FURY vs WILDER III IN PERSPECTIVE
ON October 9, in a sensational fight at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Tyson Fury knocked out Deontay Wilder in the 11th round to put the finishing touches on their heavyweight championship trilogy.
It has been a strange dance between these two men. Less than a minute into round 12 of their first encounter on December 1, 2018, Wilder knocked Fury unconscious and shimmied to a neutral corner, having established his primacy in the heavyweight division. Or so it seemed. Somehow, Fury managed to beat the count and rise to his feet. Wilder couldn’t finish. A minute later, Fury shook him with a clubbing right hand and Deontay was holding on to survive.
The rest is history. Fury-Wilder I was declared a draw. On February 22, 2020, they fought again. This time, Fury dominated from start to finish and stopped Deontay in the seventh round. Now these two men have engaged in a fight that, when the dust of time settles, will be remembered as a classic.
Let’s look at the framework that gave Fury-Wilder III its drama. Wilder’s performance in Fury-Wilder II was evocative of a playground bully who gets flustered when a kid who’s tougher than expected decides to hit back. And, like a bully, Deontay took the low road in the aftermath of his defeat. He should have said, “Tyson was the better fighter tonight. I got beat. There’s a rematch clause. Next time, I’ll kick his ass.” Instead, he manufactured excuse after ludicrous excuse.
Initially, Wilder blamed the costume he’d worn into the ring – glitzy black body armor accessorised by a black mask adorned with horns and lit up by batteries – for his defeat.
“My last couple of outfits, they had no weight on it,” he said. “It was more Styrofoam. This time around, we added different heavy things. The skulls, the rhinestones that was on there. There was a lot of things that were designed on there that made it very, very, very heavy. It had battery packs in the mask. When I first tried it on, I saw it had some type of weight to it. But during that time, you get so excited and you want people to see it. But we immediately started feeling, ‘All right, we’re gonna have to put this uniform on a certain amount of time before we go out, even if we had to delay it a little bit.’ But our timing wasn’t perfect.”
“He [Fury] didn’t hurt me at all,” Wilder continued. “The simple fact is that my uniform was way too heavy for me. I didn’t have no legs from the beginning of the fight. In the third round, my legs were just shot all the way through. A lot of people were telling me, ‘It looked like something was wrong with you.’ Something was. I knew I didn’t have the legs because of my uniform. It weighed 40-some pounds with the helmet and all the batteries. I wanted my tribute to be great for Black History Month and I guess I put that before anything.”
“IF EVERYONE’S JUST AGREEING WITH YOU… YOU START TO LOSE TRACK OF REALITY”
Now we know. The reason David defeated Goliath had nothing to do with David’s sling and five smooth stones. It was all about Goliath’s heavy body armor. Lest one forget, the Bible tells us that Goliath wore a tunic fashioned from hundreds of bronze scales, bronze shin guards, bronze plates covering his feet, and a heavy metal helmet. Boy, did that weaken Goliath’s legs.
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