He was never supposed to be a boxer. In a different timeline, Deontay Wilder might have scored a touchdown or thrown a tomahawk dunk for Alabama. It was his dream growing up in poverty in the shadow of Bryant-Denny Stadium on the sports-loving streets of Tuscaloosa, where he excelled on Central High School’s football and basketball teams. That remains a goal for the 6-foot-7 junior as he attends nearby Shelton State Community College, where he hopes to improve his grades so he can transfer and play for his hometown Crimson Tide.
That all changed after a routine visit to the doctor in 2005, when he learned that his and his then-girlfriend’s unborn daughter had been born with spina bifida, an incurable birth defect in which the spine develops. cannot be completely closed. That’s when Wilder, just 19 years old, knew he needed money, and yesterday he needed it too.
“We could have terminated the pregnancy,” he told me quietly during a visit to Tuscaloosa a few years ago. “We could have just left this whole thing alone. Let everyone mind their own business, but I felt like it was the right thing to do. I felt like my daughter deserved to live, no matter what the conditions were, no matter how old I was. No matter what I didn’t Whatever, I will find a way.
“If I never make another good decision in my life, I can say I did at least once.”
From that day on, Wilder began taking every job he could find. He worked as a waiter at IHOP and Red Lobster restaurants. He started driving trucks for Budweiser, where the benefits included health insurance that paid for his daughter Naia’s expensive treatment. But it wasn’t long before painful memories of his athletic prowess led him down a dirt road along a quiet tributary of Route 30, not far from the banks of the Black Warrior River, and through the doors of Skyy Boxing Gym on October 19, 2006. , three days before his 21st birthday, he put on the gloves for the first time.
Given the extremely low success rate for aspiring professional boxers who start the sport in their 20s, Wilder’s journey has been further than anyone imagined: fighting just 35 times as an amateur, as recently as 2008 An Olympic bronze medal was won in Beijing, the World Boxing Council’s version of the game after 33 pay-per-view fights, no less than 10 successful title defenses (one more than Mike Tyson and Joe Frazier) and over $100 million. Career earnings, becoming heavyweight champion.
At 3.26am on Sunday morning, this most incredible of journeys ended in the Nafoud Desert, more than 7,500 miles from the aluminum stadium where it started, when Wilder was brutally knocked down by a concrete-fisted giant named Zhang Zhilei, The latter outweighed him by nearly 70 pounds. The 38-year-old American, who did not officially announce his retirement after his fourth defeat in five games, fled the Kingdom Arena into the dawn of Riyadh without speaking to the media, but there are some things that need not be said. It doesn’t take an expert to see Wilder’s fight unfold.
Just like in his listless 12-round decision loss to Joseph Parker in December, he looked unhinged at the opening bell, a timid silhouette of the charismatic knockout machine that was once capable of ending a fight at any moment. A light went out. In fact, Wilder’s elite heavyweight career ended three years ago with the conclusion of his epic trilogy with Tyson Fury, their third meeting in 34 months. Both were filled with heart-pounding drama and were knocked down at least nine times in total. After the fight, Wilder left a part of himself in the ring that he never came back to. You could probably say the same thing about Fury.
On the one hand, the autopsy of Wilder’s career can be constructed in terms of what might have happened. What if he had discovered the sport early? What if he had come from a boxing hotbed rather than a lagging area with a negligible track record of producing quality boxers? More realistically, what if he adopted a training approach that seems to have been lacking, having recently fired former Olympic champion Mark Breland in favor of the unproven Malik Scott?
On the other hand, there is a credible argument that Wilder is one of the greatest achievers in all of American sports. From the start, his nickname, “The Bronze Bomber,” seemed endearing, even a little quirky, as he proudly cited his third-place finish in Beijing, as top prizefighters tend to be extremely egotistical. (If you whisper Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s 1996 Olympic bronze medal, he might have a stroke.) In the simplest terms, Wilder is a deeply flawed boxer who, in the main, Under the careful guidance of coach Shelly Finkel, Finkel became perhaps the most devastating fighter in the sport.
He was undefeated in 40 professional fights and had 39 wins within the distance, the highest knockout rate in the heavyweight division. Unlike the thunder serve in tennis, power is the equalizer in boxing, making up for average scoring in almost every other category. That proved crucial for Wilder, whose late introduction to the sport left him lacking the technical foundation that many boxers have ingrained in them as teenagers.
Had Wilder been born in the first half of the 20th century, before boxing receded into the fringes of American life, there is no doubt that Wilder would have become one of America’s most famous athletes. It takes a special something for a boxer to truly cross over into the cultural mainstream these days, but even Wilder’s specially-made-for-YouTube knack for separating opponents from their senses wasn’t enough. On the outside, he is not fashionable. His Alabama drawl was mistaken for stupidity. Even Wilder’s knockout-friendly approach wasn’t enough to make him a truly solid box office draw, and in fact, Fury stung him with ruthless and brutal intent. It all left a scar on his shoulder that only grew bigger as the years passed.
This long-simmering resentment prompted Wilder to overcompensate for the medium, tending to play a villain role that he was never suited to. His rhetoric became increasingly exaggerated, often backfiring. When he famously said “I want a body on my record” on The Breakfast Club – telling millions of viewers that he wanted to kill opponents in the ring – Wilder’s public persona A southward shift occurred, and he was widely shunned by the boxing community. He drew ridicule and inspired memes with almost comical excuses to explain his failure in the second Fury match, including that his flashy ring costume was too heavy. But none of this fit with the Wilder I knew from our conversations: a sensitive, soft-spoken, introspective father who prioritized his own health over his family.
Wilder never really lived up to the all-time greatness claimed by his “Bomb Zquad” fanatics, nor was it as bad as the armchair critics insisted, and they were vastly outnumbered. Ultimately, he became a country boy who took his talents as far as he could, going from rags to riches, bringing tremendous excitement to a heavyweight division that needed it for more than a decade and leaving a legacy in the sport An indelible mark. In a cruel business, happy endings are rare, and that’s good enough.
