IF YOU believe everything you read you may have been forgiven for thinking that Joe Joyce, the self-styled Juggernaut of the heavyweight division, was simply indestructible. The problem for Joyce was that he had started to believe it himself.
“Maybe I got caught up in the hype a little bit,” he tells Boxing News as he picks through the wreckage of his first defeat. “Maybe I was believing that hype about my chin.
“It’s hard when people are blowing smoke up your rear end all the time. It’s hard not to believe it too.”
However, the illusion was shattered at the Copper Box Arena in April when underdog Zhilei Zhang beat him up and stopped him inside six bludgeoning rounds which caused damage so bad to his right eye that the ringside doctor called the whole thing off.
No longer undefeated
