The old timers won’t like it one bit, and it’s probable younger fight fans will disagree with Deontay Wilder’s opinion on what would have happened had he and one of the great heavyweight champions of yesteryear got it on. Speaking with Lem Satterfield for Premier Boxing Champions, the currently sidelined WBC heavyweight king was asked which fighter in history he would have liked to have fought and how the fight would have gone.
Wilder, 37-0(37) picked the immortal Joe Louis and guess what; “The Bronze Bomber” stated that he would have beaten “The Brown Bomber,” – by KO!
“He was a smaller heavyweight but he was considered one of the best, and like me, he’s from Alabama,” Wilder said of the longest-reigning heavyweight champion in the history of the sport. “That would have been a great title fight between two hard-hitting heavyweights. Of course, I would knock Joe out. I think given his height, he would never get past my jab. But even if Joe was able to muster up enough energy to get beyond my jab, the jab would have hypnotized him enough to where he would never see the right hand coming. And once I land that right hand on him, that’s it.”
Wilder is correct when he says Louis, who retired with a superb 66-3(52) record (two of these losses coming when Joe was way past his best and, due to the unimaginably bad treatment he received from the IRS, was forced to return to the ring to fight for money) was not all that big, but at 6’2” he was big enough. Wilder, at 6’7,” might have given Louis some trouble in the early going with his movement, his reach and, when hurt, the holding tactics he would have been forced to adopt, but as Joe said himself, “he can run but he can’t hide.” Louis, who chopped down a number of taller opponents during his incredible career, would have caught up with Wilder, who isn’t too hard to tag, and it would have been, “timber!”
Wilder is a good fighter, a dangerous puncher and he has heart. But Louis, a master at cutting off the ring, of wasting zero punches and of landing vicious short punches thrown on the inside, was something truly special. Again, Joe would have had to have worked his way inside Wilder’s jab, but once he did do, and once he zeroed in on a chin that has been tested by the likes of Eric Molina and (very early in Deontay’s pro career) Harold Sconiers, it would have been game over.
Wilder would have fallen inside six rounds.
