DEONTAY WILDER AND TYSON FURY. PHOTO: RYAN HAFEY / PREMIER BOXING CHAMPIONS.
The old adage “styles make fights” will be put to the test tomorrow night, when the most proficient boxer in the heavyweight division confronts its most powerful puncher, in the most eagerly anticipated rematch of recent decades.
Tyson Fury assumes the role of “boxer,” and not since Muhammad Ali has a heavyweight been so light on his feet or so elusive.
An exponent of the “sweet science,” he fights according to boxing’s original tenet: hit and don’t get hit.
Meanwhile, his opponent—Deontay Wilder, the World Boxing Council champion—has been touted as the fiercest puncher since Mike Tyson, since George Foreman, or perhaps even in the history of the sport. (A record of forty-three fights and forty-one knockouts corroborates this.
Of the two challengers who went the distance, the first, Bermane Stiverne, was knocked out in the first round of their rematch. The second opponent to hear the final bell was Fury, and he ended up on the canvas twice in their first fight.)
Observers seem to agree: Fury will either win on points, or Wilder will win by knockout.
Fury, ever the contrarian, has predicted a knockout in round two. His new trainer—if we are to believe what we have been told—has been helping him to sit down on his shots, and while it is true that Fury isn’t the hardest puncher in the division, nor is he as feather-fisted as his opponents like to make out.
Fury stands six-foot-nine and weighs in at (reportedly) somewhere around two hundred seventy pounds; it would be a mistake for Wilder to think he can walk through Fury’s punches. As they say in heavyweight boxing: if you get hit, you stay hit.
On the other side of the ledger, it’s worth noting that Wilder isn’t as flawed a boxer as his detractors like to pretend. It is true that he windmills his punches once he’s got his opponents hurt, but he has a hard, effective jab when he chooses to use it, as well as that fearsome right.
Far better “technicians” have tried to land clean on Fury and failed, though Wilder did precisely that in the first fight—not once but twice. This isn’t luck.
As Joyce Carol Oates puts it in her book On Boxing: “Life is hard in the ring, but, there, you only get what you deserve.”
Should Wilder win, it will confirm what he has told us all along: that he truly is the “baddest man on the planet.”
Should Fury win, it will cap a remarkable comeback, following, as it does, his much-publicized depression, weight gain, and years away from the ring.
There have been rumblings of some vague difficulty in the Fury camp.
Let’s hope there is no truth to this, because tomorrow we’ll see a spectacle all too rare in boxing: the best fighting the best.
—Robin Jones
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