By Scott Gilfoid: Tyson Fury is starting to sound like he’s got a major chip on his shoulder about him being written off by boxing fans after his career disintegrated five years ago in 2015.
It seems like Fury is blaming the fans for what he did to himself. The fans weren’t the ones that forced Fury to balloon up in weight and take it easy after his upset win over Wladimir Klitschko. Fury did it to himself.
Fans wrote Fury off for a good reason
After Fury’s win over Wladimir, he put on so much weight that few people believed that he would ever take off the tonnage. Fury was close to 400 pounds, and that’s an enormous amount of weight for an athlete to weight. Even promoter Eddie Hearn expressed doubts about Fury’s ability to take that weight off.
Fury’s recent win over WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder last February seems to have gone to his head, making him believe that he’s the #1 heavyweight in the division.
His ego was always way up in the stratosphere from day one, but now after beating Wilder. Fury’s feet are no longer touching the ground. The way he’s talking now, Gilfoid is worrying about long he can keep it together before he implodes again.
According to Fury (30-0-1, 21 KOs), he was written off because he was fat, but it was more of a case of him being a one-hit-wonder who beat ancient 40-year-old Wladimir Klitschko.
The problem is, Fury disappeared into the horizon without ever defending the IBF, WBA, and WBO heavyweight straps that he won off of the gunshy Wladimir in Düsseldorf, Germany in November 2015.
Fury sounding bitter
“They wrote me off because I wasn’t body beautiful. Because I went to 28st and had mental health problems,” said Tyson to skysports.com. “Because I had ten changes in trainers. But here I am today, standalone heavyweight. I’m still fat, ugly, bald. And still unstoppable.”
Okay, here’s the deal. The reason why the fans wrote Fury off is of his own doing. He’s the one that decided to become a fat mess after his win over Wladimir.
Fans figured Fury would lose his rematch with Wilder because he’d been knocked down twice in their first fight in 2018 and arguably saved by the referee in the 12th. That was after Wilder knocked Fury out cold, and the referee for some inexplicable reason gave a count while he was down, looking badly hurt.
Wilder needs to be on his guard
In the rematch, Fury got away with a massive amount of rabbit punches to the back of Wilder’s head without being penalized once or disqualified. For fans that didn’t take notice of the illegal rabbit punches, they need to rewatch the Fury-Wilder 2 fight and take a close look.
Fury was hitting Wilder with punches to the back of his head through much of the fight, and it looked like he was targeting that area. Given how the fight played out, Wilder never stood a chance due to the tactics that Fury used. You can argue that if Wilder had come into the battle with a similar strategy in mind, we might have seen an even match.
“I can’t wait to get back in and smash Deontay Wilder’s face again,” said Fury on Tuesday on his Instagram.
Wilder didn’t realize until too late that he wasn’t going to be able to win the fight given all the rabbit punching that Fury was doing. Typically, a good trainer will tell their fighter in between rounds to come up with an excellent plan-B to deal with a fighter that is fouling like mad, but that didn’t happen with Wilder. He came out every round and looked defenseless to Fury’s rabbit punching.
Fury’s rabbit-punching will need to be policed
In the Fury vs. Wilder 3 clash, it’s going to be important for Deontay’s team to ensure that the referee does his job properly to deal with the rabbit punching from Tyson. Ideally, Fury won’t resort to those tactics again, but given the success, he had in the second fight, that’s wishful thinking.
You have to believe that if Fury’s rabbit punching worked for him once, he’ll go back to the same strategy and hope that the referee turns a blind eye to the fouling as we saw in the second match.
What’s interesting is that referees nowadays don’t do much to control rabbit punching for some reason despite it being far more dangerous than low blows. It’s weird how a lot of referees fail to penalize fighters when they clocking their opponents with punches to the back of the head.
The trilogy match needs to be a clean fight
If Fury can use the same rabbit-punching in the third fight as he did in the second, Wilder won’t stand a chance of winning. Look at it this way. If your opponent can get away with illegal tactics in a fight such as rabbit punching, low blows, and whatever else, that puts you at a disadvantage.
If Wilder is fighting a clean fight, and Fury is nailing him with textbook rabbit punches, then it stands to reason we’ll see another win for Tyson. That’s why the third fight could come down to the qualify of the referee that works it. If you have a referee that takes a laissez-faire approach [non-interfereing] to controlling the fouling going on, then it means the fight will devolve into the primitive caveman level.
If it’s anything goes type of fight where Fury and Wilder are fouling like mad, then the guy does the better fouling could win. That’s why it’s essential to have an assertive referee that stops the fouling right away on the spot, be it from Fury or Wilder. We don’t need one fighter getting away with fouling while the other guy is trying to play it by the marquess of Queensberry rules.
If Fury is the better fighter of the two, it will look better if he shows that by fighting a clean fight. In the first Fury-Wilder match in 2018, Fury wasn’t throwing rabbit punches, and he was fighting a good clean fight. As we saw, Fury got the worst of it in getting knocked down twice. But for some reason, Fury changed tactics in the rematch by throwing rabbit punches. Is that why Fury won the fight? It looked like Wilder never recovered from a punch he took to the back of his head in the third.
