NEW YORK — The odds are that no one will remember the first eight rounds of Saturday night’s heavyweight title fight between heavyweight titlist Deontay Wilder and Artur Szpilka, and it’s just as well.
They were as ugly and amateurish a 24 minutes of boxing as the heavyweight division has seen since the 12 rounds waltzed by Wladimir Klitschko and Tyson Fury just two months ago.
But then, something remarkable happened: Out of nowhere, Wilder’s straight right connected with Szpilka’s recklessly onrushing head, and just like that, eight-and-a-half minutes of street-corner grappling was obliterated by one hell of a KO punch, something that is not unique to, but certainly a lot more common in, the heavyweight division.
And that was just the start of it. Szpilka lay flat on his back being wheeled out of the ring on a gurney, his serious condition masked by the sight of his legs casually crossed at the ankles like a man relaxing on his living room. Fury, who had defeated Klitschko in that horrible fight in Dusseldorf back in November, decided to do what he does best: Play the heel.
He climbed into the ring and made his way to Wilder. He chanted his name into the ring microphone, and into Wilder’s face. He climbed up on the ropes and grimaced at the crowd. He tore his coat off and the wireless microphone out of his hip pocket and fired both to the floor. He made a half-hearted attempt to break free of the grasp of promoter Lou DiBella to get at Wilder.
“Anytime, anyplace, anywhere,” he shouted at Wilder. “I’ll fight you in your backyard, and I’ll beat you, punk.”
“I promise you that when we step into the ring,” Wilder said, “I will baptize you.”
The crowd loved it. Fury loved it. Wilder loved it. DiBella, especially, loved it.
“He knows what he’s doing,” DiBella said of Fury. “The guy came here to print money.”
And just like that, one night of heavyweight boxing in Brooklyn was more entertaining than a decade of Klitschkos.
Wilder and Fury are not going to fight any time soon; Wilder has a mandatory against Alexander Povetkin, and Fury is contracted to dance with Klitschko again first. The possibility exists that one, or both, will get beat first.
But for the first time in a long time, there are two heavyweights that people will actually be looking forward to seeing fight each other.
“The heavyweight division’s getting exciting again,” Wilder said.
Maybe, although very little of that excitement has to do with what happens in the ring.
Klitschko-Fury was a fight for the heavyweight championship of the world that achieved a rare triple crown. It managed to be an insult to heavyweights, champions and, yes, the world.
“What reaction could you have to a fight like that,” said Povetkin, Wilder’s mandatory challenger, his derision barely concealed behind a smirk.
And yet, for the first eight rounds, it had competition from Wilder-Szpilka. Despite holding a 5-inch height advantage and a significant edge in reach, Wilder fought hesitantly, clumsily and without wielding any of his physical superiority over an opponent who began boxing when a promoter saw him scuffling in a soccer brawl in his native Poland. Wilder never established his jab, stood curiously square to his opponent, and at times slung his right hand so awkwardly he nearly spun himself to the canvas. He wasn’t being helped by the crowd of 12,668, at least half of which sounded as if it had just come in from Warsaw. That crowd — which broke into a rousing rendition of the Polish national anthem between the first and second rounds — must have had some effect on the judges, too, one of whom had Wilder just two points ahead after eight rounds.
Performing in front of Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, Fury, Gerry Cooney and Charles Martin, a California heavyweight who won a vacant title with a third-round TKO over Vyacheslav Glazkov in the undercard — Glazkov had to quit after injuring his knee after slipping to the canvas without being hit — Wilder could claim to be no better than the sixth-best heavyweight in the building.
“His style was awkward, but that wasn’t it,” Wilder said. “Some nights you just don’t have it. If I had to grade myself, I’d say I was a low 5. I wasn’t satisfied with my performance tonight.”
But, he added with a grin, “I gave the people what they wanted.”
That he did, as did Fury. If there is anything that has hurt boxing over the past decade, it is not the rise of mixed martial arts or the negative appeal of Floyd Mayweather. It is the void at the top of the sport, the lack of a charismatic heavyweight champion, preferably American, but in any case, the kind of fighter who puts people in the seats and, at least one night a year, is capable of making the entire sports world stop to pay attention.
Tyson was that type, of course, as was his conqueror, Evander Holyfield. As excellent as he was, Lewis never really set the sport ablaze, and by the time the Klitschko brothers, first Vitali and then Wladimir, put a stranglehold on the title and smuggled it over to Germany, the division, and the sport, were in a decadelong slumber.
But that may be about to end.
We are not talking about a golden age of heavyweight talent here; neither Wilder, Fury, Martin nor Povetkin, another interested observer Saturday night because he is Wilder’s mandatory challenger, will make anyone forget (the real) Tyson, or Holyfield or Lewis, let alone Ali, Frazier, Joe Louis or Jack Dempsey.
But for the first time in a long time, there are heavyweight fighters that people will want to see fight one another because even if they are equally mediocre as fighters, they are also equally interesting as characters. Fury bought his own plane ticket to fly to New York from London, because, as DiBella said, “He wanted people to leave here knowing who he was.”
Mission accomplished.
Same goes for Wilder,who despite his flaws showed he has that great equalizer that can erase a half hour of tedium with a single stroke of lightning.
“My right hand,” he mused. “Sometimes I get scared of it myself.”
“That kind of punching power is its own kind of charisma,” DiBella said. “That’s the power of the heavyweight division.”
A power that has been missing for about 10 years but now may finally be on its way back.
