WBC heavyweight champion, Tyson Fury, once compared the power of his two toughest opponents, Wladimir Klitschko and Deontay Wilder.
Fury defeated Klitschko in 2015, outpointing the Ukrainian, who had been unbeaten for over a decade, in the traditionally unfavourable location of Germany.
Four years later, Fury battled to a draw with then WBC champion, Wilder, before completing a trilogy with the American with back-to-back knockout wins following thanks to his newly-adopted ‘Kronk’ boxing style.
In an interview with The Overlap last year, Fury explained the difference between the two notoriously powerful champions that he overcame.
“I’d been boxing all my life and I’d never heard of this knockout power where it touches you and you fall over, and I wasn’t convinced by the power of the ‘Alabama Slammer’ [Wilder].
He had forty knockouts in a row and I thought he must be a gimmick, he’s got to be. I wasn’t bothered about the power anyway, I fought Klitschko who’d had sixty-odd knockouts and it didn’t even affect me.”
“So I got in there [vs Wilder], going jab, jab, jab and thinking ‘this is easy, this cannot be right, I must be in a dream’. All of a sudden, I’ve gone to block a jab and I’ve felt his knuckle go right through my hand, it nearly broke my hand, and I went ‘s**t, I better not get hit by that, if that is his jab, what is his right-hand going to be like?’”
Fury was famously dropped in the final round of his first bout with Wilder, taking the full available count before rising impressively. He discussed what it felt like – or rather what it didn’t.
“He really does have the power where you don’t feel it. You can get punched in the face and you see a blue flash and it hurts you, but then you’ve got real, dynamite punchers like Wilder and it just switches you off like a light switch.”
Fury is set to return to action against another deadly finisher, in the unorthodox form of former UFC superstar, Francis Ngannou, whom he fights on October 28 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.