‘No Excuses Left’

After Dillon Danis suggested a rehydration clause would keep a fight with KSI from going forward, KSI’s manager announced the clause would be removed completely.

KSI vs. Dillon Danis is an odd duck of a celebrity influencer boxing match. Danis, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu specialist, has spent the last two years feuding with Jake Paul; however, a bad knee injury kept them from fighting. Now, Paul is way past Danis in the boxing world, so KSI is stepping in to try and gain some clout by beating an opponent Paul has already built up.

As for Danis, he was relevant for a hot second prior to 2020 when he was Conor McGregor’s jiu-jitsu teacher and an up-and-coming Bellator fighter, but these days he’s best known for being a Twitter troll. And even though this boxing match on KSI’s MF & DAZN X Series 4 card on Jan. 14, 2023, would throw him back into the spotlight, he sounds iffy about actually going through with the actual fight.

“It’s a lot of money to beat up a guy that doesn’t know how to fight, but I feel like this fight won’t happen,” Danis said in a recent interview with Chael Sonnen. “I think they’re starting to get scared. They’re trying to make weird things in the contract two weeks before. I feel like they’re looking for a way out and if it does happen like that, I don’t wait for nobody. I would jump on that Bellator card, I thinks it’s March 2 or 3.”

The issue in question? A rehydration clause.

“So the fights at 177 [pounds],” Danis explained They want me to be four pounds heavier the day of the fight by 4 p.m. So, the fights at 7 or 8 p.m and they want me to weigh in at 4 p.m the day of the fight only four pounds heavier or five pounds, something stupid,” Danis continued. “Every pound that I don’t make the weight on the second day I get a penalty which is very heavy for each pound. If I make weight the day before, why do I have to make weight again the day of the fight?”

Fortunately for those who want to see this fight, KSI’s manager, Mams Taylor, jumped on Twitter following the interview and said they were removing the rehydration clause so Danis wouldn’t have an excuse to pull out of the bout.

“Ok how’s this … even though you signed and agreed to the contract 2 months ago…. We will take out the rehydration clause entirely so you have no excuses left to back out now,” Taylor wrote. “Nowhere to run. Dillon Danis Let’s run it!”

He then took a shot at Jake Paul, whose December bout against Hasim Rahman Jr. was canceled after Paul claimed Rahman Jr. was planning on coming in overweight to gain an unfair advantage (details here).

“JJ will fight Danis who was well over 200 lbs in Austin, Texas. No rehydration clause!” Taylor wrote. “Unlike someone who canceled their fight for the same reason. Suck that ‘dweeb.’”

While they say there’s no such thing as negative publicity, it’s never a good thing when the biggest angle to an influencer boxing bout is whether it’ll actually happen or not.

Danis has spent two years saying he’d do all sorts of things, but he ended up doing nothing. He skipped out on the official press conference for the fight. It’s quite legitimate to question whether he shows up at all to fight KSI inside OVO Arena in in London, England. As of now, he’s got little more than two weeks to figure out a new excuse for ditching the bout.