By Bart Barry-
Initiative is the word for it.
It’s what Deontay Wilder had in the first match and lacked in the second, the first 30 seconds said. Tyson Fury wasn’t blarneying pure when he promised an early knockout. He fought the opening halfminute like a man who read the tale of the tape and wondered what the hell his timidity’d been about 14 months prior.
Fury stepped directly in Wilder’s space and surprised both men when he did. There’s a primeval intelligence in us all, most carry it much deeper than prizefighters do, and Fury found it and employed it, and Wilder got stunned by it.
A good argument exists for why this intelligence formed and why we retain it: survival of the species. One thing a species isn’t supposed to have in this unpredictable and oft-violent world is a capacity for selfextermination; perils enough abound without a species’ predators making prey of their brothers. This primeval intelligence, then, is about sensing instantly in your gut who you can dominate and to whom you must submit, to forgo mortal conflicts.
Men the size of Fury and Wilder are wholly unaccustomed to submission’s unmistakable electricity. If Wilder’d ever felt it before in his life it was only accompanied by bonedeep fatigue (that undefeated coward-maker) and never in the opening halfminute of a confrontation.
Yet there it was. Wilder’s eyes bulged and his mouth opened, and the signal bounced from tower to tower.
Wilder: What?
Fury: Aye.
Wilder: Wait, what?
Fury: Aye.
Whatever made Wilder initially weak then multiplied itself by itself. The retreat, the absorption of abuse, the sudden and desperate summoning of boxing skills he never has had. Wilder’s feet were below a different body a full round before his right leg went frictionlessly from underneath him like an iceskate.
Fury’s right fist in round 3, the devastating conclusion of a 3-2 combo whose effect shocked Fury nearly much as Wilder, drove upon Wilder’s left ear and made it seep blood like an ear should not. Wilder went down like he’d been hiptossed. And Wilder winced from the deep pain of taking a punch from a 270-pound man in a place he was unprepared to be punched. Imagine, next, finding yourself on your chest, legs unreliable, the left side of your head shrieking pain. And not even a quarter of the way through your scheduled ordeal.
Wilder was unlucky to escape round 3. Had the round been a minute younger, probably Kenny Bayless would have stopped it with Fury’s next charge, extending Wilder’s career and wits.
By the time Wilder got dropped by a shoving body punch a couple rounds later the only decent reaction to his plight was sympathy. I felt it while reviewing the rematch. Wilder rose with a body and face that strove for one thing – dignity. There was no bravado left, not much predatory impulse, surely no wiles; Deontay just wanted to be dignified about lifting himself off the bluemat.
Oddly, maybe, I thought of Bernard Hopkins and what he said before his match with a different man from the United Kingdom: “I would never let a white boy beat me. I would never lose to a white boy.”
I’m ignorant to the origin of Hopkins’ sentiments, for a variety of reasons including privilege, and there’s no telling if Deontay related to those words then or later, but wherever and however Hopkins first heard that sentiment chances aren’t bad Deontay’s heard similar. As if the burden of making combat with a fellow giant weren’t enough, right?
Which isn’t a bad segue to the costume issue. It’s not farfetched as it sounded when Wilder spoke on it. An enormous error in judgement, that getup. The weight of it isn’t so much the thing either. It’s the deprivation of air, the lunacy of covering one’s face during a massive surge of adrenaline, and the LEDs.
Not so long ago I subjected myself to a stroboscopic experience called PandoraStar, choosing right idiotically a 30-minute “Energy” experience, and let me impart: Flashing lights on the backs of your eyelids scramble your brain. How do I mean? I was five minutes in the experience before finding my rightmind enough to sing the ABCs; I once made a decent living in letters, that is, and for at least 300 seconds I couldn’t remember any.
Is that what happened to Deontay? Hell if I know, but he wasn’t right from the opening bell.
Deontay has three qualities as a prizefighter: Menace, conditioning, power. Deprived of his conditioning – his mouth was open 10 seconds in – Deontay had little power to dispatch, and his countenance the entire match was more reliably worried than fearsome.
This time round, too, when Deontay launched a righthand and missed, he got hammered, not hugged. In the 2018 match Fury seemed so relieved when Wilder’s right missed he embraced the man as if from joy. This time he punished him, roughhousing and choking him in clinches, delighting at his weakness, toying with him, putting his weight on him, dominating him – even fellating his bloody neck.
There’s no way Wilder prepared for those experiences after the first match. Almost definitely Wilder’s camp got dedicated to closing escape routes and visiting a concussion on Fury 18 minutes earlier at least.
Which brings us to the coming rubber match. If Wilder is to have even a puncher’s chance he needs to change Fury’s entire calculus in less than a minute, violently unraveling their identities before either man has time to remember their order.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
