Wilder should thank, not fire, his cornerman
Breland may have ignored wishes of Fury’s beaten opponent, but his concession saved the American to fight another day
It touched such a nerve that it ended up as a T-shirt homily: “Sit down, son, it’s all over. But no one will ever forget what you did here today.” Those words were delivered to Joe Frazier by Eddie Futch, the doyen of boxing trainers, before the 15th and final round of the savage “Thrilla in Manila” in 1975, when Frazier could no longer see Muhammad Ali’s punches through one of his battered eyes. Futch’s moral courage in pulling his fighter out when he might have been three minutes from victory has been honoured many times since without fully forcing home its message.
Mark Breland, who defied his fighter and his colleagues in the corner by throwing in the towel for Deontay Wilder in Las Vegas on Saturday night, will probably lose his job for acting on instinct when Tyson Fury was pummelling the defending champion against a ring post in the seventh round.
A white sheet fluttering on to the canvas is highly loaded.
In the game’s macho lore it is an act of surrender to be undertaken only by those unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice of being maimed or even killed.
Breland is a former Olympic and world champion who knows more about risk than Jay Deas, Wilder’s “head coach” and a former crime reporter, who says he “disagreed” with Breland’s decision to spare America’s champion further punishment. When the referee told
Wilder the white flag had been raised, he shuffled back to his corner wincing with anger.
Breland pointed to the ear from which blood had been flowing. Nobody in the corner, though, was on his side.
At the subsequent press conference, Deas disowned Breland and ignored a detail later remarked on by ex-pros: by saving Wilder from the final knock-down – and possible lifetime injury – Breland breathed credibility into a third fight, which Wilder now looks certain to demand – as is his right under the terms of their arrangement. Knocked out, on the floor, Wilder would have been a hard sell for the promoters of a trilogy. Fury’s win would have been so comprehensive that public interest would have waned.
Instead, Wilder can now blame Breland and say he might have one-punched his way out of trouble had one of his cornermen not gone rogue and exceeded his brief. Wilder has plenty of other excuses: he claimed Fury was allowed to rabbit-punch him repeatedly and even blamed the heavy metal space trooper’s suit he wore into the ring as part of Black History Month, that it had drained the energy from his legs.
What really sucked the life out of him was the first knock-down, in the third round, which left him dazed and clinging on. But the first point of call for any undefeated champion beaten so brutally is denial.
The next morning I bumped into a former heavyweight who said: “Wilder will spend the next three months crying, because that’s what I did when I lost the biggest fight of my life.”
Few can comprehend what losing in the way Wilder did in Las Vegas does to a champion’s consequences far beyond the loss of Tszyu’s belt.
Lots of things get put on T-shirts, many of them facile. “Quitters never win and winners never quit,” is one of the banalities of our age.
It is quite possible for someone in sport to give their all and still be overwhelmed. To distinguish between courage and mortal risk is not easy.
But we ought to at least try to see the dividing line, as Breland did on Saturday.
The old fighter told me the morning after Fury’s win: “As a heavyweight boxer, would I like to have seen the knockout? Yes. Am I glad the towel went in? Yes.”