Deontay Wilder: No days off from boxing!

By Boxing News - 12/27/2015 - Comments

wilder45552222By Scott Gilfoid: WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder (35-0, 34 KOs) isn’t taking any days off as he prepares for his January 16th fight against challenger Artur Szpilka (20-1, 15 KOs). Wilder, 6’7”, isn’t taking this fight lightly, because he knows this is Szpilka’s Super Bowl, and he understands the Polish fighter is going to be totally amped up trying to beat him to capture his WBC title.

If Szpilka can beat Wilder, he would get a fight against Alexander Povetkin and then possibly a big money fight against the winner of the Wladimir Klitschko vs. Tyson Fury rematch.

Szpilka, 26, has turned his career around since his loss to Bryant Jennings from a year ago. Szpilka looks much better now than he did in that fight, and he’s really shined in winning his four fights. Szpilka beat Yasmany Consuegra, Tomasz Adamek, Manuel Quezada and Tyson Cobb. He looked great in all four fights. The wins showed that the 26-year-old Szpilka has gotten better with training and learning from the mistakes that he made against Jennings. The question is can the improvement Szpilka has made in his game help him to defeat a talent like Wilder? I think not, but there’s always a chance.

This is going to be an old school slugging match. Szpilka only seems to know how to slug, and Wilder’s first instinct is to drop right hand bombs from the word go. Wilder will definitely accommodate Szpilka by going out and looking to unload on him from the 1st round. This is the perfect showcase fight for Wilder to show his stuff. I like Szpilka a lot as a fighter, but I’ll be very surprised if he’s able to make it out of the 1st round.

This is not supposed to be a competitive fight, so all Wilder needs to do is focus hard on his training and go out there and look to get rid of Szpilka as quick as he can on 1/16 at the Barclays Center. Above all, Wilder cannot let Szpilka get any confidence going in this fight because that could help him fight on a higher level than he already will be.

Wilder made the mistake of letting Eric Molina get a little confidence earlier in this fight after he landed a nice left hook, and he made the fight harder than it should have been. Of course, Wilder’s right hand wasn’t 100 percent for that fight. Wilder came into that fight with a right hand that had been fractured in his previous fight against Bermane Stiverne.

Where to see it? The Wilder vs. Szpilka fight will be televised on Showtime Championship Boxing.

Start time: 9:00 p.m. ET/6:00 p.m. PT.

Location of the fight: Barclays Center, Brooklyn, New York.

The undercard of the Wilder-Szpilka has a nice heavyweight match-up between Vyacheslav Glazkov and American Charles Martin. The two heavyweights will be fighting for the vacant IBF heavyweight title that was recently stripped from champion Tyson Fury for him opting not to defend the belt against Glazkov, his #1 IBF mandatory challenger.

Glazkov figures to have the advantage in this fight due to his superior experience and good chin. He doesn’t have the punching power or the size of the 6’5” Martin, but his chin and experience may carry him through the fight. It doesn’t matter if Glazkov wins the IBF title. He’s not going to hold onto the strap for any length of time because the top contenders will be circling him like buzzards eyeing roadkill the moment he wins the title. Martin has a real chance of winning this fight if he’s able to go after Glazkov immediately. I don’t think Martin will do well if he lets Glazkov nail him with shots for too long, because I think Martin’s chin might not be the best.

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All I can say is Glazkov needs to try and get a unification fight as fast as he can after he wins the IBF title, because if he tries to defend the strap, I can see him getting beaten even by the bottom ranked contenders. Glazkov is just so vulnerable it’s not even funny. We saw that in his fights against Derric Rossy, Malik Scott and Steve Cunningham, all of which I had beating Glazkov.



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