In a new series, published during weekdays on Boxing Social, the incomparable Terry Dooley delivers his unique look at the boxing news.
A third world war is probably going to have less fallout than the trilogy between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder. Although the rubber match is firmly in the rear-view mirror, there is still a lot of talk about Fury’s win in the second and third fights, with some still firmly in the Mark Breland camp.
Floyd Mayweather Jr. is latest person to support Breland’s decision to rescue Wilder in the second fight. Earlier this week, Mayweather was quoted in The Independent as saying: “[Breland is] an elite boxing coach, something that nowadays many unqualified people claim to be.”
Breland was clearly heartened by Mayweather’s quotes, he took to Instagram and said: ‘So I have never gotten to know this Man [Mayweather] on a personal level. I’ve had more than a few conversations with his uncle Roger and a couple with his father.
“So from only knowing Floyd Mayweather from his showmanship personality you only THINK you know a little about him! Getting to know him on a more personal level, I’ll say this, his Ring IQ is only a quarter of his business IQ, and that’s impressive! He changed the entire game and any boxer that don’t appreciate what he’s done/doing for the culture, and his dedication to the sport got a personal problem with themselves.”
Naturally, Malik Scott, who trained Wilder for the third fight and allowed him plenty of time to try to turn things around, strongly disagrees with this assessment. “I wouldn’t say he was talking s**t about me,” he said (quotes C/O The Independent). “I would say he was taking his usual random shots at Deontay, which indirectly is taking shots at me too since I’m Deontay’s head trainer, so it’s whatever.
“But what’s even more funny is Mark Breland has been a known legend for decades, but all of a sudden Floyd posts him with praise coincidentally a week after we lose to Fury. Then to make it even funnier, Mark Breland has never really liked Floyd anyway. On numerous occasions personally and publicly he’s always called Floyd an overrated big mouth that would have not stood a chance in his era.”
Another heavyweight fight that has had a big fallout is Anthony Joshua’s WBA, IBF and WBO loss to Oleksandr Usyk, with rumours circulating that Joshua is shopping around for some further input in order to reverse what was a poor performance.
Joshua has spent some time with Ronnie Shields, who worked with Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, and Shields has told ThaBoxingVoicethat he can help Joshua unlock the innate aggression required to take the fight to Usyk next time around.
“He told me, ‘Listen, I know people don’t think I’m a dog. I’m gonna be a dog in this next fight,’” he said. “He told me, ‘I just need you to show me how to be the best dog you can teach me to be.’ That answered the question for me because my thing to him was, ‘Why did you box the whole time?’, and he said he thought he could out-box him, and that was the game plan.”
“To me that was the wrong fight, now he knows that was the wrong fight,” he added. “To teach a man to be a dog he has to have the dog instincts in him already…I guess he didn’t feel it was the right [game plan vs Usyk] so he wanted to make a change.”
The life of a boxing trainer is an up-and-down one. Everyone else takes credit for the victories, you take sole responsibility for the defeats. That’s probably why SugarHill Steward is just enjoying the brace of wins that he guided Fury to over Wilder, he believes that they have added to the Steward family legacy and would have made his uncle Emanuel proud.
“The genes and the bloodline? It really does mean something sometimes,” he said when speaking to Sky Sports. “He was like my father. Emanuel was the positive male role model in my life. He not only taught fighters to be world champions but he also taught me to be what I am.
“He was so intelligent. He saw things that other people didn’t see. He saw things in people that they didn’t see in themselves. I am carrying on his legacy which means a lot to me.”
It is difficult to prepare a fighter for a tough fight, especially if that fight takes place against a deranged bear, but numerous outlets have reported that Russian boxer Ilya Medvedev is in critical condition after killing a brown bear with a knife on a fishing trip after it attacked his fishing partner, Vyacheslav ‘Slava’ Dudnik.
Dudnik was killed during the attack, but Medvedev managed to shoot the bear twice before being disarmed while trying to get a third shot off. Undeterred, he got out his knife and used that to kill the bear instead. Denis Chebotar was further upstream when the attack happened. “I heard screams,” he said. “When I reached the spot, Slava was dead and Ilya was stabbing the bear.”
Medvedev is currently in hospital being treated for severe injuries and lacerations.