By Jason Kim: With Emanuel Steward working his corner, unbeaten Tyson Fury (13-0, 9 KO’s) showed visible improvement last Saturday night in defeating journeyman Zack Page (21-33-2, 7 KO’s) by an eight round unanimous decision at the Pepsi Coliseum, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada/ Fury, 6’9″, towered over the 6’0″ Page and was able to keep him bottled up on the outside by throwing a lot of jabs in the first rounds of the bout. Fury previously used his jab only sparingly in his fights. However, you could see the changes that Steward has made in Fury’s game during the first half of Saturday’s bout.
Fury did an excellent job of keeping Page away from him during that part of the fight. Fury looked like he was mimicking Wladimir Klitschko by pumping out his jab and grabbing Page in a clinch when he would come inside. However, Fury’s form kind of disintegrated starting in the 5th round, as he seemed to fall back into his old brawling style of fighting, not using his jab and throwing wild shots. He was a lot less effective from rounds five through eight. One thing that bothered me, though, was the way that Fury had his trunks pulled up halfway up his torso. I’ve never seen a fighter with trunks pulled up that high, and was wondering why the referee let Fury get away with this. At first I thought Fury was trying to hide some blubber but he didn’t look any fatter than usual. It looks like Steward was trying to save Fury from getting hit to the body so much.
Although Fury was still dominating the action, he was getting hit a lot more than he did in the first four rounds. Fury didn’t help himself by fighting with his hands down by his sides. This enabled Page to land a lot of clean shots. Fury is going to have to change that style of fighting when he starts facing bigger punchers than Page. The good thing is he’s only 22 and has time to fix a lot of his problems. But he’s going to need to be very active and fight a lot for him to learn enough to become a top contender.
He’s got the size and the jab, but he really needs to work on using his reach more. If he can fight the way he did in the first four rounds all the time, I can see Fury beating a lot of heavyweights in the top tier. I think he can be a factor if he’s able to keep his opponents on the outside with his jab. He does need to throw his jab with more conviction, though, because it could be thrown with a lot more power. He needs to keep training with Wladimir Klitschko so he can develop more.
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