By Scott Gilfoid: In a predictable move, the World Boxing Council has voted to sanction the immediate rematch between WBC heavyweight champion Deontay ‘Bronze Bomber’ Wilder and Tyson Fury (27-0-1, 19 KOs). The WBC’s Board of Governors put it to a vote on Friday whether to sanction the Wilder-Fury rematch or not, and they voted to let the fight happen. Had the WBC opted to vote it down, their next move would have likely for them to order the 6’7″ Wilder to face his mandatory challenger Dominic Breazeale.
It was a competitive fight last weekend between Wilder and Fury, but ultimately it was an impossible one for the judges to agree on. They scored it 115-111 for Wilder, 114-112 for Fury and 113-113 even. There’s a massive amount of interest from the boxing public in seeing the two giant heavyweights face each other again. The wBC isn’t going to stand in the way of letting the Wilder vs. Fury fight happen again.
The winner of the Wilder vs. Fury 2 fight will likely be ordered to fight mandatory challenger Breazeale in their next fight. This, of course, could change if a unification fight takes place between the Wilder-Fury winner and IBF/WBA/WBO champion Anthony Joshua. The WBC tends to allow the unification fights to take place in front of mandatory defenses.
“Wilder and Fury gave boxing one of the best fights in the heavyweight division in a long time, which has created tremendous popular demand from fans to see a rematch,” Sulaiman said to ESPN.com “The WBC is happy to confirm that a direct rematch has been approved and will create in a ruling, which will also consider the mandatory status of the division.”
Wilder more than anything wants the second fight to show the boxing fans that he’s the better fighter of the two, since many of them feel that Fury deserved the win. Fury sees himself as the uncrowned champion, and is enjoying that status despite the fact that he was knocked down twice in the fight and didn’t end the fight on a strong note. Fury was clearly laboring at the end of the fight, looking both tired and hurt badly after getting dropped hard in the 12th round. Fury appeared to lose consciousness for several seconds after getting knocked down hard by a 1-2 combination from Wilder.
The referee Jack Reiss chose to give a count to the motionless Fury, who came to during the count and was able to rise at the count of 10 to just barely avoid being counted out. Fury looked nothing like the winner of the fight at the end. He was lucky, very lucky, that the fight wasn’t halted. It was one of those miracle things where the right referee was assigned to the fight, and that clearly saved Fury from the contest being waived off in the 12th. it’s believed by many boxing fans that most referees would have stopped the fight when they saw fury lying motionless on the canvas in the 12th round with his eyes closed after being deposited on the canvas by Deontay.
Wilder says he wants to finish Fury off for good when they face each other again. He’s not going to let a referee take the knockout away from him. Next time, Wilder wants to knock Fury out to the point where the referee will have no other choice but to stop the fight. You can believe by the way that Wilder is talking, he plans on coming at Fury a lot harder in the second fight, and treat every round like he did in the last four rounds. That’s the part of the fight where Fury was having major problems dealing with Wilder’s power and pressure that he was putting on him.
Breazeale (19-1, 17 KOs) will be putting his WBC mandatory spot at risk when he faces Carlos Negron (20-1, 16 KOs) this month on December 22. Breazeale is confident enough to believe that he’ll beat the 6’6″ Negron to hold his spot, and to hopefully get the winner of the Wilder vs. Fury fight. It’s still questionable whether the winner of the Wilder-Fury fight will bother facing Breazeale next. If there’s enough interest in a third fight between those two, we could see them do it again if the winner doesn’t opt to fight Joshua.
Wilder and Fury could get very rich just facing each other repeatedly and locking out the other heavyweights in the division. It’s one way for both of them to increase their popularity immensely without having to play games trying to get an increasingly reluctant and hard to negotiate with Joshua and his promoter Eddie Hearn to make a fight with them. Wilder and Fury were able to negotiate their fight seemingly in an effortless way without it being broadcast to the media and boxing fans on a daily basis by one of the promoters. Hearn can learn a thing or two from the promoters of Fury and Wilder in how to negotiate a fight in a professional manner without playing to the media and fans to try and create pressure to worm a better deal for his fighter.
“I’m willing and ready to give Fury the opportunity ASAP,” Wilder said. “It’s only right to give Fury a rematch as soon as possible. I’m ready whenever he’s ready to do it. I’m ready to give the fans what they want to see and end this talk once and for all [about who won].”
The Wilder-Fury rematch isn’t expected to go to the judges next time. It’s assumed that Wilder will KO Fury, and the referee’s 10 count won’t save the day for Fury. You can bet that Fury will be spoiling even more than he did in the first fight with his constant movement, holding and wrestling in close, but that’s not going to help him if he can’t get out of the way of Wilder’s huge right hand power shots.
Some boxing fans have been on the case of the judge that scored it 115-111 for Wilder. They think the judge did a poor job of scoring the fight. However, the British judge scored it 113-113, which takes away the argument that Fury was robbed at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. If a judge from Fury’s own country saw it as a draw, then sure it was a draw, and he didn’t do enough to win. When a challenger doesn’t beat the champ, they usually need to go to the back of the line and wait their turn for a rematch. But since there’s so much controversy and complaining from the boxing fans, the WBC has decided to sanction the Wilder vs. Fury rematch. That still doesn’t mean the rematch will take place.
Fury has to want to fight Wilder a second time, and it’s always possible he may go in another direction towards a Joshua fight. British promoter Eddie Hearn would like nothing better than to snatch Fury away from Wilder to use him as the opponent for Joshua’s next fight on April 13. It would enable Joshua to keep from being ignored again by the boxing world like he was last Saturday. Fury might not want to walk away from the Wilder fight due to the way the fight ended with him getting dropped twice, and seemingly being given a break by the referee, who chose to give him a count when he appeared to be knocked out in the 12th.
There’s a very good chance that Hearn will make Fury an offer that he can’t refuse by giving him a career-high offer to make more money fighting Joshua on April 13. When it comes to the money that Fury can make fighting one of the two heavyweights, he’ll likely choose to take the bigger payday against Joshua. Of course, if Fury believes that he can beat Wilder, then it makes sense for him to take the rematch with him, since he can increase his bargaining position for a match against Joshua if he beats Deontay in the second fight. The question is, does Fury really believe in himself?
You’d have to argue that he doesn’t believe in himself, and that he WON’T take the risk to fight Wilder a second time. If Fury loses to Wilder in the rematch, then he can forget about make the kind of loot that he would have if he’d take the April 13 fight against Joshua instead. For Fury to fight Wilder again, he will need to be in a position to gamble everything he’s got. It would be the same gamble Wilder recently took in facing Luis ‘King Kong’ Ortiz earlier this year in March. If Wilder had lost that fight, then he would have flushed away his chances of fighting Joshua for big money.
What’s sad is it didn’t matter that Wilder beat Ortiz. He still didn’t get the fight against Joshua, which tells you a lot about him and his promoter Hearn. They don’t appear to want any part of fighting Wilder. Although Wilder is flawed and can look bad at times in terms of technical boxing skills, he’s got the once punch equalizer that more than makes up for his deficiencies. Joshua and Hearn know that. Hench, they’re not fighting Wilder. Instead, Joshua is being matched against old guys like 39-year-old Alexander Povetkin, 41-year-old Wladimir Klitschko, 37-year-old Carlos Takam, and slappers like Dillian Whyte.
Wilder is showing class by saying that he wants the Fury rematch over a fight against Joshua. That shows that Wilder is willing to risk everything by fighting Fury again. Even though Wilder can make more money fighting Joshua, he’s willing to risk it all by fighting Fury in the first half of 2019.
Right about now, Fury probably needs some time to recover fully from his 12th round knockdown. If Fury faces Wilder in the next four months, there’s a good chance that he’ll be taken out quickly by him. With the way that Fury appeared to lose consciousness in the 12th round after taking two sledgehammer blows from Deontay, it would be a good idea for his promoter to wait at least six months before putting him back in with the American talent. If Fury faces Wilder too soon, it could be bad for him. Wilder is chomping at the bit, and he can’t to fight Fury a second time. If that fight were offered at the end of December, you can bet Wilder would be ready to grab it with both hands. Of course, Wilder is’t the one that was seemingly knocked out in the 12th round. It was Fury that was badly hurt. As such, Fury will either wait six months to fight Wilder again or he’ll take the fight with Joshua instead in order not to risk losing that big payday.
Fury would be losing out on a mountain of money from a Joshua fight if Wilder knocks him into oblivion in their rematch. Fury says he’s a “fighting man,” but at the end of the day, he’ll likely transform himself into a ‘businessman’ and take the bigger payday and not risk it all with the roll of a dice in a second fight with the Alabama native. It would show tremendous courage for Fury to risk his backside fighting Wilder again after what he went through last Saturday night. Fury might have nightmares about his 12th round knockdown and flashbacks.
Going back into the lion’s den to fight Wilder in any country would be the ultimate show of bravery on Fury’s part. One can argue strongly that Fury won’t want any part of having his tail ripped apart by Wilder in a second fight after the lion from Alabama almost took his head off in the 12th round last time. Fury has shown himself to be a courageous fighter in the past, but in this case, he’ll likely not want to tempt fate twice by getting inside the lion’s cage with Wilder a second time. Wilder is a fully awake lion now, and he’s going to be looking to tear apart in the rematch. Does Fury want to take that risk in fighting a psyched up Wilder in early 2019? With the money Hearn is going to offer Fury, you’d have to say probably not.