Holyfield beat some big fighters in his day. I don’t think it’s nearly this clear.
Desperate stuff. The costume excuse is LOL but he’s letting himself down with his comments about Breland throwing in the towel. His trainer (Deas) is obv out of his depth and a yes man, given Wilder has had 44 fights under his tutelage and doesn’t know how to box.
Mark Breland was a great fighter himself and would not have thrown the towel in lightly - took responsibility and did Wilder a huge service there.
Watching the fight, I thought it was basically over in the third and was surprised it went into the seventh. Wilder’s corner did exactly the right thing throwing in the towel as Wilder was just standing there, not even doing a good job defending himself and not punching back. If the towel hadn’t come in, the ref needed to stop it.
IMO, Wilder has a legitimate beef with his trainer for throwing in the towel, and if I were him I would sack the guy. Assuming, that is, that he’s telling the truth when he says that he had given specific instructions that under no circumstances were they to throw in the towel.
I’ll grant that Wilder was very unlikely to win the fight, and that he had the possibility of injury if he continued. But he still had a non-zero chance of victory, and every fighter faces the possibility of injury. That’s the risk that these guys take on themselves in the hope of great rewards, and it’s their decision to make. It’s not the trainer’s place to override his boss’s decision on this, and if you’re an employee who disobeys specific instructions from the boss in a key situation, you deserve to be fired.
On another note, when did this business of boxers making these grand entrances with over-the-top ridiculous costumes start? Is it the influence of pro wrestling?
Watched it live. I had predicted a Wilder KO. My goodness, was he exposed in this fight. And I 100% disagree that his trainers did him wrong by throwing in the towel. He literally backpedaled into the corner and offered no offense while Fury leveled a barrage of attacks. Honestly, they could have thrown that towel earlier, but Wilder is one tough son of a gun. After the busted ear drum in the 3rd round he was Bambi on ice. Amazing he could stand after that punishment.
The only disservice Wilder’s trainers have done him is they never taught him to box. They all just relied on that big right hand.
On the contrary, it’s exactly the corner’s place to protect their fighter’s health and well being. The fighter may not like it, and they may have their wishes, but a fighter isn’t in the best position to evaluate the long term effects of their decisions. That’s why there’s someone in place who isn’t actively being hit in the head during a fight.
Fury had the superior strategy. Wilder is a hesitant puncher and wasn’t prepared for Fury coming right at him. Neither fighter should be proud of their boxing skills in that fight but right now Fury is the undefeated heavyweight champ, and any disputes to that title are ridiculous.
That “someone in place” would be the referee, and/or the ringside doctor.
If the fighter himself wants to authorize his corner to override him and throw in the towel based on the notion that he won’t be in a position to make a coherent decision, then that’s his prerogative. But if he doesn’t want to authorize it then that’s his prerogative too.
I expect there are professional ethical standards for boxing trainers, and I’d expect those ethical standards would require trainers to throw in the towel when appropriate to protect the fighter’s health, regardless of the fighter’s wishes. If there are no such ethical standards, there should be.
It looked to me like neither fighter ever heard of leg day.
Curious what you and others didn’t like about what you saw from Fury. As you said, he had the far superior strategy (in that he actually HAD a strategy) and I think executed it as perfectly as could be expected.
I believe, if you want to be annoyingly technical about it, that the referee is the sole arbiter of the fight and is the only person authorized to stop the contest.
The seconds and the doctor can ask the referee to stop the fight, but the referee is the one to make the final call.
Of course, Wilder is free to hire whomever he likes to be his seconds for the next fight with Fury, the one he may actually be healthy enough to participate in thanks to the actions of his current team.
I think it depends on the jurisdiction. Under some commissions, only the referee can stop the fight (although he nearly always follows the recommendation of the ringside physician), in others the doctor and/or the seconds can stop the fight.
In the second Louis-Schmeling fight, Schmeling’s corner tried to throw in the towel because Schmeling was being horribly beaten (Louis broke his spine with a body punch), but the referee threw the towel back out (but stopped the fight a few seconds later). I believe that was under the New York State Athletic Commission at the time.
Obviously it wasn’t the only fight that did it, but Ali was so punch-drunk as to be nearly incapacitated when he retired. And a major reason was his fight with Larry Holmes, who hammered him nearly non-stop for ten rounds and Ali’s cornermen kept sending him back out, hoping for a miracle. It never happened - Ali landed about three punches in the whole course of the fight, while Holmes committed premeditated murder on him with straight lefts and right hand smashes to the head. Finally Angelo Dundee, who often remarked “you can’t tell Ali nothing” managed to overrule the other yes-men and hangers-on in the corner and get the referee to stop the beating. You can hear him screaming at the beginning of the eleventh “I’m the chief second, and I’m stopping the fight!”
The tragic thing was, you couldn’t tell Ali nothing. He fought again, losing by a wide margin to mediocre heavyweight Trevor Berbick, and then retired into the quivering fog of Parkinsonism.
There is a short story by Jack London called A Piece of Steak. Superficially it is about boxing, but really it is about getting old. In it, the protagonist, a nearly washed-up heavyweight named King, thinks to himself that a man has a certain number of fights in him. Maybe he has ten, maybe twenty, maybe fifty. But he fights his fights, and then he’s done. Rest doesn’t change that, changing trainers doesn’t change that, nothing changes it. You fight your fights, and then you’re done.
Ali tried to keep going after that. Because nobody could tell Ali nothing. And at the end, he couldn’t understand you anyway even if you did.
Regards,
Shodan
He’s a clumsy and sloppy puncher. He had Wilder rocked early on and should have been able to take him out early by getting himself under control but he was almost as off balance as Wilder was. Wilder’s corner threw in the towel when Wilder finally got hit by two punches in a row. A guy as big as Fury doesn’t need to be that accurate of a puncher, but a good heavyweight could take him out if he’s going to fall forward after wild punches. This was a departure from his usually defensive style.
Re the costume excuse, I agree that Wilder would be better served by not harping on it, but only because anything that smacks of excuse making after losing a fight looks bad. Just suck it up and answer back by winning the rematch. But ISTM that the ridicule over the notion that it could have impacted his legs may not be warranted.
True, he’s a big guy, but 40 pounds is still a lot. That’s about 17 percent of his body weight, which is a lot to be carrying around for over a half hour.
But here’s the significant point. It’s not like Wilder is saying his legs were so shot that he couldn’t walk after that. He obviously could. But if you’re in a fight against a top level 6’9" 270 pound fighter, you need every last bit of strength and endurance in your legs that you can have, and even a very small amount of fatigue can make a difference. (I also don’t get why some people think the fact that he trained with the added weight refutes his point - the opposite, if anything.) And it’s not like he would have necessarily noticed the impact if he tried on the suit the day before or whatever, since at that time he didn’t turn around and fight for his life against Fury.
Of course, he has only himself to blame, and he should have thought of that beforehand. Basically all I’m saying is that from a purely technical standpoint ISTM that it’s possible that that amount of weight before a fight could have an impact.
On another note, some people are claiming that Fury had his gloves on incorrectly, based on some video allegedly showing that his gloves were flapping about loosely and at odd angles. Hard to imagine that this is legit, but FWIW, some detail and video here.
He may have been slapping with his gloves, not making a fist inside them, and the ref should have warned him about that. Didn’t look like it gave him any advantage, but Wilder’s corner should have noticed and mentioned it.