Let the discourse over the stoppage in Fabio Wardley’s 11th-round TKO over Joseph Parker continue.
Frank Warren, Wardley’s promoter, has weighed in on the matter, telling Fight Hub TV “that was a spot-on stoppage.”
Naturally, a promoter with an obvious rooting interest in the matter would be expected to feel this way. (Wardley is now in negotiations to fight heavyweight king Oleksandr Usyk.) But that doesn’t mean Warren’s point is necessarily invalid.
“In the second round, the gumshield went out, and the referee stopped the action, and at the end … [Parker] wasn’t throwing any punches back,” Warren said. Indeed, under heavy fire in Round 2, a hurt Parker spat out his mouthpiece, giving himself a brief respite. And the entire fight was brutal, with both men throwing and absorbing punishing blows throughout. A single moment in the second round doesn’t necessarily justify the stoppage nine rounds later, though, even if it was proof Wardley could hurt Parker.
“One of his best friends in boxing, Tyson Fury, was sitting there, and has come out publicly and said it should have been stopped,” Warren added. Assuming Warren is talking about a 57-second clip of Fury posted to Ring Magazine’s account on X, this is also true. “It’s heavyweight boxing,” Fury said. “You can’t go swimming and not get wet. … [Parker] got wet and the referee jumped in. A few unanswered shots, and that’s what it takes. It’s heavyweight boxing; you can get caught. I know all about getting caught.”
Fury certainly does. He also knows something about unanswered shots; Oleksandr Usyk threw 18 of them, many of which landed, in the ninth round of their first fight. (That sequence began with a brutal left hand that hurt Fury badly.) Though unrelated, there seems a good case that Fury was lucky not to be stopped when Parker was, or at least that he was fortunate that Usyk’s salvo came at the very end of a round, while Wardley still had plenty of time to work after hurting Parker in Round 11.
Warren claimed that neither Parker nor trainer Andy Lee has complained about the referee’s decision. But that’s not the case. After the referee waved off the bout, Parker protested the stoppage. He showed grace in not criticizing the referee directly, but in press interviews he said repeatedly that he felt fine when the ref intervened. Lee was also even-handed in his analysis, but he noted that not all of Wardley’s shots were landing, suggesting he thinks the fight could have gone on. These responses may not be full-blooded condemnations of the stoppage, but they certainly aren’t endorsements.
The strongest point Warren makes on the topic is the salvo of unanswered punches at fight’s end. Parker was hurt at the end of Round 10, and he spent the final seconds of the stanza trying to survive. Then, midway through the 11th, Wardley hurt Parker again and went for the finish. By one unofficial count, he threw 42 punches, the last of which drew the stoppage, with Parker throwing only three in return.
At the end of such a grueling fight in which Parker had already been hurt multiple times, jumping in after Wardley began rolling downhill with so little resistance certainly seemed justified. Although those last few punches didn’t land squarely – and Wardley began to look tired towards the end of that blitzkrieg – plenty of others did.
“It wasn’t the best stoppage – timing was a little bit off,” Boxing Hall of Famer and current commentator Tim Bradley said in a more measured take on his YouTube channel. “However, it was a good stoppage.”
Like Warren, Bradley cited the early moment in which Parker was hurt, spit out his mouthguard and got a reprieve. He also criticized the referee for not warning Parker to throw more punches before he stopped the fight – and had harsh words for Parker, who elected to absorb all of Wardley’s blows rather than clinch or take a knee.
That said, Bradley thought the fight was only going to end one way: “Parker was going to go to sleep,” he said. “Whether it was that round or the next round. Parker was extremely exhausted. … He didn’t fight back. There was 20 or 30 unanswered punches before he was able to swing back with a couple shots.”
So Warren, despite the conflict of interest, made some salient points about the stoppage. They just hold a bit more weight coming from someone other than the promoter of the fighter who did the stopping.
