All the signs are that Las Vegas, and the world, await a world-class boxing match this coming weekend. Heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder, feared and revered for his punching power, has the latter-day Deep South version of Ali’s gift for metaphor, if not for rhyme. For his part, England’s own Gypsy King, Tyson Fury – once the feared holder of three heavyweight belts who suffered a much-documented crack-up, decline and who has mounted a subsequent courageous rehabilitation – can spout colorful working-class English invective with the most gifted pub-goers of his land. He’s a great trash-talker, and that includes trash-talking about himself.
But before we get into the narrative of this fight, first, a quick run through the odds. As a result of Fury’s dogged, beautiful, and highly technical performance during his first go with Wilder in December 2018, when the odds opened on this fight Fury, not the belt-holder, was the very slight favorite, at -130, or an implied probability of 56.5%. Wilder was hanging in close, at -110, or at an implied probability of 52.4% of winning the fight outright.
However: Over the last few weeks as the money has started to talk, those positions have almost precisely reversed. At the moment, the bookmakers at the Mirage, the Westgate and the Wynn sports books are unanimous: Wilder, now at -125, has edged lower than the British lineal-champ challenger, whose odds have risen to -105. That’s an implied win probability of 55.6% for Mr. Wilder, and one of 51.2% for Mr. Fury. We’ll update these odds as fight night rolls at us and as the money tells us more.
Trash-talking before a heavyweight championship bout has taken on many new and sharp edges since Muhammad Ali spun his most famous proto-rap poem for the press in the runup to to his ‘Rumble In The Jungle’ fight with George Foreman in Zaire in 1974.
That iconic rap went like this, verbatim:
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see Now you see me, now you don’t George thinks he will, but I know he won’t.
Wilder’s and Fury’s intermittent challenges and vocal eruptions over the last few weeks’ run-up to their 22 February rematch have been by turns hilarious and bracingly poetic. But within the peacock strutting and hissing, it’s worth decoding what, exactly, the fighters have been saying about their abilities, their plans, and their tactics – all the while grinding down the abilities, plans and tactics of their opponent. It’s an art form. Muhammad Ali was the Picasso of it.
Because: As much roosterish Ali-esque boasting as fighters do, there is actual sporting content in what they say. In fact, if we dial back to 1974 in Zaire, ‘float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’ is precisely what Ali did to Foreman in the ring, and the catchphrase has rightly been entered into the American lexicon. It cuts so many ways and touches so many parts of life. Which is the job that good poetry does.
Both Wilder and Fury are, by turns, charmingly and eloquently unfiltered. They have not got editors or fidgety, overprotective PR minders in their camps, or in their heads. They have trainers and routines. They are living their stories in the moment, and, reaching back to the origins of the sport in the 18th and 19th centuries, there’s an old culture in boxing of fighters telling us what that narrative is.
Here is the unvarnished Tyson Fury on his new routine in an interview with the British press a few weeks back: “I’m doing a lot of things I didn’t before. I’m eating five or six meals a day, drinking eight litres of water. If it’s gonna give me an edge, I’m willing to try it. I’m masturbating seven times a day, keep my testosterone pumping. I’m not coming here for a points decision, I’ve had too many of them – nine of them – I’m coming here for a knockout, I’ve had 21 of them and from the heart that’s what I’m looking to do. This is why I employed Sugar Hill. If I didn’t want a knockout, I wouldn’t have hired a Kronk [the famous Detroit gym] trainer. If I didn’t want a knockout, I’d have kept Ben Davison and working on that herky-jerky style.”
Hormonal science doesn’t wholeheartedly support the theory of “maintaining” testosterone flow via Fury’s chosen method — he is a young buck who’s blessed with a very caring wife, so, despite the old boxing encomium that “women weaken legs,” Mr. and Mrs. Fury do have methods of release at their disposal other than Fury’s maintenance prescription of seven times a day. But fair enough, it’s what he thinks. What he’s really talking about here is why he changed trainers for this fight, parting from Ben Davison, who ingeniously brought him back after three years off to a draw — which “herky-jerky style” resulted in a points win, minus the win — with the most feared and dangerous puncher in the sport, namely, Wilder. Fury does have four inches of reach on Wilder, but is not at all known for his raw punching power, rather, for his fleetness of foot and his ability to dance. The jury’s out on whether he has successfully made this change, but the bottom line is that Fury’s saying it, straight out: He won’t be much floating like a butterfly or stinging like a bee. We can expect on Saturday that he’s going to be circling for the kill.
The obvious problem with this is that Wilder won’t be coming into the ring just to stand there. Fury will have to dance out of range of Wilder’s artillery at some point. He has to be able survive, defensively, in order to be able to toss the new Sugar Hill-trained punch to knock Wilder out.
For his part, Wilder is having none of that. He doesn’t believe it. Here’s Wilder on Fury’s change: “What my right hand did to him (in the last fight) is definitely in his mind,” Wilder told a British reporter. “That’s why he’s changing so many things in his camp. If it didn’t affect him and it wasn’t in his mind, he wouldn’t be making changes. My own situation is that if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. He says he beat me 10 rounds to two but he can’t believe that. Why so much change? It’s dramatic change as well. This man has gone to the point where he’s sticking his hands in gasoline. It’s crazy. He’s talking about building testosterone. I knew instantly when I heard all that that it was because of the game changer in the 12th round.”
Wilder means, because he downed Fury twice and knocked him out once, arguably saving their 2018 match from being a straight-up points loss. Key here is that Wilder and trainer Jay Deas have not changed one iota of their thinking or their tactical approach. The architecture of his work in the ring is, still, built on Wilder’s power, particularly, that in his right hand. And about his power, Wilder has a lot to say: “My power is proven. What I have done is proven. You got to assume that they are going to be thinking about that. I would be thinking about that if I were them. Not only do I hit people with combinations but it’s just one punch. And that makes it worse. One punch, just one, and you can literally be out of there.”
