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By Arne K. Lang
On Saturday, April 23, a UK record crowd of 94,000 is expected at London’s Wembley Stadium where Tyson Fury will defend his WBC and linear world heavyweight titles against Dillian Whyte.
The massive turnout is incongruent with the odds. This is no “pick-‘em” affair, as one might assume for an aggregation this large. Fury is a consensus 6/1 favorite in the on-line marketplace and that price actually seems a bit too low when measured against various polls. The Ring sampled 20 pundits and boxing insiders and it was 20-0 for the Gypsy King; no one had the temerity to pick Dillian Whyte.
Whyte has only lost twice. On Dec. 12, 2015, he was stopped in seven rounds by Anthony Joshua. As pros they had answered the bell for roughly the same number of rounds, but Joshua had a wealth of amateur boxing experience and he had virtually none. Whyte’s background was in kickboxing where he was a British and European champion. Moreover, it’s worth noting that Whyte buckled Joshua’s knees in the second round of that skirmish and hurt his shoulder in the process.
His second loss came on Aug. 22, 2020 at the hands of Alexander Povetkin. In the fifth round, Povetkin knocked him clear out of the ring with a thunderbolt of an uppercut. No one, least of all Whyte, saw that coming. He had the Russian in serious trouble before the sudden turn-about.
Eager to avenge the “fluke” knockout, Whyte turned the tables when he caught up with Povetkin again. He won every minute of the mill before Povetkin’s corner tossed in the towel in round four. But although Povetkin was a former Olympic gold medalist and had lost only twice previously -- to Wladimir Klitschko and Anthony Joshua – Whyte received little credit for that performance. The storyline was that Povetkin, a 41-year-old COVID survivor, had grown old overnight.
On his best nights, Whyte (28-2, 19 KOs) has looked unbeatable. In 2018, he knocked poor Lucas Browne into oblivion with a punch that would have felled a horse. Had it landed on Tyson Fury, it would have assuredly had the same result, notwithstanding Fury’s remarkably fast-acting powers of recuperation.
At times, however, Whyte, age 34 per Wikipedia but thought to be at least a year older, has looked very ordinary. He sleep-walked through his 10-round bout with David Allen. It was easy work for the “Body Snatcher,” but yet he looked slow.
Dillian Whyte has been disrespected by more than the pundits who accord him no chance against Tyson Fury. No one in recent memory has waited longer to get a crack at a world title. Whyte was the WBC’s mandatory challenger for more than two-and-a-half years before temporarily falling off this perch. His current title, “WBC interim champion,” is a travesty, but one would have thought that it would have gained him a square deal at the negotiation table. A champion’s mandatory opponent customarily receives 25 or 30 percent of the purse, but it’s not a fast rule. To get this fight, Whyte had to agree to an 80/20 split.
Tyson Fury’s people, notably lead promoter Frank Warren, have made Whyte feel like an ugly step-sister. He has branched out to the management of prizefighters, taking rising heavyweight contenders Fabian Wardley and Alen Babic and newcomer Thomas Carty under his wing, but yet Warren saw no point in including any of them on his show. The featured bout of a dreadful undercard is an uninteresting featherweight contest between Tyson Fury’s bosom buddy Issac Lowe and countryman Nick Ball.
The prevailing sentiment is that Whyte cannot out-box Fury. The Gypsy King has more dimensions to his game and all of those dimensions are incorporated within a six-foot-nine frame and an unconventional style (rather awkward, but in a good way) that makes him a more perplexing puzzle to solve. But when two big heavyweights lock horns, the underdog always has a puncher’s chance and an underdog simmering with resentment over various slights would seem to be especially dangerous.
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