Deontay Wilder’s right hand can only break things, not fix them

THE PAST

The evidence of his power and the damage done could be found in splatters of coffee on the ground. That it wasn’t blood was considered a relief, yet in some ways the sight of a man spilling coffee on account of trembling hands was more revealing. “Look at my hands,” said Frank Joseph, the man with the cup. “That’s how hard he f****** hits.”

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Joseph, an Iraqi fight agent, had earlier been holding pads for Deontay Wilder inside a boxing gym in Vauxhall, London, and was now unable to hold even a cup of coffee without spilling it. He decided that Wilder’s punches were the heaviest he had ever felt, and although, by his own admission, Joseph was no coach, he had seen and heard enough punches in his time to detect abnormalities. He also made this statement long before the world came to believe in Wilder’s power and long before Wilder’s impressive knockout streak really meant something.

Back then, in 2013, Wilder was in London as a sparring partner for David Haye ahead of Haye’s ill-fated September fight with Tyson Fury. It was a role he had played before, a couple of years earlier, but now Wilder was 27 years old and just 18 months away from becoming WBC heavyweight champion. It showed, too. He now stood straighter, he commanded attention, and when entering a room he did so with the swagger of a man who had ended all 28 of his fights by knockout. You would hear him before you saw him — “BOMB SQUAD!” — and nobody seemed to mind that he had made himself at home. In fact, Wilder made himself at home wherever he went. If he wasn’t in the gym, the heavyweight from Tuscaloosa would take his act to the Park Plaza Hotel, where for two weeks he stayed and day after day joked around with staff and attracted the attention of guests due to his size. He was, in some respects, both sparring in London and rehearsing in London. He was rehearsing for what was ahead of him and he was behaving like a world heavyweight champion before becoming one.

In the gym, meanwhile, he was no less positive and imposing. Whether in the ring with Haye, Mariusz Wach, Filip Hrgovic or Richard Towers, Wilder appeared completely at ease and was granted the space and time offered only to those who hit hard. Either you kept it long with him, so long that he couldn’t touch you, or you hid within his 83-inch reach and tried to reduce the possibility of him extending his arm and throwing a punch. Whichever route you took, though, there was danger at every turn.

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“I’ve sparred every heavyweight you could think of and I know that when it comes to power, Deontay Wilder is in a league of his own,” said Towers, who shared many rounds with Wilder during that period. “Put it this way: He hits four times harder than Vitali Klitschko, five times harder than Wladimir Klitschko, six times harder than Anthony Joshua, and eight times harder than Tyson Fury. When Wilder hit me, it felt like a fully-formed pedigree horse kicking me in the face.”

The first time he was there, sparring beneath that railway arch, Wilder kept Haye on his toes without ever treading on them. The next time, however, was slightly different. The next time, while still respectful of the two-weight world champion, Wilder would routinely urge Haye to give him the best he could and really test him. “This is the champ’s camp!” he would shout during a particularly slow round of sparring, or when sensing Haye’s caution. “Let’s go, champ! Let’s go!”

It was, on the one hand, an attempt to motivate both Haye and himself; an extension, that is, of his gregarious personality. But it was also more than that. It was a sign that their roles were starting to switch and that the gap between champion and prospect had in the space of two years narrowed to almost nothing. He was the future; Haye was the past. He was to now be judged accordingly.

“To beat Wilder, you need to make him step to you,” said Adam Booth, Haye’s trainer. “He doesn’t have good balance. If you allow him to stand still, he can set himself. But he looks like he’s very unsteady and unstable through his hips and his knees, so as soon as you make him move, he loses a lot of his power because he doesn’t have a solid base when moving.”

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Wilder’s coach, Jay Deas, was less concerned about his man’s supposed flaws. “He obviously punches very hard,” said Deas, “but is well aware that hard punchers who are deficient in other areas generally do not win the big prize. He wants to be a well-rounded fighter who can do it all. He is a very good boxer which gets overlooked. He has a body like a heavyweight Thomas Hearns and the punch to match. He also has a kind of Mike Tyson appeal for the people who may not even be boxing fans.”

For all that to be true, we had to see more than just 104 seconds of him in the ring with Siarhei Liakhovich, his last victim. Even the sparring, as impressive it was, could say only so much about the potential of Wilder as a future heavyweight champion. What he really needed around that time were proper fights, testing ones, ones in which his power not only settled matters, but also helped him out of a crisis and won the respect of an opponent whose scalp had value.

The first fight of that ilk arrived in 2018, when Wilder was soundly outboxed by Cuba’s Luis Ortiz for nine rounds only for his power to then rescue him in round 10. It was in that round Wilder found the punches to end the lesson and it was in that round we saw the expression on Ortiz’s face go from that of a teacher delivering said lesson to one who had suddenly lost control of the classroom.

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Word soon got around, too. It hit the lunch hall. It hit the staff room. The late Naazim Richardson, the coach of Bernard Hopkins, said to me in the aftermath, “Fighting Wilder is like fighting a guy with a five-pound weight in both hands. He’s saying, ‘I don’t care what you do to me, I don’t care how many rounds you win, the minute this five-pound weight lands, everything you did is null and void.’ He carries that equalizer.

“I said he might be the best heavyweight puncher in history and people are like, ‘How can you compare him to Joe Louis, Mike Tyson and George Foreman?’ The reason I say that is this: They were all better fighters than him and had better attributes. Deontay didn’t have any other attributes when he won and started defending his world title. He just hit you. I mean, he f****** hit you.”

Others, though, were less impressed. “Ortiz was getting ready to stop him and Ortiz is at least 45 years of age,” said Chris Byrd, the former IBF heavyweight champion. “If he had thrown three or four more punches, he would have stopped Wilder.

“Ortiz gave Wilder problems because he was like, ‘I’m 6-foot-4, I’m big, I’m not worried about this guy, he doesn’t know how to fight. He might catch me, but if he doesn’t, he’s going to get a boxing lesson.’

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“Wilder can’t take pressure. If you do it the right way and use solid defense to get close, he can’t take it. But if you give that man distance and find yourself in his range, at the end of his punches, he will knock your head clean off with punches that might not even land clean. His punch power is terrifying. It is unbelievable.”

Although it was that rare thing, a distance fight, there was perhaps no greater example of Wilder’s raw, equalizing power than the night he boxed Tyson Fury in 2018. This, the first of three fights between the pair, was a fight largely dominated by Fury on the back foot, and yet still it was Fury and not Wilder who found himself on the brink of being stopped in Round 12. Dropped heavily in that round, Fury just about scrambled to his feet in time to discover that Wilder’s late rally had salvaged a draw from the jaws of defeat.

For Wilder, it came as quite the relief. After 11 rounds of impotence and self-doubt, balance had somehow been restored by the only thing he could ever trust and rely upon: His right hand. It had saved him — again. It had papered over the cracks and protected him from both deficiency and defeat.

THE PRESENT

To understand the present, we must first delve back into the past. In this instance that means turning our attention to a text message sent from Andy Lee, Tyson Fury’s coach, in December 2019. Lee, from Ireland, is of course now regarded as one of the best coaches in the game — also, a former WBO middleweight champion in his own right — but back in 2019 he was as uncertain as anybody else. He was uncertain about the threat level of Deontay Wilder and he could predict with no certainty what would happen when Wilder and Fury met again, this time with Lee involved. “You can have perfect prep, perfect game plan and be boxing the perfect fight — and Wilder can erase it all with one punch,” Lee texted me before the fight. “Their feet is the main difference between the two [apart from power] and if Tyson can attack in a smart way, protect himself while punching, when he hurts Wilder, I think he can get the stoppage.” He then added: “But that power, man...”

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Apprehensive though he was, there was a quiet confidence about Lee, too — the only kind of confidence one can hope to have in the company of Wilder. Lee knew, having watched Fury outbox Wilder in fight one, and having watched Luis Ortiz do the same across not one but two fights, that the doubts regarding Wilder’s boxing ability were more than justified. Only so much longer could Wilder’s right hand keep bailing him out, Lee felt. Only so much longer would he find the space and the time to make it count.

In the rematch, Fury dealt with those two things, space and time, in a manner that seemed reckless in the moment but quite masterful in retrospect. Space was something he closed rather than created, choosing to go towards Wilder and not away from him, while time was something he shortened rather than stretched. Meaning: Instead of prolonging the fight and aiming to reach the final bell, as he did in fight one, Fury now started fast and appeared intent on ending the fight as soon as possible. By Round 6, in fact, he had repeatedly hurt Wilder and dropped him twice — once in Round 3, and once in Round 5. Then, by Round 7, the fight was over, Wilder having been rescued by the towel and compassion of his coach, Mark Breland.

It was, for a puncher, the worst kind of defeat. He was beaten up and down, in and out. Now we knew that Wilder was not only primed to be outboxed by a smarter technician, but that he could also be broken up physically by a bigger, stronger man — or just one who is unafraid. He didn’t lose merely a fight that night, Wilder. He lost his mystique, his fear factor, the very thing that gave him time and space and a chance to fire.

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Even in their third fight, when Wilder managed to put Fury down twice in Round 4, Fury never once doubted his capacity to rise and outlast his opponent. He had done it before, you see. He therefore knew it could be done. We all did.

In 2023, two years after Fury-Wilder 3, it was then the turn of Joseph Parker, a former WBO heavyweight champion from New Zealand. Parker, unlike Fury, was not considered one of the world’s elite, but still he went into the fight with Wilder with the same belief that he could avoid Wilder’s power, stay safe, and pull off the win. Better yet, he went into the Wilder fight alongside Lee, the coach who had by then twice led a man to victory against the “Bronze Bomber.”

“We were initially planning on doing a lot of movement and boxing,” recalled Lee. “Joe is technically a lot better than Wilder, I believe, but Wilder still has this unorthodox way of pouncing from far out and can land a punch with lightning speed.

“Then, the more I watched Wilder, the more my opinion changed. So, on the week of the fight, I said, ‘Joe, we’ve got to punch with him.’ We’ve got to change what we were going to do. When he throws his right hand, that’s when he will be most vulnerable.

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“From the Tuesday to the Saturday that’s all we worked on: Throwing the right hand when he threw his, as well as moving Joe’s head to his left and throwing his right over the top. That was enough to worry Wilder and keep him moving and tentative.”

So worried was Wilder, in fact, that he often forgot to punch, which in turn helped Parker get comfortable, outwork him, and eventually win a 12-round decision. It was a clever performance from the underdog and seldom did he outstay his welcome in any exchange or let confidence become complacency. One round simply led to the next and he looked only so far ahead. He knew, after all, how a well-worked game plan can be aborted with just one swing of a Wilder right hand.

“There’s no blueprint,” Lee said. “It’s not like I have a secret way of doing it. Tyson and Joseph are very different boxers. Tyson has the size and he is a dominating personality as well. He’s able to be aggressive and put Wilder on the back foot.

“With Joseph it was more about posing a threat all the time and keeping Wilder anxious enough not to throw that right hand. Even when you’re resting, look like you are ready to punch. Your posture and how you shape up; look like you’re engaged but you’re actually resting. We worked on that a lot.

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“You can never feel safe with Wilder,” Lee was at pains to stress. “You can never think you have a 10-round lead and be content to box and move. He will always, at any moment, have a chance to take you out.

“I remember looking up at one point during the Wilder fight [against Joseph] and it was only Round 3, yet it felt like we had been in the fight for ages.”

Once again, to understand the present, we must first revisit the past. In other words, to truly understand Wilder’s post-Fury reticence, we must go back further than Parker and focus on the one win he has registered since the third fight with Fury. That win came against Robert Helenius in October 2022 and was a fight Wilder finished in Round 1 with a right hand so scary, it sent Helenius into a different realm and had some proclaiming Wilder was back to his best. It was, if nothing else, the closest Wilder had come to securing what he had always said he wanted: A body on his record. Yet, interestingly, what made this version of Wilder different, and what made the Helenius knockout so important in the context of his career, is that Wilder no longer wanted a body on his record. He certainly didn’t want that body to be the body of Helenius, a former sparring partner and someone he called a friend.

Afterward, in the press conference, Wilder made this abundantly clear, expressing his love for Helenius before then referencing the tragedy of Prichard Colon, a boxer whose life changed irrevocably in 2015. As he spoke, Wilder broke down in tears and became uncharacteristically introspective, emotional, human. It had evidently been on his mind, Colon’s fate, and with it no doubt exacerbated by his own setbacks, it was all Wilder could think about after using his right hand to leave Helenius, a friend, stiff on the canvas. “I always have concern for all fighters,” he said that night. “This is not a sport. A sport is something you play. You don’t play this. We risk our lives for you guys’ entertainment.

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“Look at Colon. I don’t even know him like that, but I’ll always be an advocate for us. This man will never know what it feels like to be somebody’s father. That’s the most precious thing in the world, to be somebody’s father. He will never have a chance of living again because he got in the ring to support his family. Now his family have to take care of him for the rest of his life.”

So no, Wilder wasn’t “back” that October night against Helenius. He was instead set back; humanized. He has since then failed to win another fight — losing to Parker and Zhilei Zhang in quick succession — and now returns this Friday against the unheralded Tyrrell Herndon (24-5, 15 KOs), in need of a sign he still has it: That instinct, that cruelty, that punch. He will always be able to punch, of course, and use that punch to do damage, but nothing will ever be fixed by it, nor can it turn back time. In fact, now, at the age of 39, Wilder is viewed as a cause for concern rather than the cause of fear. Forget his past. Forget the present. People now worry about his future. Deontay Wilder now worries about his future.