last six years.

Were you an overnight success or like how long did it take? Because you’ve got more than 15,000 subs, right?

Now they’re not all paid, by the way.

For sure. I get that.

It wasn’t overnight. I’ve worked my ass off on this every single day for six years. And I did it for free for eight months before I ever even thought about making it into a paid product. Just because, in my mind, I was still weighing other opportunities, thinking about what else I might want to do.

I didn’t want to ask somebody to pay me their money and not give it my full attention. So I don’t want to like turn it into a pay product and do it half-assed. When I decided to make it a paid thing, and there’s still some things obviously that are not for pay, but you can still see plenty of stories and posts that are not behind the paywall, but once I determined, ‘I’m gonna make this available for pay, I want the people that put their hard-earned money to get their money’s worth, I’m there to give them everything I got.’

And so hopefully they keep with it. And so far, it’s been more of a success than I could ever have imagined. It’s a beautiful thing. It really is. It’s capitalism. It’s independence. It’s all that stuff.

With your history of legacy media and journalism, local journalism as well, let’s not forget where you’ve worked for smaller newspapers on the way through before you got to USA Today, so you’ve got that legacy background. Is it tough to embrace this new thing where you’re stepping away from the establishment and everything that you got taught on the way through in journalism, the structure, it’s no longer the one we existed in for two decades?

Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to be your own editor. Obviously I strive not to make mistakes, but inevitably you’re going to make a spelling mistake or you’re missing this, or you’re missing that.

And, you know, I write a story about Tyson Fury, forget to put his name in the story and I’ve got to go back and fix it, but it’s too late for your people who get the emails. You can change it on the website, of course, but the folks that already got your blast, it’s kind of too late. So I kind of struggle with that from time to time, but the tenets of journalism have never changed. It doesn’t matter if I’m working for ESPN or USA Today, places that have extremely high standards for their journalism or the local newspapers that I work for that I didn’t do boxing at. I learned the trade well before when I worked at small newspapers in places like Saratoga Springs, New York and Binghamton, New York.

And before that on my college newspaper and taking some college classes and learning journalism, those things have been pounded into me and driven me by my editors that I’ve had for my entire career when I worked for those outlets. That doesn’t just go away. I still hold myself to the same standards that any reputable journalism outlet would hold.

I try to make sure I’ve got my sourcing correct. I make sure I’m not going to libel anybody, and be as accurate as humanly possible. And I’ve been criticised by some in the boxing space that I’m sometimes too conservative when I’m going to go with a story because I’m not willing to be wrong, you know? I take humongous pride and always have, and this even goes back to my days at the paper at USA Today and at ESPN, is if I write something that I can be trusted. It’s not fake news. It’s legit, and I take great pride in that. And I want to keep that reputation and whether it’s on Substack or it’s on a normal mainstream press-type of thing, it doesn’t matter. But I’m doing my Substack.

I have seen some other boxing people come into this space. I wish everybody good luck, but I’m going to tell you it’s hard work, man. And to make money at it is really difficult, but I’ve managed to be able to do it.

Who was the last fighter to call you out, Dan? Obviously, you’re so well known that I’ve seen you cross swords with people for years. Who was the last guy who got onto you or the last big name who called you out on X for whatever reason?

That’s a good question. I have been called out by a lot of guys over there. I mean, it’s been consistent for the last few years. I can’t tell you the last time, but I’ve certainly had my ups and downs with Ryan Garcia, at times, no doubt about it.

And by the way, when he was telling me when he tested positive for the drugs, after the Devin Haney fight and that I was lying or whatever, every single thing I wrote turned out to be 100 per cent accurate. He did get suspended. He did test positive. He did settle with the commission… things along those lines. And I don’t say that because I have any beef with Ryan Garcia. I’ve known him for many years. I had a very good relationship with him.

I knew him since he’s basically a teenager and right around the time he was turning professional. So I don’t have no ill will towards him whatsoever, but that’s one guy. I’ve had my battles, but it’s not because I’m trying to be antagonistic to these guys.

You know the business. You’ve been around boxers for many years. Also that a lot of fighters and not just boxers, but managers and promoters and other people in the business, broadcasters, they have thin skins, and the thing I always found about the fighters, they have such bravery in the ring and they’re such hard men and women and they can deal with the physicality and the pain and all the things that go along with being a professional fighter, which I admire every single one of them that steps up into that ring, but when they’re outside the ring, if you have a mild criticism, they break into a thousand pieces.

They can’t take it. It’s just sort of always been an anomaly to me. Like they’re such tough people physically, but emotionally the smallest criticism just breaks them apart and they lash out and they can’t take constructive criticism.

Sometimes it goes a little beyond that, but it’s sort of weird to me. But I’ll say this, though, all the fighters I’ve ever had those sort of battles with for the most part, everything always ended up being cool. I had a four-year thing with Bernard Hopkins years and years ago, I was just texting with Bernard the other day. I had my battles with your buddy Carl Froch. I saw Carl Froch a few years ago, in Texas, at a Canelo fight when he was fighting Billy Joe Saunders and we’ve been cool for years. I love Carl. I mean, point is, life’s too short to hold those grudges. You know what I mean?

I would read that Substack story though, Dan, if you wrote something about these personal times you’ve been called out on social media.

I mean, there’s been times… Shannon Briggs tried to beat me up or tried to fight me at ringside one time. And James Toney probably would punch me in the face if I saw him today. Shit happens, you know?