He was never supposed to be a boxer. In a different timeline Deontay Wilder might have been scoring touchdowns or throwing down tomahawk dunks for the University of Alabama. That was the dream growing up poor in the shadow of Bryant-Denny Stadium on the streets of sports-mad Tuscaloosa, where he excelled for Central High School’s football and basketball teams. And it was still the goal when the 6ft 7in teenager enrolled at nearby Shelton State Community College, where he sought to raise his grades enough to transfer and play for the home town Crimson Tide.
That all changed with a routine visit to the doctor’s office in 2005, when he learned his unborn daughter with his then-girlfriend would be born with spina bifida, an incurable birth defect in which the spine does not close fully during development. Right then Wilder, only 19, knew he needed money and he needed it yesterday.
“We could have terminated the pregnancy,” he told me quietly years ago during a visit to Tuscaloosa. “We could have just left this whole thing alone. Let everybody go about their business, but I felt like it was the right thing to do. I felt like my daughter deserved to live, no matter what the conditions were, no matter how old I was. No matter what I don’t have, I was going to make a way.
“If I don’t make any right decisions no more in my life, I can say at least I done it one time.”
From that day Wilder picked up any work he could find. He waited tables at IHOP and Red Lobster. He began driving a truck for Budweiser, where the benefits included health insurance that covered the expensive treatment for his daughter, Naieya. But it wasn’t long before the gnawing memories of his sporting prowess led him down a dirt road off a quiet offshoot of Route 30, not far from the banks of Black Warrior river, and through the doors of the Skyy boxing gym on 19 October 2006 – three days before his 21st birthday – where he took up the gloves for the first time.
Given the astronomically low success rate of aspiring professional boxers who start the sport in their 20s, Wilder’s journey went further than anyone could have imagined: an Olympic bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games after just 35 bouts as an amateur, the World Boxing Council’s version of the heavyweight championship after 33 paying fights, no fewer than 10 successful title defenses – one more than Mike Tyson and Joe Frazier – and career earnings in excess of $100m.
This most improbable journey ended at 3.26 on Sunday morning in the Nafud desert, more than 7,500 miles from that aluminum-sided gym where it began, when Wilder was brutally knocked out by a cement-fisted colossus named Zhilei Zhang who outweighed him by nearly 70lbs. The 38-year-old American didn’t formally announce his retirement after his fourth defeat in five fights, escaping the Kingdom Arena into the Riyadh dawn without speaking to the media, but some things don’t need saying. It doesn’t take a expert to see Wilder’s race is run.
Much as in December’s listless 12-round decision loss to Joseph Parker, he’d appeared mentally checked out from the opening bell, a timid silhouette of the charismatic knockout machine once capable of ending a fight at any second. A light had gone out. In reality Wilder’s run as an elite heavyweight ended three years ago with the finale of his epic trilogy with Tyson Fury, their third encounter in 34 months, each of them rife with heart-pounding drama with no fewer than nine knockdowns in all. When it was finished Wilder left a part of himself in the ring he’d never get back. You could probably say the same for Fury.
On one hand Wilder’s career postmortem could be framed in terms of what might have been. What if he’d found the sport earlier in life? What if he’d come from a boxing hotbed instead of a backwater with a negligible record for producing quality fighters. And more practically, what if he’d enlisted a training setup that always seemed lacking, most recently sacking former Olympic champion Mark Breland in favor of the unproven Malik Scott?
On the other there’s a credible argument that Wilder is one of the great overachievers in all of American sport. From the start there was something endearing and almost quaint about his nickname – the Bronze Bomber, proudly invoking his third-place finish in Beijing – given the often supercharged egos of top prizefighters. (If you mentioned Floyd Mayweather Jr’s 1996 Olympic bronze within earshot, he’d probably have a stroke.) In the simplest terms Wilder was a deeply flawed boxer, guided masterfully by manager Shelly Finkel, who became perhaps the most devastating puncher in the sport’s centuries-spanning history.
At one point he was undefeated in 40 professional fights with 39 wins inside the distance, the highest ever knockout percentage for a heavyweight with that many fights. Not unlike a thunderbolt serve in tennis, power is the equalizer in boxing that can compensate for average marks in nearly every other category. That proved critically important for Wilder, whose late introduction to the sport left him without the technical foundation ingrained in many fighters before their teenage years.
If he’d come about in the first half of the 20th century, before boxing’s gradual retreat toward the margins of American life, there’s no question Wilder would have been one of the country’s most famous athletes. These days a fighter needs a special something to truly cross over into the cultural mainstream, but not even Wilder’s made-for-YouTube knack for separating opponents from their senses was enough. Outside the ropes he wasn’t stylish. His Alabama drawl was mistaken for dim-wittedness. Not even Wilder’s knockout-friendly approach was enough for him to become a truly reliable box office attraction, a fact that Fury needled him with relentlessly and with cruel intentions. All of it created a chip on his shoulder which only grew as the years passed.
That long-simmering resentment prompted Wilder to overcompensate with the media, leaning into a villain’s role that never really fit. He made increasingly bombastic statements which often backfired. When he famously said on the Breakfast Club that “I want a body on my record” – telling an audience of millions that he wanted to kill an opponent in the ring – Wilder’s public perception took a southbound turn while he was widely shunned by a boxing community all too familiar with the sport’s darkest reality. His almost comical sprayfire of excuses to explain his defeat in the second Fury fight, including that his ornate ringwalk costume was too heavy, drew ridicule and inspired memes. But none of it squared with the Wilder that I knew from our conversations: the sensitive, soft-spoken, introspective father who put his health on his line for family.
Wilder never quite achieved the all-time greatness his Bomb Zquad cultists proclaimed, nor was he quite as bad as insisted by the armchair critics who vastly outnumbered them. In the end he was a country kid who extracted as much as possible from his natural talent, went from rags to riches, brought loads of excitement for more than a decade to a heavyweight division that needed it and left an indelible mark on the sport. In a cruel trade where happy endings are few and far between, that’s plenty good enough.
