Joe Joyce: I'm the worst smack talker in boxing – but my fists make up for it'

Hype and boxing – especially heavyweight boxing – go hand in hand. Mike Tyson infamously said he would eat Lennox Lewis’s children while David Haye declared he would beat Jean-Marc Mormeck like “Rodney King in the LA riots”, but Joe Joyce can barely put a line together to ‘smack talk’ his opponents. 

In fact, it has become ‘a thing’. His best effort in recent times was calling rival and former GB amateur team-mate Anthony Joshua “a glass cannon”. It has been no different this week as ‘The Juggernaut’ Joyce prepared to face China’s Zhilei Zhang at the Copper Box, on the Olympic Park, on Saturday night.

Nary a word between the two 6ft 6in tall, 18-stone heavyweights, and besides, it might have been lost in translation this week on the man known as ‘Big Bang’ from Henan Province. Zhang, a gentleman bruiser himself, speaks little or no English.

“I'm just not that good at getting into my opponents with words, or smack talk. I'd much rather do it with these two, in the ring,” the towering Joyce explained to Telegraph Sport, raising his two huge fists to illustrate the power which has stopped all but one of his 15 opponents. 

‘I’m not ready to flick the switch until I walk to the ring’

Yet Joyce is quickly becoming a cult figure for his quiet ways outside the ring; and his fearlessness against anyone inside it.

“I've tried, I even did a skit for BT Sport with Susie Dent [in which at a mocked-up press conference Joyce produced a cascade of words like a swallowed thesaurus], but in real life, I'm not ready to flick the switch until I walk to the ring,” added Joyce, who also has other skills on canvas: He graduated with BSc degree in fine arts at Middlesex University in 2017, and still paints.  

It is another of Joyce's unique selling points, another peek inside his inner world. When there is time, he told me, there will be an exhibition – but that will come ahead of his world title fight. 

He has already had displays with the Art of the Olympians foundation. Joyce holds the WBO Interim heavyweight title, and contests with Tyson Fury, Deontay Wilder, Anthony Joshua or Oleksandr Usyk are all mouth-watering prospects, if he can triumph in ‘the bang with Zhang’ in east London.