F--- boxing

George Foreman wasn't exactly a chiseled physical specimen either. Always interesting to see different physiques succeed, no matter what the sport is.

 

Young George, circa 1974, was pretty chiseled.

George v 2.0, circa tabletop grill/oldest champion ever, was not.

 

I just watched the fight again, knowing the result, and I think you're bang on. Ruiz got decked in the third but came up and fought the way he was supposed to fight. I don't know why or how Joshua allowed him to be so close for so much of the fight. Joshua did everything wrong. Looks the part but fought like an absolute amateur. Slow and straight is a great way to get your kidneys punched in. I think all the body work—which I've always liked, which shows how disciplined Ruiz is as a fighter if not as a nutritionist—just gassed Joshua in the end. He had no stomach left.

 

Joshua's trainer kept hammering that point: jab, jab, jab, right hand, box! He kept telling him not to let Ruiz get close.

 

As a short-ish, heavy-ish man, I almost always fought guys taller than me during my brief, undecorated boxing "career." And the only fight strategy I was ever taught was: get close, work the body, wait for his hands to drop, and then you punch the jaw through the top of his head. That's it! So if you're the taller guy, your one job is to make sure that you don't let the short guy do that. Because that's the short guy's only chance. It's so fucking basic. It's something every boxer knows by the time he's 14. I have no idea how Joshua didn't build a cage around himself and then pop Ruiz in the forehead, from distance, until he toppled over. I mean, it's either because he forgot elementary boxing technique, or he's not capable of performing elementary boxing technique. Either way, it says nothing good about Joshua or the sport that he became heavyweight champ.

And this isn't Buster Douglas beating Mike Tyson, by the way. Mike Tyson was the scariest man in boxing history. Joshua can't fight. It's a win for fat guys. That's what it is.

 

I know how Joshua allowed him to be that close. He's not that fucking good for starters. He's way too easy to hit for a guy his size. He doesn't use his reach advantages at all and his chin is suspect. Joshua is a very good athlete but not all that has translated to boxing skill.

That's why when I read this thread a while back and I still wonder where all this belief that Joshua would easily dispatch Wilder came from. Putting everything aside Wilder is just a tougher, more determined fighter that can stand up to the heat.

 

Joshua never looked this bad before.

Wilder's determination, and his ability to take a punch, were legitimate questions until the 8th round of the Ortiz fight.

 

The more I look at it, the more I believe this was very much the result of one third-round punch. Joshua essentially had his senses dulled. It might be giving him too much credit -- honestly, I hadn't seen enough of him in the past to make a definitive guess -- but it seemed like he fought from that point on like he was in a fog.

 

It's possible, but that's a long time not to be able to shake off a single punch that didn't knock him out. I haven't seen enough of Joshua to know if he has a bad chin or head. When you think of some of the beatings some other guys can get through, he'd have to be pretty suspect for your theory to be true. It might be. I don't know enough about him to know, either.

 

Probably a stretch. It just strikes me that maybe that first knockdown was a punch that lesser boxers would not have gotten up from -- sort of like Fury getting up from Wilder's shot in the 12th.

 

Well Joshua fought 20 cans and Klitchsko and however you want to define Povetkin. And in the Klitchsko fight he let that 40+ year-old man come up off the canvas and drop him in the later rounds. I doubt he could've stood through the pressure Ortiz gave Wilder either.