Deontay Wilder: People will call Stiverne a bum after I beat him

By Boxing News - 01/15/2015 - Comments

Stiverne and Wilder face off(Photo credit: Esther Lin/Showtime) By Scott Gilfoid: If there’s one thing that the giant sized American heavyweight Deontay Wilder (32-0, 32 KOs) is expecting from boxing fans after Saturday night is him not getting any credit for having beaten WBC heavyweight champion Bermane Stiverne (24-1-1, 21 KOs) in their fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Indeed, Deontay, 6’7”, believes that people will discredit his win over Stiverne by saying that the Haitian fighter wasn’t any good to begin with. It would be kind of like how people discredited Malik Scott after Deontay stroked him out in one round last year.

Instead of Deontay getting credit for knocking out a very good fighter in Scott, fans said that Scott took a dive. This is absolutely crazy because Scott is a warrior and he’d never purposely take a dive, especially in the biggest fight of his career.

“I don’t make promises I can’t keep and I promise you Stiverne your time is up on Saturday,” Wilder said. “People will call Stiverne after I beat him on Saturday.”

It’s quite possible that Deontay won’t get any credit for knocking Stiverne out, at least with a certain segment of the boxing world. There will be a lot of fans who give Deontay credit, but for the ones that dislike him for one reason or another, they’ll look at his win over Stiverne and say it was an empty one because Stiverne had only one real scalp on his resume during his 10 year pro career in Chris Arreola.

Let’s get this straight; Stiverne is a very good fighter and clearly a top five guy. I wouldn’t say he’s in the league of someone like Alexander Povetkin or a couple of other heavyweights like Wladimir Klitschko, but he’s still a very fine fighter.

If Deontay can whip Stiverne on Saturday night, it’s going to be a huge feather in his cap. But, yeah, Deontay is right about some boxing fans discrediting his win by pronouncing Stiverne as little more than a bum.

Deontay’s work will just have begun after the Stiverne fight, because there are bigger fish to fry against Wladimir, Povetkin, and Tyson Fury. I don’t rate Fury as a fighter, but a fight between him and Deontay would be a huge fight for boxing.

Deontay would get a nice payday for that fight, and it would help establish him as one of the top heavyweights in the division. I see a Fury as an easier fight than Stiverne, because Fury can’t punch and he’s got a weak chin.



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