By Charles Brun: WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury’s path to the undisputed championship has suddenly become more complicated with his mandatory Dillian Whyte abruptly pulling out of his October 30th fight against Otto Wallin, complaining of a shoulder injury.
Some believe that Whyte (28-2, 19 KOs) made a calculated decision to pull out of the Wallin fight, a voluntary defense for his interim WBC title to take advantage of his mandatory status FORCE Fury to fight him next.
If you saw Fury getting decked repeatedly by an exhausted and seemingly poorly conditioned Deontay Wilder on October 9th, you’ll know that Whyte is a dangerous fight for the ‘Gypsy King.’
Whyte = Nightmare for Fury
There’s an excellent chance that Fury could lose. Suddenly, Fury’s future isn’t nearly as rosy as it was before Whyte’s convenient shoulder injury.
Fury’s ugly new mauling style of fighting is made to order for a fighter like Dillian Whyte, an excellent inside puncher with his uppercuts and left hooks to the breadbasket.
If Fury chooses to try his nonstop clinching against Whyte, he could be sorry for it afterward when he gets blasted out.
Unless Fury vacates or begs the World Boxing Council to make him their Franchise champion, he likely will need to defend against Whyte next rather than just sitting around waiting to face the winner of the Anthony Joshua vs. Oleksandr Usyk 2 rematch in 2022.
Charles Brun is assuming that Fury will use the same mauling tactics that he used against Deontay Wilder in their last two fights against Whyte in hopes that he can tire him out in the same way.
In other words, Fury thinks that he can use the ‘one size fits all’ approach to winning by cycling the same mauling game plan that he used twice successfully against Deontay for all of his fights moving forward.
I’m afraid it will not work for Fury if he attempts to mug Whyte, Joshua, or Usyk with that primitive new style that SugarHill has taught him. If Fury uses that mugging approach against any of those three heavyweights, he will lose badly.
Fury should dump SugarHill
It would be a good idea for Fury to demote SugarHill to a secondary coach right now and find a trainer that can bring back the gazelle-like fighter that he used to be because he’s been transformed into a lazy, flabby 270+ blob that clings to his opponents the way that out of shape journeymen do.
While much has been said about how great of a job Fury’s Krong Gym-trained coach SugarHill Steward has done with him science taking over as his trainer in 2019, the reality is, he’s changed him for the worse.
Before SugarHill took over as Fury’s coach, he was a slim, highly mobile fighter focused on being as elusive as a greased pig inside the ring.
Fury was hard to hit, and he was crafty and skilled. Since taking the job with Fury, SugarHill has turned him into a flabby 270+ lb mauler, who doesn’t move like he used to, and who uses his size to hang grapple and lean on his smaller opponents to try and wear them down.
It’s a dimensional lazy approach to fighting that is typically seen by fat out-of-shape B & C level heavyweights.
Unfortunately, that style will not work for Fury against Anthony Joshua and especially not Oleksandr Usyk. They’re going to outbox Fury and pick him apart as he attempts to start his simplistic mauling.
You can argue that Fury was a far better fighter when Ben Davison was his trainer than now, with SugarHill transforming him into a flabby 270+ lb mauler.
SugarHill worried
“Yes, he does. I don’t want to see that. But yes, he does,” said SugarHill to Sky Sports on Fury being dropped occasionally.
“He wants to fight. Everybody talks about undisputed,” SugarHill said about Tyson Fury’s goal of fighting for the undisputed against the Anthony Joshua vs. Oleksandr Usyk winner.
“We think about it sometimes, we have conversations about it, but it’s not the deepest conversation we have,” Sugarhill admitted. We know it’s a difficult thing to accomplish with the politics, the stars being aligned.
“We don’t talk about a specific person. We want whoever the best is. Everybody has it in their head to be an all-time great,” said Steward about Fury wanting to become undisputed heavyweight champion.
The reason Fury keeps getting dropped is that he’s right in the line of fire with him mauling in close because he’s no longer the elusive greased pig-like fighter that he once was.
You got to blame SugarHill for that because he’s turned him into a giant sloth with the way he’s grappling with his opponents instead of boxing them like he used to.