Wilder vs Fury Just Reinvigorated The Entire Heavyweight Division
This is what the heavyweight division is all about. This is what we’ve been desperate to see for the last ten years and probably longer. Two absolute champions, one a current belt holder and the other without a belt but with the lineal title, embracing in the ring after twelve rounds of absolute brutality, speaking encouraging words in the true warrior spirit. Like the champions that they are. Insults may fly and tempers may flare in the build up to the fight and of course what happens in the ring is its own thing… but afterwards the true warriors will do what Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder did and leave it all where it belongs.
Clearly it was the biggest heavyweight battle of the year. Only the Canelo Alvarez vs Genady Golovkin rematch could challenge it for biggest fight of the year across all divisions. It’s the most important heavyweight fight to take place in the United States for around fifteen years, not since Lennox Lewis vs Mike Tyson, really. The biggest heavyweight fight anywhere since… well, that’s hard to say. But this was a very big deal.
It was also a big deal from a technical point of view, the fighter against the boxer as Tyson Fury liked to put it. One guy who brings incredible defence and boxing IQ against a guy who is lacking in a few fundamentals, far from polished, but overcomes that with the hardest right hand in the business. A fascinating philosophical exercise beneath all the power and bluster. Same as how Klitschko vs Fury was except that was a Klitschko well below his best and without the power that Deontay Wilder wields in his gloves. This was that dynamic to the absolute extreme.
Then there were the storylines. Deontay Wilder’s story is a hero’s journey. He’s the poor boy from Alabama who made something of himself by harnessing his natural gifts. A guy who came to the sport late and has had to learn his craft as he goes along. The most powerful man in the most powerful division. The grand hope for American heavyweight boxing, which had dominated the sport for decades until the turn of the millennium. A man who embraces meditation and mindfulness to engage his ability to destroy people’s faces.
But even his story pales in comparison to Tyson Fury’s. Here is a man who had it all, rising from nowhere with his unconventional technique, all the jerky movements and showboating, to defeat one of the greatest champions the sport has ever known… and he stood atop that mountain and he felt empty. He tried to fill that emptiness with a lifestyle that would ruin a normal man. He turned to drugs and alcohol. He put on enormous weight. He went through hell in his own head and, I’ll be honest, a year ago I had no faith whatsoever that he would ever return to the ring, let alone in a fight of this magnitude. It is a modern miracle that he’s been able to get back to his previous level again.
Which is before we even get to the fight itself because let me tell you it was absolutely the best fight I’ve seen in 2018. Tyson Fury started a little slow but he figured it out to take full control of this bout. He rolled and he tumbled around the ring, throwing those excellent jabs down the middle to rough Wilder up. Deontay could hardly touch him. It was a clinic of defence and the rounds began to tally up. But then in the ninth Wilder dropped him to get back into consideration. Wilder’s always been like that, even when he doesn’t look good he’s got that one massive blow in him which could change everything. Unlike the rest of his opponents though, Fury got up and fought the tenth and eleventh as well as he had any other rounds in the contest.
Until we came to the decisive twelfth and final round, when Wilder again sent a rough right past the defences and he followed it up with a fiery left hook to send Fury to the ground. We were in the final minutes and Fury seemed to have it all wrapped up. Then it all changed with two punches. There he was lying on the ground, there he was on his back and with the count rising in his ears…
… and somehow he summoned the force of will to get back onto his feet and continue the fight. The last minute or two of this fight were the most incredibly tense action imaginable, as each man slugged it out believing that they were on the brink of victory. When the final bell went, you felt like you’d gone twelve rounds along with them just from watching. That’s always the sign of a great fight.
Let’s be honest, the result was a bit of a joke. There’s no way that Deontay Wilder won enough rounds, even with the two knockdowns, to take a 115-111 card as one judge ruled it. It’s one thing for the three judges to all rule it differently. You can make a decent case for Wilder taking four rounds, which is what I gave him. One, four, nine and twelve (I was extremely conflicted about four though, and I suspect that if I watched it again I’d give it all the way to Tyson). Chuck on the two knockdowns and we’ve got a 114-112 scorecard. One judge gave it exactly that way (but with the seventh to Wilder instead of the fourth), while another gave one extra round to Wilder for the 113-113 draw.
But seven rounds to Wilder? Bro, you’re not even watching the same fight.
To be honest though, I can’t hate the way it’s played out. I’m all here for the new Tyson Fury, who doesn’t lash out like an arsehole saying bigoted things and generally acting ugly because he can’t stand himself. The new Tyson Fury is an advocate for mental health in a sport which there’s a long history of such troubles. He’s a force for good instead of chaos. And an inspiring man as well. Even more likeable because he’s working with a new trainer and with Freddie Roach, instead of his uncle and them cronies. Tyson Fury is almost a humble man these days… and we saw that in the aftermath of the win, where he knew he should’ve won but it wasn’t ever about the result for him.
Deontay Wilder has every reason to feel like he won too, to be fair. He knocked the bugger down twice after all. The draw is a little bit of a cop out but look at what it does for heavyweight boxing. There will be a rematch. The rematch will be even more hyped up than this one was – they could take it to the UK and sell 100,000 tickets if they want. Even in the States again it’d be huge. Vegas, baby. Tyson Fury has re-emerged at the top of the division and Wilder has done enough to prove he belongs there (beating Luis Ortiz earlier in the year also helped – another fight of the year nominee).
Add that all up and it’s no longer about Anthony Joshua dictating terms. AJ might not even be a top two heavyweight any longer (there’s no way he’s any lower than three though). Eddie Hearn has been a greedy bastard with AJ’s career recently, withholding him from taking on Wilder because of the probability that it’d make more money down the track. But his negotiating leverage just took a big shrink. The monopoly is broken. I love AJ and what he does but a more even split at the top of the division can only be a healthy thing.
And, uh, as for Joseph Parker… no shame in it at all but he’s not touching that top trio. He’s also got to be considered near the bottom of that second tier on account of those two defeats, a second tier that features the likes of Dillian Whyte, Kubrat Pulev and Luis Ortiz. But you know what? He’s younger than all the other contenders by at least a couple years. It’s easy to give up on a guy who loses back to back but he did lose to two of the top five brawlers in the game so don’t get too carried away. He’s won a world title. A better planned fight and he’d have beaten Dillian Whyte too. There’s a lot left unwritten in the Joseph Parker story.
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