By Charles Brun: Tyson Fury (29-0-1, 20 KOs) is chomping at the bit in wanting to taste one of the WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder’s right hand power shots in their rematch on February 22 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. You can argue that Fury is a glutton for punishment in begging Wilder to get hit by one of his right hand.
Fury, 6’9″, is literally asking for trouble in daring the 6’7″ Wilder to hit him with one of his crushing right hand bombs, because he was unable to handle his power last December.
Has Fury’s chin improved since last year?
Wilder knocked Fury down TWICE, and had him unconscious in the 12th. Although Fury beat the count, there’s a lot of questions about whether the referee Jack Reiss should have given him a count. Fury will need to have a sturdier chin in the rematch if he wants to be able to take Wilder’s right hands without getting dropped over and over again.
The two will be fighting for a second time, and this match is expected to show who the better fighter is between them. Last time they fought, the fight was scored as a 12 round last December. The conventional wisdom is Fury did enough to deserve the victory, but the 2 knockdowns by Wilder in the later rounds convinced the judges that neither fighter deserved the win.
Fury given 2 confidence boosters against Wallin and Schwarz
Wilder-Fury 2 will be aired on Fox and ESPN pay-per-view on February 22. Fury has won his last couple of fights in beating Otto Wallin and Tom Schwarz, and he looked good at times in both fights. His promoters at Top Rank Boxing chose to put him in against guys with no power after his hard fight against Wilder last year.
This was more about showcasing Fury’s talent to make him look good in the eyes of the U.S boxing public, and the results were so-so. To be sure, Fury looked good against little known Schwarz, but that’s a fighter that looked dreadful. The fact that the WBO had Schwarz ranked #2 before the fight was troubling, because he had struggled against 2nd tier fighter Senad Gashi in 2018.
For his part, Wilder faced FAR BETTER opposition than Fury in beating Luis ‘King Kong’ Ortiz and Dominic Breazeale by knockout. Ortiz is a guy that would have a good chance of beating Fury, and it’s admirable that Wilder chose to fight him again.
Fury has added SugarHill and Andy Lee to training team
Tyson made a trainer change recently in swapping the tried and true coach Ben Davison for Javan ‘SugarHill’ Steward and Andy Lee, and it remains to be seen if this change will benefit Fury or not. The fact that Fury felt that he needed to change trainers at this point is a bad sign that he’s worried about what could happen in his rematch with the hard hitting Wilder.
Sugarhill and Lee are going to need to come up with a different game plan for Fury if he wants to beat Wilder in the rematch, because ‘The Bronze Bomber’ had him figured out in the last 4 rounds of their fight.
Fury threw Wilder off with his movement, and constant feints in the first 8 rounds of the fight. But in the last quarter of the fight, Wilder solved the Fury riddle and was drilling him with devastating right hands. In the rematch, Fury will need to do something different if he wants to win.
