By Scott Gilfoid: Deontay Wilder thinks Tyson Fury would have been better off being trained by his long-time trainer Peter Fury for their fight on December 1 rather than using Freddie Roach. Wilder (40-0, 39 KOs) sees Fury’s addition of Roach to his team as a signal that he’s worried about the fight with him.
Fury (27-0, 19 KOs) will have Ben Davison as his leader trainer during the fight on December 1, but Roach will be there to work cuts if any and to give him advice if things start looking bleak. The problem that Fury has is if he does get in trouble against the hard-hitting Wilder, the fight is likely going to be over before he gets a chance to go back to his trainer to get advice from Roach.
“I would’ve been happier to see Peter [Fury],” Wilder said. “When you start getting multiple trainers, for me, that says you’re nervous.”
The timing of the 6’9″ Fury asking Roach to help him against Wilder does look awfully bad. I mean, it wouldn’t have been a big deal if Fury asked Roach to work as his adviser/cut man for his mismatches against former cruiserweight Sefer Seferi and Francesco Pianeta. No one would have said anything about Fury asking Roach to work with him if he’d done it for those fights, as they were both mismatches.
Fury looked weak in the eyes of Wilder and a lot of boxing fans with the way that he bailed out early during his training camp in the mountains at Big Bear, California. Wilder, 32, thinks Fury couldn’t take the hard training in the high altitude.
“You couldn’t even take Big Bear. You had to come back down because that was too much for you,” Wilder said about Fury leaving the Big Bear training facility early to come back down to sea level to train at Roach’s Wildcard gym in Los Angeles, California.
It’s not easy obviously training in the altitude in Big Bear. The only well known big guys that train currently at Big Bear are Joe Joyce and Murat Gassiev. Those are hard workers, who don’t blow up in weight in between fights celebrating their victories, eating as much as they want. Those are dedicated guys. For Fury, you an argue that he was out of his element from the moment that he stepped foot inside the Big Bear training facility. It’s hard for fighters that come to Big Bear overweight, because they’re going to be having a hard enough time just trying to deal with the altitude with the lower levels of oxygen.
Fury adding Roach to his team at this late in the game for his training camp is clearly an indication that things aren’t working well. If Fury was confident, he would stick it out with just Davison and hope for the best. Hopefully this isn’t the sign of Fury coming apart mentally at the seams. He needs to be functioning on all eight cylinders mentally on December 1 for him to have a shot at beating the talented 6’7″ Wilder.
If the Wilder-Fury fight turns out to be a gross mismatch with Wilder obliterating Fury, there’s still a good chance that the undercard will have at least one or two decent fights. Heavyweight contender Joe Joyce (6-0, 6 KOs) fights Joe Hanks (23-2, 15 KOs), IBF/WBA junior middleweight champion Jarrett Hurd (22-0, 15 KOs) faces Jason Welborn (24-6, 7 KOs), former heavyweight world title challenger Luis Ortiz (29-1, 25 KOs) fights Travis Kauffman (32-2, 23 KOs), former two time heavyweight world title challenger Chris Arreola (36-5-1, 31 KOs) faces Maurenzo Smith (20-10-4, 13 KOs), light heavyweight Anthony Yarde (17-0, 6 KOs) fights to be arranged and Featherweight Isaac Lowe (15-0, 5 KOs) takes on journeyman Lucas Rafael Baez (33-16-5, 17 KOs). The only problem with the undercard is it’s full of mismatches, but there might be one good fight out of the bunch. Unfortunately for the boxing fans that order the Wilder vs. Fury fight on Showtime PPV, the televised fights aren’t expected to be great ones. That might be why that Adonis Stevenson vs. Oleksander Gvozdyk and Julio Cesar Chavez Jr. vs. Alfredo Angulo will have their fights shown on the same night as part of a split sight double-header.