By Scott Gilfoid: Former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis recently got the chance to see unbeaten American heavyweight Deontay Wilder (28-0, 28 KO’s) destroy fellow British heavyweight Audley Harrison in a 1st round knockout in London, UK, and Lewis came away from the experience thinking that the 6’7” Wilder needs work on his punching.
Wilder hurt Audley with his first right hand of the fight, and he then snowed him under with windmill shots until Audley collapsed on the canvas. He got up and the fight was stopped because Deontay had done such a good job with his big power shots, but it looks like Lewis wasn’t all that impressed.
Lewis said on his twitter: “Just saw Wilder KO… He’s young and strong, but still needs work straightening out his punches. Thought Audley might test him. Against a great boxer he would be undone with those type of punches. Hitting hard isn’t going to help much when u run into a fighter u can’t hit or who hits hard back. I like Wilder but he’s got a LOT of technical work and improvements to do before he’s ready for the best. I’ve only seen a few of Wilder fights and the level of competition needs to be stepped up… 28-0 means little at level he’s fighting at.”
I agree with what Lewis says about Deontay needing to step up the level of his competition. This echoes the thoughts of legendary trainer Emanuel Steward, who said last year that Deontay’s promoters [Golden Boy Promotions] need to step him up against better opposition because they weren’t helping him by holding him back against guys that can’t even make it out of the 1st round.
Golden Boy has been wasting Deontay’s time for the past two years because he needed to be stepped up a couple levels as early as 2010 instead of continually feeding him soft touches for no apparent reason.
I don’t agree with Lewis about Deontay’s punching form. He doesn’t punch like that all the time. He just did it against Audley because he had him out on his feet. If you look at Lewis’ fights against Riddick Bowe in the Olympics, Andre Golota and Ray Mercery, Lewis flurried in pretty much the same manner as Deontay did against Audley.
No one complained about Lewis fighting like that against those guys, so why are people making a big production about Deontay not using the best form when beating up the British heavyweight Audley? I mean, it worked, didn’t it? Those clubbing shots really hurt Audley because a couple of them hit him on the back of the head and essentially brained him.
If Deontay had taken his time to throw only straight punches, it would have taken him longer to get the knockout and he might have missed out on knocking Audley out in the 1st round. When you’ve got a guy hurt like that, you punch whatever way you can so you can throw the fastest possible shots with the most power, and that’s exactly what Deontay did in this case and I applaud him for that.
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