Anthony Joshua has no regrets about confronting a pair of university students for abusing him and insisted: ‘I don’t take s*** from anyone.’
The 32-year-old, two-time heavyweight champion was speaking for the first time about the incident, at Loughborough University, when a group of drunk students began shouting abuse at him from what they thought from the safety of their halls of residence.
Joshua fights Oleksandr Usyk on August 20 in rematch after losing his WBA (Super), IBF and WBO titles last September. He’d been at the University to check out the boxing facilities in preparation when the incident occurred one night.
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He said: “When people are intoxicated they are not their normal selves, alcohol does not help. But I am a normal person and I have good and bad days. You cannot expect me to be different to anybody else because of what I have to lose.
“You could take it all, take everything I have, and I will still be the same man. I don’t act a certain way because I want to keep what I have, I am just who I am.
“If you cross me, you are crossing the wrong person. I don’t take s*** from anyone, that’s No1. And those students were not kids, they were 6ft plus. I showed them so much respect when I first got there.
“I bought them all 100 pizzas every weekend, I try to do what I can for all people and they are uni students. So one night I couldn’t sleep at 3am so I went for a walk.
“The reason I had to address them was that their block and my block were next to each other and they couldn’t get comfortable calling me names from a window.
“I told them ‘I am here to work, I am not playing games with anyone and they were crossing the wrong person’.
“I also feel sorry for any student that might need to walk past that window and feels like they can’t because they are afraid of getting abused or threatened.
“There were four or five of them and that’s the only reason I dealt with them in that fashion. I told them that, if they see me on my own again and they want to shout that s*** at me, I will break your jaw.
“We left it at that and I spoke to them afterwards and we shook hands.”
