Accidental champion Deontay Wilder was the American dream misunderstood | Bryan Armen Graham
HHe was never meant to be a boxer. In another timeline, Deontay Wilder might have scored touchdowns or thrown down tomahawk dunks for the University of Alabama. Such was the dream of growing up poor in the shadow of Bryant-Denny Stadium on the streets of sports-mad Tuscaloosa, where he excelled for the Central High School football and basketball teams. And that was still the goal when the 6-foot-1 teenager enrolled at nearby Shelton State Community College, where he tried to raise his grades enough to transfer and play for the hometown Crimson Tide.
That all changed with a routine visit to the doctor’s office in 2005, when he learned that his unborn daughter with his then-girlfriend would be born with spina bifida, an incurable birth defect in which the spine does not close completely during development. At that moment, Wilder, only 19, knew he needed money, and he needed it yesterday.
“We could have terminated the pregnancy,” he quietly told me during a visit to Tuscaloosa years ago. “We could have just left this whole thing alone. Let everyone else do their thing, but I felt like it was the right thing to do. I felt like my daughter deserved to live, no matter the circumstances or how old I was. Whatever I don’t have, I would find a way.
“If I don’t make one more right decision in my life, I can say I did it at least once.”
From that day on, Wilder picked up whatever work he could find. He waited tables at IHOP and Red Lobster. He started driving a truck for Budweiser, where, among other things, he got health insurance that covered expensive treatment for his daughter Naieya. But it wasn’t long before nagging memories of his sporting prowess led him down a dirt road along a quiet spur of Route 30, not far from the banks of the Black Warrior River, and through the doors of the Skyy- boxing gym. 2006 – three days before his 21st birthday – where he picked up the gloves for the first time.
Given the astronomically low success rate of aspiring professional boxers who take up the sport in their twenties, Wilder’s journey went further than anyone could have imagined: Olympic bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games after just 35 matches as an amateur, the World’s version Boxing Council of the heavyweight championship after 33 paying fights, no fewer than 10 successful title defenses – one more than Mike Tyson and Joe Frazier – and career earnings of more than $100 million.
This most improbable journey ended at 3:26 a.m. Sunday morning in the Nafud Desert, more than 7,500 miles from the aluminum-sided gymnasium where it began, when Wilder was brutally knocked out by a cement-fisted giant named Zhilei Zhang, who weighed nearly 70 pounds heavier. than he was. . The 38-year-old American did not formally announce his retirement after his fourth defeat in five fights, fleeing the Kingdom Arena for the dawn of Riyadh without speaking to the media, but some things don’t need to be said. It doesn’t take an expert to see that Wilder’s race is over.
As in December’s listless 12-round decision loss to Joseph Parker, he appeared mentally exhausted from the opening bell, a timid silhouette of the charismatic knockout machine once capable of ending a fight at any time. A light had gone out. In reality, Wilder’s career as an elite heavyweight ended three years ago with the finale of his epic trilogy with Tyson Fury, their third meeting in 34 months, each of them packed with heartbreaking drama with a total of no fewer than nine knockdowns. When it was done, Wilder left a part of himself in the ring that he would never get back. You could probably say the same for Fury.
On the one hand, Wilder’s post-mortem career could be framed in terms of what might have been. What if he had found the sport earlier in his life? What if he came from a boxing hotbed instead of a backwater with a negligible record for producing quality fighters. And more practically, what if he had used a training setup that always seemed to be lacking, recently firing 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 great overachievers in all of American sports. From the start, there was something endearing and almost quaint about his nickname – the Bronze Bomber, which proudly touted his third-place finish in Beijing – given the oft-inflated egos of top fighters. (If you were to mention Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s 1996 Olympic bronze within earshot, he’d probably have a stroke.) In the simplest terms, Wilder was a deeply flawed boxer, masterfully managed by manager Shelly Finkel, who produced perhaps the most devastating became a puncher in the sport. centuries of history.
At one point he was undefeated in 40 professional fights with 39 wins within the distance, the highest ever knockout percentage for a heavyweight with that many fights. Like a lightning-fast serve in tennis, power in boxing is the equalizer that can offset average marks in almost every other category. That proved crucial for Wilder, whose late introduction to the sport left him without the technical foundation that was ingrained in many fighters before their teenage years.
Had he been created in the first half of the twentieth century, before boxing gradually retreated to the margins of American life, Wilder would undoubtedly have been one of the country’s most famous athletes. These days it takes something special for a fighter to truly enter the cultural mainstream, but even Wilder’s made-for-YouTube talent for separating opponents from their senses wasn’t enough. He wasn’t stylish outside the ropes. His Alabama accent was mistaken for stupidity. Even Wilder’s knockout-friendly approach wasn’t enough to make him a truly reliable box office attraction, a fact that Fury screwed him ruthlessly and with cruel intent. All of this left a chip on his shoulder that only grew bigger as the years passed.
That long-simmering resentment led Wilder to overcompensate with the media, leaning into the role of a villain that never quite fit. He made increasingly bombastic statements, which often had an adverse effect. When he became famous said on the Breakfast Club that “I want a body in my name” – telling an audience of millions that he wanted to kill an opponent in the ring – public perception of Wilder took a southerly turn as he was widely shunned by a boxing community all too familiar with the darkest parts of sports. reality. Its almost comical a barrage of excuses to explain his defeat in the second Fury fight, including that his ornate ringwalk costume was too heavy, was ridiculed and inspired memes. But none of that matched the Wilder I knew from our conversations: the sensitive, gentle, introspective father who risked his health for his family.
Wilder never quite reached his all-time greatness Bomb Zquad cult members proclaimed, and he wasn’t as bad as made out by the armchair critics, who were well outnumbered. Ultimately, he was a country boy who made the most of his natural talent, went from rags to riches, brought excitement to a heavyweight division that needed it for over a decade and left an indelible mark on the sport. In a cruel business where happy endings are few and far between, that’s plenty good enough.