Wilder vs. Fury: Two Unpredictable Heavyweights and the Biggest Fight in Boxing

Tyson Fury is confronted by rival boxer Deontay Wilder after defeating Francesco Pianeta in a heavyweight contest at...
On Saturday, the undefeated boxers Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder meet in Los Angeles to determine who deserves the championship that they both claim.Photograph by Charles McQuillan / Getty

A recent promotional video from Showtime Sports began with a dispatch from Alabama. Nick Saban, the University of Alabama’s monomaniacal football coach, sat in a trophy-stuffed office, reminiscing about the days when he cared about something other than football. “If Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston was fighting,” Saban said, “there would be twenty-five, thirty people hanging around the car with the radio on, listening to it.” Boxing, he added, was “the biggest thing happening—everybody was into it. And then it just kind of all . . . ”

The guy across the coffee table—dressed regal-casual, in a thin green T-shirt and a thick gold chain—helped Saban finish his thought. “Died down,” he said.

“Died down,” Saban agreed.

The guy in the green T-shirt was a special sort of expert. His name is Deontay Wilder, and he is the heavyweight champion of the world—or, at least, as Lena Dunham might put it, a heavyweight champion of a world. These days, more than half a century after the Ali-Liston fights, the sport of boxing is lively but rather confusing, and “champion” is rarely a definitive title. The meeting with Saban was part of an ongoing effort to transform Wilder from a mere champion into the kind of transcendent star whose exploits might stop traffic. The video was created in anticipation of Wilder’s upcoming fight, this Saturday night, against the British boxer Tyson Fury, who also calls himself a heavyweight champion. It is one of the biggest fights of the year: an intriguing meeting between two very different boxers who are evenly matched, at least as far as anyone can tell. (Oddsmakers have installed Wilder as a modest favorite.) Each fighter is undefeated. And each is, in his own way, unpredictable. Wilder punches with ludicrous power, but he can also be hit, and be hurt; he is a knockout specialist who has sometimes looked like a potential knockout victim. Fury upset Wladimir Klitschko, the dominant modern heavyweight, three years ago, and then embarked on a long semi-retirement. In the last few months, Fury began a comeback with victories in a pair of low-level fights. On Saturday night, fans will learn whether Fury has been diminished or improved by his time away.

Wilder has spent his career battling the skepticism of hardcore boxing fans, who are always looking for signs that the latest putative world-beater is actually some sort of fraud. He is an Alabama native, and took up the sport around the age of twenty, which is generally considered too late for an élite career. (He says that his goal was merely to make enough money to support his daughter, who was born with spina bifida.) But he won a bronze medal at the 2008 Olympics, and he has evolved into one of the most exciting boxers on the planet. He is also one of the best, even though those two qualities are sometimes at odds. Earlier this year, in Brooklyn, Wilder had a riotous encounter with Luis Ortiz. The fight would not have been so memorable had it not been for the moment, near the end of the seventh round, when Ortiz sank his left fist into Wilder’s chin, and Wilder, floundering, looked unlikely to survive into the eighth. (He finally dispatched Ortiz in the tenth.) A more technically proficient fighter might never have been in such trouble, and might never have given fans the thrill of watching him escape it.

Fury inspires skepticism, too. He is a six-feet-nine giant, and his movements look somehow clumsy and nimble at the same time. He beat Klitschko not by landing a monstrous punch but by spending twelve rounds using his long arms to entangle and swat and frustrate him. It was an unpleasant fight, albeit one that electrified the boxing world by rearranging the heavyweight division. And when it was over, Fury—one of the most engaging characters in boxing, especially when he’s not boxing—serenaded his wife with the Aerosmith ballad “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.”

In the years after he beat Klitschko, Fury continued to be a tabloid fixture in England. But he never got around to defending his championship, eventually suggesting that he had retired. This year, though, he returned, with an explanation for his absence. In a recent Showtime interview, Fury remembered how he felt when he won the championship in 2015. “Something I’d worked for me whole life, and, when I finally achieved it, it was, like, ‘Oh, well. That was a lot of rubbish,’ ” he said. “I just felt an emptiness, a deep, gaping hole of nothing. Darkness and gray clouds. Every day was gray. Every day I woke up, after that fight—even before the fight, for a long time—would be gray days. I felt like I had nothing to look forward to.” Fury said that he tried to manage these feelings with alcohol. (Showtime cameras captured Fury, in 2016, watching a Wilder fight from the crowd. After Wilder won, Fury charged into the ring, fortified by what he estimates as “a litre of vodka,” and shouted, “You’re a bum!”) In the interview, Fury said that he has learned to maintain his mental health through diet and exercise, although without the help of a therapist. His interviewer was Mauro Ranallo, Showtime’s boxing announcer, who has chronicled his own experience with bipolar affective disorder.

In the past few months, Wilder and Fury have engaged in a promotional effort that has been by turns respectful and ridiculous. At one appearance, they barked and shoved; at another, they gave free tickets to firefighters in Los Angeles, where the fight would be held, in honor of the first responders who battled the California wildfires. On Wednesday, they came together for a predictably shambolic stare-down. Both men love to talk, although Wilder often sounds as if he is trying in vain to coin a new catchphrase. At one joint interview, Wilder pointed to a heavyweight-championship belt on the table and said, “That, right there? At the end of the night?”—he jerked his thumb over his shoulder and glanced backward—“It came with me, and it’s leaving with me.” Fury deflated Wilder’s boast with a cheerful comeback. “I’ll make ya a deal,” he said. “After I beat you, I’ll give you that belt back. ’Cause that belt don’t mean shit to me.”

In fact, the biggest prize at stake on Saturday night is not a belt but an opportunity. The winner will get a chance—although, given the fractious and fragmented state of the boxing industry, only a chance—at a lucrative unification fight with the third major heavyweight champion, Anthony Joshua, who emerged during Fury’s hiatus as England’s new heavyweight king. The winner of that fight could then proclaim himself the singular heavyweight champion of the world, and the sport of boxing would become, at least for a time, slightly less confusing than it is now.

It is easy to be excited about the buildup to this fight, and about its potential aftermath. And yet it is certainly possible that the fight itself, like a number of Fury fights before it, could be rather ugly, especially if Fury finds a way to dodge and smother Wilder’s punches. (Throughout his career, Fury generally has not just beaten his opponents but has made them look lousy, and boring.) The fight is on pay-per-view, which means that we are being asked to pay $74.99 for the privilege of finding out whether Fury has survived his retirement, whether Wilder is crafty or powerful enough to get past Fury’s long arms, and which one of them deserves the championship that they both claim. Casual fans surely won’t be tempted. And Wilder’s friend Nick Saban may be distracted by his day job—that afternoon, Alabama plays the University of Georgia for the Southeastern Conference title. (As it happens, the Georgia Bulldogs also have a boxing connection, through their star running back Elijah Holyfield—the son of Evander, the former undisputed heavyweight champion.) But, at least in the small universe of people who care about boxing in 2018, this fight is, as Saban might say, the biggest thing happening.