If nobody else recognized the milestone Marcelo Esteban Coceres achieved in reaching the end of Round 3 on his feet, let’s do it here. The Argentine became the first of Edgar Berlanga’s 18 professional opponents to go three complete rounds without hitting the canvas.
This time Berlanga, a 24-year-old power puncher from Brooklyn, settled in, survived a knockdown, and won a 10-round unanimous decision, using forward movement and heavy punches raise a welt on Coceres’ left eye. All three judges scored the fight 96-93 for Berlanga.
Cameras in T-Mobile Arena just showed that Tyson Fury arrived. Compared with the custom-made suit he wore at a news conference Wednesday, he’s casual this time in a T-shirt, shorts and a hat.
Deontay Wilder created his reputation by usually delivering devastating knockouts to his opponents, and he successfully defended his World Boxing Council heavyweight belt 10 times. He did so with his unique twist. Normally, before he enters the ring and unloads punches, he does what many children do on Halloween: he puts on a costume.
Wilder is completing a trilogy of fights with Tyson Fury, the 6-foot-9 Englishman who defeated Wilder via technical knockout in February 2020. Wilder, 35, of Tuscaloosa, Ala., created a litany of unsubstantiated reasons for suffering the first loss of his career.
One of them, he claimed, was that the extravagant 40-pound costume he wore into the ring weakened his legs.
That night, he wore a jewel-encrusted suit that resembled a knight’s armor accented with black skulls. He wore a mask which lit up in red near his eyes and a crown. The set was said to cost $40,000.
He wore similar costumes in the past. In November 2019, he wore a lighter garb with slits to expose his chest with white-and-gold accented shoulder spikes, complete with a mask and crown.
In 2018, before his first fight against Wilder, he wore a similar mask and crown, but diverted from the armor by wearing a feathered robe.
And don’t expect him to forgo the exotic attire this time even after the debacle last February. The designers of Wilder’s suit told TMZ that his get-up this time around will be “significantly lighter.”
In the first televised preliminary bout, Vladimir Hernandez came back in the late rounds to sneak past Julian Williams with an impressive split decision. It’s surprising not just because Williams appeared to be up early, but because he had quickly given Hernandez a nasty cut above the right eye and soon gained an even bigger advantage with a gash over Hernandez’s left eye because of an accidental head clash.
This trilogy bout between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury offers Wilder a change to avenge his the only loss of his professional career — a defeat he suffered in humiliating fashion.
For much of the fight in February 2020, Fury stalked Wilder down, setting in aggressive pace and landing clean blows. Fury weighed 273 pounds, and he used that 43-pound advantage on the scale effectively and clinched with Wilder, forcing him to carry his weight. He knocked Wilder down in the third and fifth rounds. By the seventh, Wilder’s trainer, Mark Breland, threw in a white towel. The referee stopped the contest and Fury won via technical knockout.
After changing his trainer, proclaiming a litany of excuses for his loss and winning an arbitration case to force Fury to fight him, Wilder now has an opportunity to correct his mistakes.
The heavyweight title fight between Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder will be televised on both Fox Sports’ and ESPN’s pay-per-view platforms in the United States, with a price of $79.99. The pay-per-view card begins at 9 p.m. Eastern on Saturday. And yes, it’s a bit unusual to have two big sports networks carry the same event, though that’s one of the quirks sometimes present in boxing.
Fury is promoted by Top Rank, which has a media deal with ESPN, and Wilder fights under the banner of Premier Boxing Champions, which broadcasts its fights with Fox Sports and Showtime. That rival promoters and broadcast platforms have cooperated to stage the last two Fury-Wilder matchups hints at how significant these events are in the boxing world.
A two-hour preliminary card began at 7 p.m. Eastern, and in the United States it is being televised on both ESPN and Fox Sports 1. A set of early prelims also streamed on ESPN’s YouTube channel.
The main event between Wilder and Fury main event will likely begin after 11 p.m. Eastern — and perhaps closer to midnight Eastern. It depends heavily on the results of earlier fights.
Here’s a look at the bouts on the main card and the preliminary card (note that sometimes bouts can change with little or no notice):
Main Card
Tyson Fury (30-0-1) vs. Deontay Wilder (42-1-1), World Boxing Council World heavyweight title, 12 rounds
Efe Ajagba (15-0) vs. Frank Sanchez (18-0), World Boxing Council Continental Americas and World Boxing Organization N.A.B.O. heavyweight title, 10 rounds
Robert Helenius (30-3) vs. Adam Kownacki (20-1), heavyweight, 12 rounds
Jared Anderson (9-0) vs. Vladimir Tereshkin (22-1), heavyweight, eight rounds
Preliminary Bouts
Edgar Berlanga (17-0) vs. Marcelo Esteban Coceres (30-2-1), vacant World Boxing Organization N.A.B.O. super middleweight title, 10 rounds
Julian Williams (27-2-1) vs. Vladimir Hernandez (12-4), super welterweight, 10 rounds
Fury (30-0-1, 21 knockouts) will never moonlight as a bodybuilder, but he hit the weights before his previous bout with Wilder and weighed in then at 273 solid, if not chiseled, pounds. Wilder weighed a sculpted 231 pounds, but promised his punching power would negate the weight disadvantage.
He was wrong, and their bout devolved into a one-sided drubbing. Ahead of this third fight, Wilder (42-1-1, 41 knockouts) has sprinkled the internet with his own weight-training highlights. One clip shows him bench pressing progressively heavier weight, until he maxes out at 350 pounds.
On Friday, Wilder weighed in at 238 pounds, while Fury weighed 277 pounds. Unlike in other divisions where strategic weight cutting has become the norm, fans can expect the fighters to weigh about the same on Saturday night.
From a functional standpoint, Wilder’s trainer, Malik Scott, said the added muscle mass would help Wilder withstand Fury’s clinching and mauling, which helped drain Wilder’s energy during their last bout.
“It will help Deontay be a lot more physical if it comes to clinches,” said Scott, who lost to Wilder in 2015. “It’ll help him be a lot more dynamic.”
But the fighter himself says functional strength is merely a helpful byproduct. His real motivation to add muscle mass in training camp?
“Mostly just for the looks of it,” Wilder said.
Just how heavy are these heavyweights?
Sonny Liston weighed 215½ pounds when he successfully defended his heavyweight title against the 195½-pound Floyd Patterson in 1963. The next year, Liston, considered a large heavyweight, weighed 218 pounds when he lost the championship to the 206-pound Muhammad Ali.
Since then, heavyweights in general have grown. Anthony Joshua, dethroned last month by Oleksandr Usyk, stands 6-foot-6 and weighed 240 pounds for his last fight. Tyson Fury first won the heavyweight title in 2015 from the 6-foot-6, 247-pound Wladimir Klitschko.
The elite fighters in the division have grown so large that the World Boxing Council created a new class — bridgerweight, which has a limit of at 224 pounds — aimed at fighters heavier than the 200-pound cruiserweight limit, but too small to compete with the 6-foot-7 Wilder and the 6-foot-9 Fury.
Malik Scott, Deontay Wilder’s trainer, said Fury’s size would work against him if Wilder followed through on their game plan.
“Fury was blessed by God with a lot of body — for Deontay Wilder to beat up,” said Scott, who briefly served as Fury’s sparring partner in 2012.
Of course, size alone doesn’t guarantee success for a heavyweight. Otherwise the 7-foot-tall Nikolai Valuev and the 7-foot-1 Julius Long would rank among the all-time greats. But for a skilled, versatile fighter like Fury, outlier size adds a dimension that he thinks opponents cannot handle.
“I’m setting a landmark here,” Fury told reporters last week. “Two hundred and 70-plus, 6-foot-9. Stop me if you can. Like a steamroller, coming towards you.”
Both Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury have promised to win by knockout. They can’t both be right.
In their first bout, Fury employed the cautious, counterpunching style that carried him to a world title, and the hard-hitting Wilder still clipped him. A thunderous right hand and left hook dropped Fury in the 12th round, and, in a bout Wilder was losing on the scorecards, scored Wilder enough points to earn a draw.
Before the rematch, Fury promised aggression, and Wilder’s one-punch power couldn’t save him from wilting under Fury’s pressure.
This time, Scott says Wilder can’t depend on power at the expense of other tactics.
“For the past 10, 12 years I’ve watched a guy have a toolbox and only use one tool,” Scott said. “That toolbox has at least 100 tools, and he would always go in the fight and use one, maybe two. We have to go in this toolbox and drill everything, because it’s been collecting dust from sitting so long. That’s what we did. We started from the foundation on up.”
One training camp, Wilder says, didn’t convert him from a power puncher to a chess player. Instead, he says Scott has awakened the latent boxer inside him. He says he will diversify his attack, but he is still is aiming for a spectacular finish.
“People always talk about skills when they don’t have the power, but any fighter, they would love to have power, because we don’t get paid for overtime,” Wilder said. “It’s all good and dandy to show a couple of skills, but at the end of the day or end of the night, especially with heavyweights, people come to see the knockout.”
Expect roughly the same game plan from Tyson Fury.
Sometimes, Fury says the change in his fighting style happened in the training camp before his second fight with Deontay Wilder, when the trainer Javan Hill (nicknamed Sugar) remade him in the mold of the boxer-punchers Hill had coached at the famed Kronk Gym in Detroit.
“It only took me six weeks to go from a slick-boxing counterpuncher to an aggressive knockout puncher,” Fury said.
Other times, Fury says the new game plan occurred to him after rising from the knockdown in the last round of the first Wilder fight. Fury spent the second half of that round moving forward, and blunted Wilder’s offense in the process. He carried that strategy into the rematch and won by a technical knockout in the seventh round.
But before this fight, Fury says his tactics won’t change. He aims to trade punches with Wilder and force the former champion to deal with it.
“I’m gonna go all guns blazing, full-out attack,” Fury said. “All infantry, straight out the door, from Round 1.”