Billy Joe Saunders is doing his best to be headline fodder these days.
Two days after the super middleweight titleholder apologized for posting a disturbing video joking about inflicting physical harm to women, the British Boxing Board of Control, the regulatory body that oversees professional boxing in the U.K., suspended the boxer’s license.
In the video, Saunders explains how men can deal with their frustrations with women during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic that has forced citizens around the globe to stay indoors.
“If your old woman is giving you mouth and you try to be patient, you try to be calm, but after the seventh day or sixth you’re about to explode,” Saunders says, before ripping a hard one-two on the heavy bag. “So, as she comes in, she’s just about to say something and you explode and hit her on the chin.”
That didn’t go over well with the BBBofC.
“The British Boxing Board of Control having considered comments made by Billy Joe Saunders on social media have suspended his boxer’s licen[s]e pending a hearing under the Board’s misconduct regulation, at a time and venue to be confirmed as soon as possible,” the organization said in a statement on their website.
In a now-deleted tweet, Saunders, 30, offered an apology, saying that he would “never condone domestic violence. He Tweeted: “If I saw a man touch a woman I would smash him to pieces myself. Apologies if I offended any women.”
Saunders was projected to face Canelo Alvarez on May 2 in Las Vegas, but the fight, along with scores of other cards worldwide, has been tabled as a result of the pandemic.
This isn’t the first time Saunders’ clownish behavior has run afoul of regulatory protocol. He was fined £100,000 ($132,000) by the governing body in 2018 for posting a video online in which he offered a female passerby drugs to perform a sex act on another person.