By William MacKay: If IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (50-3, 44 KOs) is expecting his challenger Tony Thompson (31-1, 19 KOs) to sit back and fight him in a jab contest I think he’s sadly mistaken, and in for a much tougher fight than he expected. Thompson, 6’5″ 246 lbs with an 81″ reach, is an excellent puncher, especially at close range where he can use his hooks and uppercuts, and pound his opponents into submission. He may use his jab on the outside, but he often uses it more seldom than you’d think he would, focusing more on getting in close proximity to his opponents and beating them around the head and midsection with constant hooks and uppercuts.
At close range, Wladimir is no match for Thompson, neither able to compete with him in the sheer volume of punches he’s going to be throwing or able to fight nearly as well as him at close range. Klitschko doesn’t have an uppercut in his arsenal, although he’s experimented with one off an one over the years since taking on trainer Emanuel Steward. However, for some reason likely due to his height, he’s never been able to master using an uppercut, and when he tries to throw one, he gets zero power on the punch, often misses badly with it and only succeeds at looking terribly uncoordinated. For that matter, Wladimir hasn’t learned how to throw short hooks on the inside, which is another punch that the southpaw Thompson is quite proficient at throwing.
Indeed, once Thompson gets started with throwing hooks at close range, he never lets up and just keeps on throwing them, reminding me of a taller version of Antonio Margarito. There’s no way Wladimir can match Thompson at close range, that much is clear. He may try and stay up with him for a round or two, but he’ll quickly tire, and not have the arsenal to fight Thompson in close proximity, and will be forced to clinch him repeatedly to get him to stop punching. That will only work some of the time, because once on the outside, Thompson’s is an equal to Wladimir’s jab, maybe a little less effective about the same more or less.
Thompson will likely throw several jabs, and regardless of whether he’s landing or Wladimir’s landing, he’s going to come forward and start commencing with his inside offensive attack and put a lot of pressure on Wladimir to come up with either a big punch to try and stop him or attempt to ramp up his own punch output so he can stay up with Thompson. For a moment, I think Wladimir can trade shots with Thompson, match him shot for shot, but very quickly, though, Wladimir will tire out, and if he hasn’t scored a knockout by then, Thompson will completely take over the fight. Thompson’s chin is first rate, and he can take a tremendous shot without going down.
This means that unless Wladimir can hit him a lot, way more than he’s been forced to hit his recent low quality opposition, Thompson will still be there by the 6th round (the point in which Wladimir typically starts to fade in his bouts). Wladimir will use a lot of power shots, throwing them in a disparate manner to try and take him out, but the punches won’t help him out. His attempt at taking Thompson out will only draw attention to the fact that Wladimir is out of his league, and can’t match him in boxing ability, poise or command of the ring. Thompson is just a much mature fighter, like a fighter that’s been there before and he knows what he can do.
With only one loss on his record, he hasn’t learned how to lose, and, in fact, he hasn’t lost a fight in eight years. In a way, you can consider him unbeaten, because his only loss was a 4-round unanimous decision defeat in only his 5th fight. Those kinds of defeats hardly matter, unless their followed by a string of additional losses. In Thompson’s case, he hasn’t been beaten since then, and no one has come even close to beating him. He’s beaten good fighters like Luan Krasniqi, Dominick Guinn, Timor Ibragimov and Cliff Couser, dominating all of them with his huge size and high volume offensive attack. Certainly Thompson hasn’t faced the same quality of fighters that Wladimir has, but I don’t see this as a factor that will be hurting Thompson any.
Most of the fighters that Wladimir has faced have been flawed, fighters with good power, some of them, but most of the very average in ability. For three-fourths of Wladimir’s career, he was protected by his German management, keeping him away from big punchers or ones with a lot of ability. Hence, after losses to Ross Puritty, a journeyman with good power, and Corrie Sanders, a semi-retired boxer in his mid-thirties, Wladimir was steered away from powerful punchers. The first thing that happened once he moved away from his German management, his new trainer attempted to put him in with a big puncher, in this case Lamon Brewster, and as one would expect, Wladimir was flattened in the 5th round.
This is not to say that Thompson is a big puncher, although he does have very good power, but more to highlight how poorly Wladimir has done against the few fighters that had a good offense, and who could actually throw punches back at Wladimir. Thompson doesn’t have anywhere near the same kind of power as Brewster, Puritty or Sanders, but what he does have is a better overall offense than any of them. None of them can punch for long periods of time, and none have an offensive attack as complicated as Thompson.