By Matt Stephens: IBO/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion and Ring Magazine Fighter Of The Year Tyson Fury is due to defend his belts in a rematch against dethroned heavyweight king Wladimir Klitschko on July 9th of this year. He took the belts from Wladimir in Wlad’s home turf on November 28th 2015 – an achievement which is impossible to overestimate.
Wlad was last beaten in 2004 by Lamont Brewster but since then had accumulated the WBA (Super), IBF, WBO, IBO, The Ring and lineal heavyweight titles! He was quite simply – one of the most dominant champions of all time. If you’re a fan of emotionally charged Hitler comparisons then this article isn’t for you. If you’re a fan of balanced, technical boxing discussion – you’re in the right place.
So what happened on that night in Germany vs Tyson Fury? Look through many articles, comments sections, YouTube videos, etc – and you’ll find big statements of how Wladimir ‘didn’t turn up’, ‘didn’t let his hands go’, ‘gave the titles away’, and as many other ridiculous statements as you can think of. Yet, these statements and the many like them are total drivel! All of them are utter nonsense that display a serious misunderstanding of what Tyson actually did in Dusseldorf that night and of boxing in general. I was going to leave this post while closer to fight night but reading some recent articles filled with this ridiculous nonsense has prompted me to put it out there now to help stop the dumbing down of this magnificent win.
What Tyson and his team did was come up with the perfect game plan to beat Wladimir and then Tyson executed it under the highest of pressure, in an environment he’d never boxed in before. Everything was against Tyson that night but he didn’t freeze up under the big lights as we see time and time again when a boxer fights in an arena or stadium for the first time. That alone is an achievement few boxers could’ve hoped to perform. But, as well as that, he put a boxing plan into action that was perfectly designed to dethrone the king in front of him.
So what about that king? Well, ever since the late Emanuel Steward took the reigns in training Klitschko, Wladimir grew smarter and smarter as time went on. No longer was he getting wobbled or stopped by getting stuck into a fight during his matches – he was intelligently using economy of movement, some not pretty – but effective inside tactics and maybe most of all – a deep understanding of distance, an educated jab and touch jab to set up the right ‘Steel Hammer’ he possessed.
Wladimir beat contender after contender with that set of tools. Watch any highlights reel of Wladimir and you’ll see him landing that hammering right hand over and over behind the touch jab. But what is a touch jab? For the uninitiated, a touch jab does exactly what it says on the tin – it’s a jab that you just touch your opponent with, usually to his/her guard, most often to measure range. It can be used for many other things too – as a defensive tool keeping a shorter opponent at arm’s length; to blind an opponent to an oncoming shot (most often the right hand) by holding it in their eye-line for a split second; to disrupt a fighter’s rhythm by touching their guard before they punch and much more. It’s a massively useful technique used by Wladimir, Floyd Mayweather, Bernard Hopkins and Andre Ward for all these things. Wladimir became a master of it; and that fact combined with his elite level distance management made him unbeatable for 11 years. I could go on and on about Wlad’s brilliant management of these skills and the boxers with which he beat using them, but I’ve gone on long enough – let’s get to why Tyson was able to beat Wladimir.
HE TOOK THEM AWAY!!! It’s that simple. The style that Wladimir had perfected is perfect to defeat a smaller guy when all the onus is on them to get inside past that massive touch jab and start to work; and even if they could get past the jabs and Wladimir’s subtle use of distance management, they had to get out of a quickly initiated clinch or their head being pulled down on the inside! It made for a near impossible task for Wlad’s opponents to land any meaningful shots on him. They’d exhaust themselves trying to do so and either get stopped or beat handily on points. Beautiful in conception, but a bit ugly to watch.
Equally beautiful was the plan designed by Peter Fury. What do you do if your opponent relies heavily on a touch jab to get shots off – YOU DON’T LET HIM TOUCH YOU!
As Tyson did – you move, you slip, you slide, you bob and weave, you herk and jerk your way around the ring, you switch stance, you showboat. Why do you think Mayweather’s opponent’s punch outputs plummet when they box him (except Marcos Maidana!)? Because he doesn’t allow them to get the shots off and that’s exactly what Tyson did to Wladimir. It wasn’t that Wladimir wasn’t letting his hands go! He wasn’t allowed to let his hands go! He became reduced to edging forward, pawing with the touch jab and trying to touch a target that wasn’t there.
His style is all about being set, being in control of the distance. How can he possibly do that vs a 6ft9 man that is in perpetual, unpredictable movement? A 6ft9 man who managed to get the ridiculous memory foam canvas designed to stop him from employing this game plan removed? A 6ft9 man who hasn’t lost his bottle when confronted with the biggest challenge of his life in front of an arena full of people for the first time? He can’t. Plain and simple. Tyson took his biggest weapon and under the most intense of sporting pressure, disarmed him. No accidents! No poor showing by Wlad! A perfect plan and a brilliant execution!
Absolutely beautiful, elite level, tactical boxing.
Lesson over. Class Dismissed.
Fury has stopped eating meat and is now focusing on fish instead.
“I’m not a vegetarian, I’m a pescatarian and I think I will stick to it. I don’t feel bloated after eating fish and don’t want to lie down like a lion after it has killed something,” Fury said to newsweek. “It’s got to the point where I don’t like meat anymore. If I am sitting in a restaurant and I am looking at the man next to me and he is eating a big juicy steak, I’m like, ‘Urgh, that’s disgusting.’”