By Allan Fox: WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder spoke the obvious in giving his estimation of the slender, non-punching Bryant Jennings’ chances of beating IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (63-3, 53 KOs) in their fight on April 25th at Madison Square Garden in New York.
Wilder thinks the 6’3”, 225 pound Jennings is too weak and short to be able to deal with the power and the reach of the 6’6” Klitschko. But interestingly enough, Jennings has a long reach than Wladimir by three inches so it’s possible in theory that Jennings could have some success in at least making contact with Wladimir.
The area where Jennings may find himself in trouble is his lack of power. Without the power needed to beat Wladimir in a fight where they’re trading shots, Jennings is going to be at the mercy of Wladimir if the Ukrainian fighter can land his power shots with any regularity.
At the very least, Wladimir will be able to win rounds just based on his better power. If Jennings is able to land a lot of his shots, he’s still going to find himself getting hit by Wladimir’s harder shots in every round unless he can skillfully get out of the way of them.
“Jennings is definitely not going to beat Klitschko, who is a taller fighter who knows how to keep his distance,” Wilder said via RingTV.com. “Jennings doesn’t have the power to knock nobody out. His best chance is as a cruiserweight or a light heavyweight because his power is not built for the heavyweight division. So I see no way in hell that he’s going to beat Klitschko.”
Jennings will never be able to take off enough weight for him to fight at cruiserweight, so that’s not a real possibility for him. Light heavyweight obviously is out of the question. However, Jennings is going probably going to need to be content at being an Eddie Chambers type heavyweight and just hang around looking to be a gatekeeper and a guy that occasionally gets title shots ever so often.
Wilder notes that Jennings had problems beating the 6’1” Mike Perez in their fight last year in July in winning a controversial 12 round split decision. Jennings was clearly bothered by Perez’s power in the first six rounds, and he likely would have either folded or lost the fight if Perez hadn’t faded so badly in the second half of the fight due to his conditioning issues.
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