By Liam Scanlon
Interview with British boxing legend Chris Eubank Sr., and his views on the upcoming Deontay Wilder vs. Tyson Fury heavyweight championship and all things boxing.
Prediction for Fury-Wilder
Deontay Wilder has a very good coach in New Yorker Mark Breland, who himself had a phenomenal jab and right hand. Wilder has a great jab, he shoots the right hand down the pipe; he only gets wild and ungainly when he has a man already rocked, you see.
Tyson Fury is very unorthodox, very big and rangey and agile, almost like a giant Ingle-like fighter. So you have to get in low because his uppercuts aren’t so accurate as his other shots, and Wilder doesn’t get in low, so it’s hard to say, you know?
The winner is this – the best man. I don’t know. I’m not clairvoyant.
On Body Punching
Today, they should all look at Mike McCallum and the Mexicans fighters. They don’t snatch the body these days, they hunt the head. I don’t see the body punching. It slows the man down and gets his head drooped into a position where he can be clipped better, too.
Look at me against Rocchigiani, I was giving up the lot – height, reach, destination, a southpaw, a great guard, a great one-two, unbeaten…. I had body punching though, half a dozen solid shots per round behind those big elbows. That was the equaliser. You can absorb a head shot umpteen times better than you can absorb a body shot.
On Blueprints
There’s a blueprint to beat anybody unless they’re unbeaten. So Fury and Wilder, where are these blueprints? World champion fighters with no losses are a hard puzzle to solve, it takes a special performance. So we’re going to see something special on Saturday night.
Steve Collins got in my head the first time, but in the second fight I was perfect and he fought like an absolute maniacal, lunatistical mad man basically and it was a very special night for him, that second fight.
The Watsons, Malingas, Thorntons, Holmes’; they had already lost before, thought they could stand off toe to toe and so I could just maneuver around them, although extremely good fighters – all either world champions or competitively challenging the pound-for-pound best.
Nigel Benn was another matter, because it was never going to happen again where a man can just cover up like Watson did and simply let him punch himself out. That was like beating an unbeaten world champion and hardest pound-for-pound puncher who actually went to the body as well as the head, an almost impossible task; as was Rocchigiani in Germany and being behind and battered against Watson in the rematch, and six world championship defenses in ten months in 1994!
You had to jump all over me, 1), or 2) run away. Only the three best pound-for-pound fighters of the 80s and 90s, Mike McCallum, James Toney and Roy Jones could just stand with me and better me, apart from maybe awkward southpaws.
