LAS VEGAS — The Gypsy King has reclaimed his throne. Tyson Fury entered the ring at the MGM Grand Saturday night wearing a gold crown and a cape, astride a golden throne accompanied by the voice of Patsy Cline singing, “Crazy.”
And that’s what the damned evening was, right up to the time it ended in the seventh round.
Fury brutalized, bullied and twice floored defending heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder, the fighter whose right fist, until Saturday night, carried within it the Hammer of Alabama.
Crazy:
The theory that Fury couldn’t punch, that Fury needed to be perfect just to win a decision, that sooner or later Wilder would catch him, that Wilder would drive him into the ropes and drop him with the right hand that nearly finished him in their first fight.
Crazy:
The idea that Fury, the 270-pound, 6-foot-9 lineal heavyweight champion could stand up, box with a rapier jab and win the decision. We’ll never know because he didn’t stick and move as expected. Instead, he stuck and struck and won in a fashion nobody ever dreamed he could. He went right after Wilder. He knocked him down in the third with perfectly measured right hand and again in the fifth with a pair of left hooks.
Fury — who admits he battled depression and suicidal thoughts — won every round on The Star-Ledger scorecard. Outside of Fury, the only one who wasn’t surprised was his trainer Sugar Hill Steward, a disciple of his uncle, the late Emanuel Steward, who, during his reign at Detroit’s Kronk Gym, turned his joint into a school for knockout artists.
In the first bout, Fury and Wilder fought to a controversial draw, and before this one Fury said, “I can never win a decision here (in the United States). I must make my own decision with these to fists. I must take the matter out of the judges’ hands.”
In other words, the British and Irish fighter would have to force Wilder to make a Brexit.
He believed what he said. He hired Emanuel’s nephew because Sugar Hill insisted that Fury could do just that. They trained for a knockout. They planned for a knockout and they were motivated for a knockout after Wilder mocked him.
“Fury had two pillows for fists,” Wilder said. “He is just a fat man who can’t punch.”
This is how the gentle giant from cross the pond morphed into a different fighter in the span of less than a year. I said in my prefight column that Fury had to fight the perfect fight for 12 rounds to win a decision.
But the new Fury came out in Round 1 and went straight for Wilder. Well, not straight. The head feints were still there. So was the jab with which he controlled the geography of the fight.
What was different was intensity and right hand behind the jab and the confusion it generated in Wilder’s head. Fury took Wilder to a place he had never been before. He drove him backward, he outthought and outmaneuvered him. He forced him into clinches and then laid his full 273 pounds on Wilder’s shoulders. That cost Fury a point for ignoring the referee, Tony Weeks, but it was worth it.
By the sixth round, Wilder was bleeding profusely from the ear. Earlier, he had started to stagger and lose his balance, a possible effect from damage to his ear drum. And in the seventh round, when Wilder missed badly on two right hands, It was time for Fury to put an end to it. Backed into the corner, Wilder had no answer for what followed,
No longer a need for the jab, Fury gave himself just room enough for the finishers. Each time, he stepped back, fired and hurt Wilder, then stepped back and fired again.
At that point, Mark Breeland, Wilder’s assistant trainer, threw in the towel and Weeks stopped it. The numbers show he was right. By then Wilder had been hit with 58 power punches compared with only 18 landing by of Wilder.
Wilder protested that the towel should not have stopped it.
“I make no excuses. I’m a warrior,” he said. “I wished that my corner would have let me go out on my shield. Tonight, he was the better man.”
When we last saw the Gypsy King, he was standing in mid-ring, arms thrust above his head, singing “American Pie” to that part of the crowd that was still remained.
Hey, he’s the king. He can do whatever the hell he wants.
