Oleksandr Usyk, the IBF, WBA & WBO heavyweight champion, could surprise many fans with his punching power to defeat the gargantuan WBC champ Tyson Fury for the undisputed championship on February 17th at the Kingdom Arena in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Chris Mannix believes that Usyk has the power to hurt Fury and possibly stop him. This writer agrees. Cruiserweight Steve Cunningham dropped Fury in 2013, and Deontay Wilder knocked him down four times.
Many boxing fans believe the 6’6″, 270+ lb behemoth Fury (34-0-1, 24 KOs) will have too much size and strength for the 6’3″ Usyk (22-0, 14 KOs) and squash him underfoot like he did against the pencil-thin, underskilled Deontay Wilder twice.
What fans overlooking these factors:
1. Fury has aged and is declining: He’s a very old 35.
2. Usyk’s superior athleticism
3. Tyson was never great to begin with
4. Wear & tear Fury took from the three Wilder fights
5. Wealth having robbed Fury of his ambition
Fury is the favorite in this fight, but only because the fans & oddsmakers are basing it on his wins over Deontay Wilder and the journeymen Dillian Whyte and Dereck Chisora.
Those were NOT high-quality wins for Fury, and they gave a warped view of his talent, making him look better than he actually is. Although Wilder has an excellent right hand, he is always limited, and his trainer had no clue in his three fights with Fury.
If Fury had fought some talented heavyweights in the division in the last six years, like Zhilei Zhang, Jared Anderson, Joseph Parker, and Martin Bakole, he wouldn’t be where he is now.
He would be just another big lummox, hanging around the mid to low top 15 rankings. Charles Brun hates to say it, but Fury would be on skidrow, trying to hustle fights like the other fighters in the division that have been left out of the party in Saudi Arabia.
Usyk’s Underrated Punch and Calculated Game Plan
“I’m done betting against Oleksandr Usyk. He goes into two fights with Anthony Joshua and dominates those fights. They were clean wins against Joshua,” said Chris Mannix to DAZN Boxing, discussing IBF, WBA & WBO heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk’s undisputed championship against WBC champ Tyson Fury on February 17th.
“He had Joshua hurt in the twelfth round of their first fight [in 2021]. That tells me that Usyk has real heavyweight power.”
Usyk had Joshua ready to be knocked out in their first fight in the 12th, and if not for the round ending, AJ would have been a goner for sure. In the rematch, Joshua looked just as bad, getting pelted by Usyk with stinging shots each time he would attack him with combinations.
It looked like Joshua was having flashbacks to his first fight with Andy Ruiz Jr, covering up and getting bombarded by shots from Usyk.
“Even though he’s going to be giving away a few inches to Tyson Fury, he’s going to have the power to hurt him if he lands the kind of shots that he’s going to be looking to land,” said Mannix.
“He’s also going to have what will undoubtedly be the right game plan to get on the inside on Fury, neutralize that activity, neutralize that size and length advantage. He’s going to be coming in clicking at this point,” said Mannix.
Fury: Still Elite or Showing Signs of Decline?
“Tyson Fury, I’m not sure, is clicking,” said Mannix. “The easiest thing to do is dismiss the Ngannou performance. Tyson Fury is not really taking that fight all that seriously, and that’s a perfectly valid thing to do.”
Of course, Fury is showing signs of decline. We saw that in his last fight against Francis Ngannou last October.
Fury looked as old as his 59-year-old dad, John Fury, and was nothing like the nimble-footed fighter that had beaten 40-year-old Wladimir Klitschko in 2015.
It’s unclear what Fury has been doing between fights, but some believe the rich foods he’s been gorging on have aged him. It could be just genetics. Some people age quicker than others, looking old as the hills at an early age, and that may be the case with Fury.
What’s troubling is how rapidly he’s aging. From Fury’s third fight with Wilder in 2021, he looks ten years older. It’s like he’s aging in dog years instead of people years.
“I think there was a part of Tyson Fury that read all the press clippings, that watched all the YouTube videos, that saw everybody say, ‘This guy can’t compete with you,’ and he went into that fight with that kind of mindset.
“Then, he saw a guy in front of him that could box a little bit better than he thought he could and had the kind of power that I’m sure he wondered if he did, and when he put him on the canvas, that changed everything.
“There’s certainly an argument that can be made that this will be a different Tyson Fury, but what if it’s not? What if we saw Tyson Fury, in his mid-30s, starting to show signs of decline? This is a guy that has had plenty of outside-the-ring issues that he’s been dealing with.
“He had three physical fights with Deontay Wilder. He won two of them, and he certainly was highly competitive in that draw [in 2018] the first time around, but he hit the canvas four times in those fights. That can take something out of you.
“We just spent weeks talking about ‘Did the Fury fights take something out of Deontay Wilder?’ Did the Wilder fights take something out of Tyson Fury? We’ve seen Fury in fights since then, but they’ve been against a so-so version of Dillian Whyte.”
Fury has been able to cover up the decline from his three fights with Wilder by facing the British journeymen Whyte & Chisora and then facing Ngannou. He hasn’t fought a quality heavyweight since his clash with Klitschko in 2015, and that’s the reality of it.
Like Anthony Joshua, Fury has been matched against weaker opposition to make him look good, and he’s responded. It’s all smoke & mirrors stuff, and classic on how to build a star off the back of fluff opposition.
“Then there’s a well past his prime version of Dereck Chisora,” said Mannix. “So, we haven’t seen him [Fury] in against an elite guy since the Deontay Wilder fight [in 2021]. This is an elite guy, and I believe Usyk is going to have an incredible game plan going into this fight that is going to put him in a position to win a decision.
“So, I’m riding with Usyk on this one. I can’t bet against this guy because all he does is not only find ways to win but win clean fights. He knocks out [Tony] Bellew, and he beats Joshua twice cleanly. Forget the controversy of the below-the-belt shot from Daniel Dubois.
“He was beating Daniel Dubois pillar to post and effectively made him quit in that fight. I understand that Fury is great, one of the greatest fights of this generation, but Usyk may be one of the best heavyweights of this generation. I think he’s going to put on a performance worthy of that,” said Mannix.
“In the latter stages of the first Anthony Joshua fight, he looked good. There was the twelfth round of the first fight, and in the ninth of their second fight, he took a pretty good beating from AJ. He came back and put a pretty good beating on AJ in that tenth round,” said Mannix about Usyk.
The Size Factor: Does it Matter?
“Fury, his ability to lean on fighters is an underrated skill of his because he puts his entire 275-ish pound frame on him and makes you carry him, and that is something that matters. So, you’re saying that Tyson is still at an elite level,” said Mannix.
“Fury is still at an elite level until he proves me wrong,” said Sergio Mora. “That was a dessert type of event. It was a crossover boxing event, and I don’t think Fury took it seriously,” said Mora about Fury’s fight with Francis Ngannou.
“He got knocked down,” said Mannix about Fury getting dropped by Ngannou.
“I don’t think he took it serious and he paid for it, but I don’t think that was a boxing championship fight. It was a mix of two sports, and we got what we got,” said Mora, making excuses for Fury’s signs of decline that he showed against Nnannou.
“Fury is right around 6’5″ or 6’6″ in real life. That’s right around the same size as Anthony Joshua, and we saw what Usyk was able to do against Joshua,” said Mannix. “I think we’re getting caught up a little bit in what guys are listed at.
“I think you’d agree, Fury is not 6’9″. He’s a few inches shorter than that, which puts him in the AJ range, and we saw what Usyk did to AJ. We saw how effective he [Usyk] was against a taller fighter. I’m not going to disbelieve that he can do it again,” said Mannix.
“Fury is a monster. He stands out because of his height, weight, and mass. He’s going to be a lot bigger than Usyk,” said Mora.
“You’re riding with Fury. I’m riding with Usyk. The winner will unquestionably be the #1 heavyweight in the world,” said Mannix.
