The End of Durinho — Burns Retires, Joshua/Fury Still Negotiating

THIS WEEK: Gilbert Burns is done. Joshua and Fury are still negotiating. And a kid from Canada just ended a legend's career in front of a crowd that will never forget it.

Gilbert Burns walked into the Canada Life Centre on Saturday night 1,000 percent confident he was going to win.

He said so himself, postgame, with the kind of blunt honesty that has always made him one of the more likeable figures in the sport. He wasn't posturing. He genuinely believed it. And then Mike Malott dropped him twice in the third round, Herb Dean stepped in at 2:08, and Burns laid his gloves down in the center of the cage.

Just like that. Fourteen years. Done.

Burns finishes 22-10, with a record of 15-10 inside the UFC — including a title shot against Kamaru Usman in 2021 that he nearly pulled off. He had five losses in a row heading into Winnipeg. Most fighters at that stage either don't get the main event or talk themselves into one more camp, one more diet, one more shot. Burns did both. He got the fight. He believed in it. And when it didn't go his way, he had the self-awareness to know it was time.

"If I cannot win at this level," he said afterward, "I don't want to do this."

That's not defeat. That's clarity. It's rarer than a knockout in this sport.

What Malott did is worth noting separately. He's 13-2, fights at home in Canada, and has now beaten a former title contender in the main event of a UFC Fight Night. There's a real run here if the matchmakers give him the right fights. Watch for him.

Last week, 60,000 people at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium watched Tyson Fury grab the microphone and call out Anthony Joshua ringside. Netflix confirmed the fight within hours. The boxing world went sideways.

This week, the picture is more complicated.

Joshua has received the contract. He hasn't signed it. Eddie Hearn confirmed that his side is in negotiations — with Turki Alalshikh in Saudi Arabia, the man who has become the de facto power broker of heavyweight boxing — for a two-fight deal. One tune-up fight in July. Then Fury in November.

Fury's side says he's signed. They want Joshua to stop stalling.

Joshua's side says he needs medical clearance before he can fight at all.

Here's the context the callout didn't mention: on December 29, 2025, a Lexus SUV carrying Joshua and members of his team hit a stationary truck on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway in Nigeria. Two of his closest associates were killed — Sina Ghami, his strength and conditioning coach, and Latif Ayodele, a trainer who had been with him for years. Joshua sustained minor injuries and returned to the UK days later.

The driver has since been charged with dangerous driving causing death.

That's what's sitting behind this negotiation. A man who lost two people he worked with every day, trying to figure out when his body — and maybe his head — is ready to get back in the ring against Tyson Fury.

The November timeline is real. Eddie Hearn says so publicly. But until Joshua clears medicals and signs, none of it is official. Boxing has been here before with these two — twice, in fact, both previous attempts at the fight collapsed. This time feels different because of the Netflix money and the Tottenham moment. But it still has to happen.

It hasn't happened yet.

UFC Fight Night: Winnipeg

Boxing — April 20

Mike Malott, after the fight, with his crowd still going insane around him, was asked what it meant to end Gilbert Burns' career in Canada.

He paused. And then he said he didn't think about it that way — that Burns decided to retire, that was Burns' moment, and it was Burns' call. He just fought.

That's the kind of thing that tells you who someone is. He won the biggest fight of his career in front of the loudest crowd of his life, and his first instinct was to give the retiring fighter his dignity back.

This sport produces some genuinely good people alongside all the noise. That was one of them.

— The Fight Docket