Deontay Wilder vs Tyson Fury: Train Crash in Los Angeles

Published

6 years ago

November 29, 2018

Even though both the American World Champion Deontay Wilder and the British challenger Tyson Fury possess anatomies that could be compared to enormous mastodons, their fighting styles are complete opposites, which creates the opportunity for this bout on Dec. 1^st at the Staples Center in Los Angeles to be one of the best fights of the year.

Thanks to his incredible power, which has been endured until the finish line by only one man in all of his 40 victories, “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder is the favorite to defeat “The Gypsy King” Fury (27-0-0, 19 KO’s) by knockout, thus retaining the WBC World Heavyweight Title, which he has held since 2015 and successfully defended seven times.

What Could Happen

As we previously stated, Wilder and Fury possess drastically different boxing styles, leaving the stage open for this fight to become an absolute war. However, it wouldn’t be surprising either if both were to be excessively cautious in order to avoid getting knocked out, a situation that would leave the crowd displeased, similar to what happened in the Fury vs Klitschko fight in November of 2015.

“The Gypsy King” was declared winner by unanimous decision in a fight of few punches, immeasurable clinching, and lack of technique, which led the referee to give warnings to both of them. Fury even had a point taken away in the 11^th round due to landing an illegal “Rabbit Punch”. In that fight, Klitschko only landed 52 punches for an extremely low average of 4.3 punches per round, one of the lowest in title fight history. Fury was slightly better, landing 86 strikes with an average of 7.3 per round.

Wilder Did Not Look Good in the Open Media Workout

Like the popular saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”, Wilder should be worried, because regardless of his optimism, the performance he displayed in front of the California media left many unconvinced.

“I feel like I’m at my very best right now. Mentally, physically and emotionally I’m ready to go. Everything is perfect. I just want to get in the ring and show action. Tyson Fury doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into”, said Wilder, after concluding a session on the mitts with his trainer Jay Deas at the Churchill Boxing Club in Santa Monica.

In reality, Wilder was inaccurate with his powerful right hand when he tried to strike the mitts and similarly, his movements and footwork lacked coordination. In a general sense, he lacked rhythm, regardless of his previous eloquence.

“As a true champion, I know how to adjust to any fighter that’s in front of me. My experience facing fighters of all styles has prepared me for this special fight”, stated Wilder, still covered in sweat from his training.

Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Wilder will be defending his WBC World Heavyweight Title for the 8^th time, which he acquired after unanimously defeating the Haitian-Canadian Bermane “B-Ware” Stiverne in January of 2015 in Stiverne’s first title defense.

In his most recent bout, Wilder defeated the Cuban southpaw Luis “King Kong” Ortíz, by TKO in the 10^th round on March 3^rd of this year at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York. But even though he knocked down Ortíz in the 5^th and a few times in the 10^th, the North American was on the edge of defeat in the 7^th, when the Cuban rocked him during the final seconds of the round. The champion was saved by the bell, and in the next round, Ortíz lacked the killer instinct that could have made him the first Cuban Heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. “King Kong’s” lack of aggression allowed Wilder to recover and take control of the fight. After the Cuban had been knocked down a few times, referee David Fields called a stop to the contest with 55 seconds remaining in the 10^th round.

Wilder has stated that he has had excellent sparring sessions and is constantly making technical adjustments with Deas in order to be in optimal condition when he faces Fury, a fighter who lacks technique and constantly clinches, creating boring fights. This is how things transpired against the Ukrainian Klitschko exactly three years ago, when Fury won the IBF, WBA, WBO and fringe IBO title in a bout that took place in the German city of Dusseldorf.

In the weeks leading up to the fight, Jay Deas hasn’t missed an opportunity to praise the “Gypsy King”, born in the city of Manchester, a 30-year-old mastodon with an extraordinary reach of 85 inches. “Tyson Fury is kind of like a Rubik’s cube. But a Rubik’s cube can be solved. Fury is a very versatile fighter who can move, he can box and fight from lots of distances. He’s the total package as a fighter and on top of that he’s strong-willed mentally,” stated Deas.

Wilder conquered Stiverne for the title on January 12^th of 2015 and during the following months and years both of them proceeded to compete several times, awaiting a second confrontation, a rematch which finally took place November 4th of 2017, in New York. Wilder quickly demolished the Haitian, knocking him down 3 times in the first round.

Fury Comes Back With Two Victories

After a long 30 months away from the sport, Fury came back, meanwhile losing more than 100lbs and recovering from drug addiction and alcoholism. Fury also confessed that he suffered from depression. One of the three titles that he acquired through defeating Klistchsko was stripped from him for having accepted a rematch with the Ukrainian, instead of his mandatory. The other two titles were immediately stripped when he tested positive for cocaine, leading to the cancelation of the rematch with Klitschko.

Fury returned victorious when he defeated the Macedonian Sefer Seferi by RTD in the 4^th round on June 9^th of this year at the Manchester Arena in England. Regardless of accomplishing the main objective, Fury looked very bad against Seferi due to such a long period of inactivity.

Two months later, on July 18^th in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the “Gypsy King” outpointed the Italian Francesco Pianetta in a 10 round match.

Fury looked better than he did against Seferi, but still punched erratically and with minimal movement, although he did use the jab more effectively. At the end of the fight, Fury invigorated the more than 25 thousand fans present at Windsor Park, by announcing that he had accepted the offer to fight Wilder for the WBC Heavyweight World Title.

“They called, I answered. I said send me the contract. I said ‘yes’. Now he gets his chance to fight the lineal heavyweight champion of the world. Believe me, I will go to Las Vegas and I will bring home the belt. I will knock this man out.” Said Fury, causing the crowd to roar in excitement.

Who Will Win Wilder or Fury?

My opinion is that if both giants decide to make it a slugfest from the very beginning, Wilder, 6’7” in height, will be the winner within no more than 2 thirds of the fight. His devastating right hand, lethal and effective, and his superior physical condition will be enough to put Fury to sleep, a fighter who was away from the ring for two years and seven months following the fight with Klitschko. Fury’s only true advantage will be his weight, carrying approximately 40 pounds more than his opponent on the day of the fight.

Add the fact that the “Gypsy King” Fury, 6’9” in height, is a clumsy fighter with predictable movements, who lacks defense, and he will be forced to go all out in the opening rounds, using the clinch as his main weapon, in order to avoid falling victim to one of the powerful punches of the Tuscaloosa-born fighter with dynamite in his right hand.

Only tactical errors on Wilder’s side (lowering his hands, not using the jab to maintain distance and avoiding falling into the clinch) will lead to Fury’s victory. In conclusion, the American will emerge victorious by knockout before the beginning of the 8^th round.

Translated by E.G. for J.J. Alvarez of Boxeo.tv

Photo credit: Amanda Westcott / SHOWTIME

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Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

David A. Avila

Avila-Perspective-Chap-289-East-L.A.-A-Fight-Town-Claressa-Shields-and-More

Avila Perspective, Chap. 289: East LA, Claressa Shields and More

East Los Angeles has long been a haven for some of the best fighters around if you can keep them out of trouble. For every Oscar De La Hoya or Seniesa Estrada there are thousands derailed by crime, drugs or drinking.

Boxing has always been a favorite sport of East L.A. Every family has an uncle or two who boxes.

On Friday, 360 Promotions’ Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) fights Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1) in the main event at Commerce Casino, in Commerce, CA. UFC Fight Pass will stream the fight card.

The City of Commerce used to be part of East L.A. until 1960 when it incorporated. It’s still considered to be part of East Los Angeles, but informally.

Plenty of fighters come out of East L.A. but few make it all the way like De La Hoya and Estrada. Will Trinidad be the one?

The first world champion from East L.A. or “East Los” as some call it, was Solly Garcia Smith back in the late 1800s. Others were Richie Lemos, Art Frias and Joey Olivo. There is also 1984 Olympic gold medalist Paul Gonzalez.

Once again 360 Promotions brings its popular brand of fights to the area. On this fight card includes two female bouts. One features Roxy Verduzco (1-0) the former amateur star fighting Colleen Davis (3-1-1) in a featherweight fight.

All that action takes place on Friday.

Elite Boxing

The next day, also in East L.A., Elite Boxing stages another boxing card at Salesian High School located at 960 S. Soto Street in the Boyle Heights area of East Los Angeles.

Elite Boxing has promoted several successful boxing cards at the Catholic high school grounds. The area is saturated by many of the best eateries in Los Angeles. Don’t take my word for it. Check it out yourself and grab some of that delicious food.

Boxing has long been a favorite sport of anyone who lives in East L.A. It’s a fight town equal to Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Detroit. There’s something different about the area. For more than 100 years some of the best fighters continue to come out of its boxing gyms. Some will be performing on these club shows.

For tickets or information go to www.eliteboxingusa.com

Claressa Shields in Detroit

Speaking of fight towns, pound-for-pound best Claressa Shields who won two Olympic Gold Medals in boxing, moves up another weight division to tackle the WBC heavyweight world champion Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse on Saturday, July 27, at Little Caesars Arena in Detroit, Michigan.

DAZN will stream the heavy-duty fight card.

Shields (14-0) cleaned out the super welterweight, middleweight and super middleweight divisions and now wants to add the big girls to her conquests. She will be facing Canada’s Lepage-Joanisse (7-1) who holds the WBC belt.

The last time Shields gloved up was more than a year ago when she fought Maricela Cornejo. Don’t blame Shields. She loves to fight. She loves to win. The last time Shields lost a fight was in the amateurs and that was three presidential administrations ago.

Shields doesn’t lose.

I wonder if Las Vegas even takes bets on her fights?

The only fight she may have been an underdog was against Savannah Marshall who was the last opponent to defeat her. And that was in 2012 in China. When they met as pros two years ago, Shields avenged her loss with a blistering attack.

Don’t get Shields mad.

Perhaps her toughest foe as a pro was in her pro debut when she clashed with Franchon Crews-Dezurn in Las Vegas. It was four rounds of fists and fury as the two pounded each other on the undercard of Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev in November 2016.

That was a ferocious debut for both female pugilists.

Assisting Shields on this fight card will be several intriguing male bouts. One guy you should pay special attention is Tito Mercado (15-0, 14 KOs) a super lightweight prospect from Pomona, California.

Many excellent fighters have come out of Pomona including Sugar Shane Mosley, Shane Mosley Jr., Alberto Davila and Richie Sandoval who just passed away this week.

Sandoval was best known for his 15-round war with Philadelphia’s Jeff Chandler for the bantamweight world title in 1984. Read the story by Arne K. Lang on this link: https://tss.ib.tv/boxing/featured-boxing-articles-boxing-news-videos-rankings-and-results/81467-former-world-bantamweight-champion-richie-sandoval-passes-away-at-age-63 .

Fights to Watch

Fri. UFC Fight Pass 7 p.m. Omar Trinidad (15-0-1) vs Viktor Slavinskyi (15-2-1).

Sat. ESPN+ 12:30 p.m. Joe Joyce (16-2) vs Derek Chisora (34-13).

Sat. DAZN 3 p.m. Claressa Shields (14-0) vs Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse (7-1), Michel Rivera (25-1) vs Hugo Roldan (22-2-1); Tito Mercado (15-0) vs Hector Sarmiento (21-2).

Omar Trinidad photo by Lina Baker

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Arne’s Almanac: Jake Paul and Women’s Boxing, a Curmudgeon’s Take

Published

2 days ago

July 24, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Jake Paul can fight more than a little. The view from here is that he would make it interesting against any fringe contender in the cruiserweight division. However, Jake’s boxing acumen pales when paired against his skill as a flim-flam artist.

Jake brought a 9-1 record into last weekend’s bout with Mike Perry. As noted by boxing writer Paul Magno, Jake’s previous opponents consisted of “a You Tuber, a retired NBA star, five retired MMA stars, a part-time boxer/reality TV star, and two undersized and inactive fall-guy boxers.”

Mike Perry, a 32-year-old Floridian, was undefeated (6-0, 3 KOs) as a bare-knuckle boxer after forging a 14-8 record in UFC bouts. In pre-fight blurbs, Perry was billed as the baddest bare knuckle boxer of all time, but against Jake Paul he proved to have very unrefined skills as a conventional boxer which Team Paul undoubtedly knew all along. Perry lasted into the eighth round in a one-sided fight that could have been stopped a lot sooner.

Jake Paul is both a boxer and a promoter. As a promoter, he handles Amanda Serrano, one of the greatest female boxers in history. That makes him the person most responsible (because the buck stops with him) for the wretched mismatch in last Saturday’s co-feature, the bout between Serrano and Stevie Morgan.

Morgan, who took up boxing two years ago at age 33, brought a 14-1 record. Nicknamed the Sledgehammer, she had won 13 of her 14 wins by knockout, eight in the opening round. However, although she resides in Florida, all but one of those 13 knockouts happened in Colombia.

“We found that in Colombia there were just more opportunities for women’s boxing than in the United States,” she told a prominent boxing writer whose name we won’t mention.

The truth is that, for some folks, Colombia is the boxing equivalent of a feeder lot for livestock, a place where a boxer can go to fatten their record. The opportunities there were no greater than in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1995. It was there that Peter McNeeley prepped for his match with Mike Tyson with a 6-second knockout of professional punching bag Frankie Hines. (Six seconds? So it would be written although no one seems to have been there to witness it.)

Serrano vs Morgan was understood to be a stay-busy fight for Amanda whose rematch with Katie Taylor was postponed until November. Stevie Morgan, to her credit, answered the bell for the second round whereas others in her situation would have remained on the stool and invented an injury to rationalize it. Thirty-eight seconds later it was all over and Ms. Morgan was free to go home and use her sledgehammer to do some light dusting.

The Paul-Perry and Serrano-Morgan fights played out in a sold-out arena in Tampa before an estimated 17,000. Those without a DAZN subscription paid $64.95 for the livestream. Paul’s next promotion, where he will touch gloves with 58-year-old Mike Tyson (unless Iron Mike pulls a Joe Biden and pulls out; a capital idea) with Serrano-Taylor II the semi-main, will almost certainly rake in more money than any other boxing promotion this year.

Asked his opinion of so-called crossover boxing by a reporter for a college newspaper, the venerable boxing promoter Bob Arum said, “It’s not my bag but folks who don’t like it shouldn’t get too worked up over it because no one is stealing from anybody.” True enough, but for some of us, the phenomenon is distressing.

—

The next big women’s fight happens Saturday in Detroit where Claressa Shields seeks a world title in a third weight class against WBC heavyweight belt-holder Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse.

A two-time Olympic gold medalist, undefeated in 14 fights as a pro, Shields is very good, arguably the best female boxer of her generation which makes her, arguably, the best female boxer of all time. But turning away Lepage-Joanisse (7-1, 2 KOs) won’t elevate her stature in our eyes.

Purportedly 17-4 as an amateur, the Canadian won her title in her second crack at it. Back in August of 2017, she challenged Cancun’s Alejandra Jimenez in Cancun and was stopped in the third round. Entering the bout, Lepage-Joanisse was 3-0 as a pro and had never fought a match slated for more than four rounds.

Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse

True, on the women’s side, the heavyweight bracket is a very small pod. A sanctioning body has to make concessions to harness a sanctioning fee. Nonetheless, how absurd that a woman who had answered the bell for only 11 rounds would be deemed qualified to compete for a world title. (FYI: Alejandra Jimenez was purportedly born a man. She left the sport with a 12-0-1 record after her win over Franchon Crews Dazurn was changed to a no-contest when she tested positive for the banned steroid stanozolol.)

Following her defeat to Jimenez, Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse, now 29 years old, was out of action for six-and-a-half years. When she returned, she was still a heavyweight, but a much slender heavyweight. She carried 231 pounds for Jimenez. In her most recent bout where she captured the vacant WBC title with a split decision over Argentina’s Abril Argentina Vidal, she clocked in at 173 ¼. (On the distaff side, there’s no uniformity among the various sanctioning bodies as to what constitutes a heavyweight.)

Claressa Shields doesn’t need Vanessa Lepage-Joanisse to reinforce her credentials as a future Hall of Famer. She made the cut a long time ago.

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Former World Bantamweight Champion Richie Sandoval Passes Away at Age 63

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Arne K. Lang

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Richie Sandoval, who won the WBA and lineal bantamweight title in one of the biggest upsets of the 1980s and then, not quite two years later, suffered near-fatal injuries in a title defense, has passed away at the age of 63.

News circulated fast in the Las Vegas boxing community on Monday, July 22, the grapevine actuated by a tweet from Hall of Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler: “Boxing and the Top Rank family lost one of our own last night in the passing of former WBA bantamweight champion Richie Sandoval. It hurts personally and professionally to know that Richie is gone at age 63. RIP campeon.”

Details are vague but the cause of death was apparently a sudden heart attack that Sandoval experienced while visiting the Southern California home of his son of the same name.

Richie Sandoval put the LA County community of Pomona, California, on the boxing map before Shane Mosley came along and gave the town a more frequently-cited mention in the sports section of the papers. He came from a fighting family. An older brother, Albert “Superfly” Sandoval, became a big draw at LA’s fabled Olympic Auditorium while building a 35-2-1 record that included a failed bid to capture Lupe Pintor’s world bantamweight title.

Richie was a member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic boxing team that was stranded when U.S. President Jimmy Carter (and many other world leaders) boycotted the event as a protest against Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan.

As a pro, Sandoval’s signature win was a 15^th-round stoppage of Jeff Chandler. They fought on April 7, 1984 in Atlantic City. Chandler was making the tenth defense of his world bantamweight title.

Despite being a heavy underdog, Sandoval dominated the fight, winning almost every round until the referee stepped in and waived it off. Chandler, who was 33-1-2 heading in and had avenged his lone defeat, never fought again.

Sandoval made two successful defenses before risking his title against Gaby Canizales on the undercard of Hagler-Mugabi in the outdoor stadium at Caesars Palace. In round seven, Sandoval, who had a hellish time making the weight, was knocked down three times and suffered a seizure as he collapsed from the third knockdown. Stretchered out of the ring, he was rushed to the hospital where doctors reduced the swelling in his brain and beat the odds to save his life. This would be Richie’s lone defeat. He finished his pro career with a record of 29-1 (17 KOs).

Bob Arum cushioned some of the pain by giving Richie a $25,000 bonus and offering him a lifetime job at Top Rank which Richie accepted. And let the record show that Arum was good to his word.

A more elaborate portrait of Richie Sandoval was published in these pages in 2017. You can check it out HERE. May he rest in peace.

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