By Scott Gilfoid: IBF/IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (63-3, 53 KOs) has arguably one of his toughest fights in years ahead of him this month against unbeaten American Bryant Jennings (19-0, 10 KOs) on April 25th at Madison Square Garden in New York.
The Klitschko vs. Jennings fight is only 19 days away, and it promises to be a very tough one for Wladimir due to the talent of the long-armed Jennings. This is one of the rare fights that the 39-year-old Wladimir has had during his career where his opponents’ reach was equal to his own.
We saw in the past what happened to Wladimir when he faced fighters with a long reach in his knockout losses to Ross Purrity and Corrie Sanders. Both of those guys had the reach to tag Wladimir with big shots, and they both scored stoppage wins over him.
The Klitschko-Jennings fight will be televised live on HBO World Championship Boxing on 4/25 @ 10 PM ET/PT. The fight will also be televised on RTL in Germany. It’s been seven long years since Wladimir fought in the United States.
The last time he fought there was back in 2008 when he defeated an over-matched Sultan Ibragimov by a boring 12 round unanimous decision to capture the WBO heavyweight title. Ibragimov didn’t have the reach or the punching power to make it a fight of it. Jennings does have the reach and the power to give Klitschko all kinds of problems in this fight with his combinations.
Klitschko is going to need to try and get the 6’3” Jennings out of there as fast as possible on April 25th, because the longer this fight goes the better the chance that Jennings wears the 6’6” Ukrainian down with his combination punching. This fight reminds me a lot of the Wladimir-Puritty and Wladimir-Brewster fight with the way that Jennings will cause Klitschko problems with his stamina, pressure and power.
Brewster and Puritty both wore Wladimir down with their relentless pressure in their fights. This was, of course, before Wladimir started clinching like crazy. Back when he fought Brewster and Puritty, Wladimir rarely clinched. Since then, he’s become like an octopus with the way he constantly grabs his opponents to keep them from getting their shots off.
The thing is Wladimir is only able to do this due to him fighting guys with a shorter reach than himself. His shorter opponents need to get close enough to land their shots, and once they do, Wladimir grabs them in a clinch to keep them from throwing anything. But with Jennings’ long reach, he’s going to be able to avoid Wladimir’s attempts at grabbing him in a clinch. This will enable Jennings to connect with his shots from the outside to try and expose Wladimir’s questionable punch resistance.
Jennings’ punching power is underrated. He’s a very good puncher. He obviously doesn’t have the one-punch power that you see in WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder, but he makes up for it by throwing many more punches in combination form. If Jennings is able to nail Wladimir with his hard left-right combinations, I think it’s quite possible that we’ll see a knockout in this fight and a new multi-belt world champion on April 25th.
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