Tyson Fury vs. Deontay Wilder 2: Celebrating Cleverness
Going into the ring on Saturday night to face Tyson Fury in their much-hyped rematch, Deontay Wilder was absolutely convinced that he can win. He always does (did), his seemingly indominable will and focus one of his greatest assets, and something his opponents always had in the backs of their minds too. No matter how badly a fight is going, how much he's getting outboxed, Wilder would enter a ring knowing that just one tiny opening and the fight would be his.
A minute or so into the first round, he hit Fury with a hard right, and a little while later, he did it again. Fury barely reacted, and from that point on, Wilder no longer knew he could win.
It's more complicated than that, of course. Fury didn't just put on 17 pounds and thereby magically gain a chin capable of withstanding the biggest bomb in boxing. He - to much fanfare that many of us struggled to believe was more than just hyping the fight- adopted a new strategy of walking Wilder down and making him go backwards. He jabbed brilliantly and with variety, both obscuring and obstructing Wilder's lines of sight and attack, and disrupting any rhythm Wilder thought he might be able to get a read on. And he appeared to, with his new team, have introduced a different snap-reaction to Wilder's attacks, replacing the duck away of the first fight with a more basic step-back-and-lean-back that, while it may have left him more open to being caught by that right, also left him better able to ride it.
But all that tells us is still why Wilder's big shot wasn't working. That fact - and the change it prompted in Wilder's demeanour from belief, to hope, and eventually to resignation (it was very telling that Wilder's post-fight complaint was not 'I wish they'd left me in because I always have a chance' but 'I wish I'd gotten the chance to be knocked out') – was a big part of the story of the night, but it's still mostly a Wilder story. And while every fight is a dialogue, this fight was a Tyson Fury story, so let's talk some more about what he did to Wilder.
We mentioned the jab already as a defensive tool, but as difficult as it was to deal with, Wilder had to have known that was coming. What he had a right not to expect was Fury's jab as an offensive tool, one that wobbled Wilder three times in the opening two rounds. What? Fury, quite well known for being a light-punching heavyweight, is buzzing a fellow champion with a jab? In the first round, no less? How did that happen?
Well, partly it happened because Wilder's defensive reactions in open space were almost nonexistent and his stance not at all suited to riding a punch straight down the middle, but what Fury was taking advantage of was his own stance. He's often stood fairly narrow for his size in the past, but what he did here a little bit differently to the last fight out was bend the back leg a little more, put just a little more weight on the back. Presumably the primary reason was to aid with the previously mentioned defensive reactions, but what it also enabled him to do was not just step in with the jab but, once he was satisfied by the end of the first that he had Wilder's timing sorted, to really push off from the back foot as he did so. Wilder clearly hadn't anticipated that, and he leaned himself face first into it three times, as well as taking multiple hard jabs to the body, before he got a handle on what was going on (the body jab, he never really did deal with, and Fury would bring it out to get himself some separation throughout the fight).
Now, Wilder's a smart fighter- it was being pointed out increasingly leading up to this weekend that it's his technique that lacks, not his ring IQ - and, while the narrative is likely now to regress more towards 'Wilder is just a big crude oaf', it shouldn't - and he did adjust; after those three occasions he started leaning back himself to take the sting off and, when Fury started doubling his jab up, Wilder responded to that quite quickly. But the thing about a jab, of course, is that it's not at its best as a solitary weapon; a jab's primary purpose is to build a game around it. And, once he'd got Wilder reacting to the jab to his satisfaction, that's exactly what Fury did.
There were two main ways he took advantage. The first was to fake a jab and whip a quick hook in with the same hand- on a couple of occasions, the increased time that punch takes to reach the same target meant that the evasion that'd have timed the jab perfectly left Wilder just leaning back forwards straight into the hook, something I imagine must have been really annoying. Later on he doubled up the left hook with a follow up one from the right, quite an outlandish combination but one that sent Wilder lurching a few times even if the one time Wilder went down from it combined with a slip for no knockdown.
The real kicker though was the simple straight right. Couple of times, he'd stick the jab in Wilder's face, leave it there while he adjusted the angle, then clip him with the straight, but for the knockdown he simply poked his jab out and, while Wilder was flinching – so quickly that the right hand was almost already on its way before the jab arrived - stepped across and slammed the right across Wilder's ear. It was more the speed and angle than sheer power but Wilder went down like a bowling pin and from then on, really, it was over. That particular combination was there for Fury for the rest of the fight, and Wilder never got to grips with it.
The story from round four onwards features much less by way of deliberate adjustments, as Wilder was by then no longer responding with any serious calculation. He rode the damage quite well along the ropes - Fury never benefited fully from trapping him there, doing most of his best work while chasing Wilder in open space- and showed the dog in him even while the actual conviction he could win drained away, but after the knockdown he'd bite on almost every feint Fury gave him. This not only gave Fury plenty of opportunity for simple but constant potshotted attacks, but served as one of his main forms of defence in the latter stages, as Wilder would abandon chambered attacks to chase punches that were simply never going to come.
The other main defence in those rounds is the clinch, as Wilder started to lunge forward (only he knows if he was just trying ungracefully to close distance, or if he'd decided that his balance was so gone by then that an inside fight, as unsuited to it as he is, was his best chance of staying upright). Referee Kenny Bayless has got some stick for not allowing them to work out, but that's a little unfair- the point deduction was a little hasty, but Fury was quite clearly utilising the clinch, even if he didn't initiate it, to drag on Wilder with no intention of punching his way out, he'd resist the break even when ordered as long as possible, and he'd frequently hit with one arm while headlocking, obviously illegally, with the other. It wasn't pretty and it was of questionable legality but it drained Wilder while denying him a safe haven of any kind, so it worked.
One quick note before we wrap up - there's been some chatter over whether Wilder was already hurt before the first knockdown and his movement affected earlier, perhaps from the start. It's possible he was a bit - the punches at the close of round 2 certainly had an effect - but Wilder's movement is always janky, and was only likely to get moreso as he got pushed into a fight he wasn't expecting. It wasn't until after the knockdown that he started wobbling about and struggling to balance even while in clear air and not under attack, so I don't really buy that the earlier signs of his dodgy movement were anything other than Wilder's already ropey fundamentals simply falling apart.
The conclusion though, as we loop ourselves neatly back to the start: it's very easy to remember this performance and just think of it as a domination of a fighter whose technical form was simply not up to the challenge. But even as we debate whether that's even completely fair to Wilder, that's really doing a disservice to the man who we should be making this all about: Tyson Fury, who used Wilder's own boxing brain against him, drawing adjustments and then nailing him for them, and who finally, unexpectedly, broke that unbreakable belief in victory.
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