Fury tries to get in your head, but all of his talk has fallen on deaf ears
IT is late in the evening and the headlights of the cars rumbling across the bridge over the Black Warrior River between Tuscaloosa and Northport dance and dip in the Alabama darkness.
A mile away, past the crossroads of shops and restaurants in downtown Northport, past the Bart Mart on the corner, 30th Avenue opens up into a parking lot, bordered on one side by a long low-slung building.
At the far end, cars cluster around the entrance to the Skyy Boxing gym. Inside, Deontay Wilder, WBC heavyweight champion, is leaning back in a low chair in a small office.
His defence against Tyson Fury at the Staples Center in Los Angeles is only two weeks away and Wilder is saying he is the happiest he has been.
‘The things I have, money can’t buy,’ he says. ‘I have happiness, peace, love and great health. I’m the type of person who can be happy for others.
‘If you knew who I really was you’d love me. You’d love me to death. People only get the perspective of me in the ring but that is not enough to know me. I can’t have girls as friends or some guys as friends, because people always fall in love with me. They always do.’
Later that night, Jay Deas is sitting in the Dreamland BBQ restaurant on Bridge Avenue where Wilder says they serve the best ribs in Alabama.
Deas, a one-time TV reporter and the man who sets the open tone for Wilder’s camps, has been his trainer since the day 13 years ago when Wilder, a promising basketball player, walked into his gym, desperate to make it as a boxer so he could pay the medical bills for the treatment he needed for his baby daughter Naieya, who had been born with spina bifida.
Wilder, 33, didn’t start his fight career at Skyy Boxing. Not really. He says that if I want to know more about him I should go and check out the house where he grew up as one of six siblings on the West Side of Tuscaloosa.
It’s a crescent of unevenly spaced bungalows, some with tidy front yards, some overgrown and bedraggled, between West Highland Memorial Cemetery and the road heading out of town. A mailbox outside a small beige-painted wooden house says 3811 on it.
I get out of the car to take a picture and a man opens the front door. His name’s David. He says he’s lived there for two years. He says Wilder pulled up outside in his Rolls Royce recently just to have a look. ‘I told him: “Deontay, I know you’re making a lot of money but you ain’t got enough cash to buy this place back.”’ He bursts out laughing and goes back inside.
Wilder still associates the place with his fractious youth. ‘I never looked for trouble,’ he says, ‘but trouble always found me. It seemed to me every time I walked out the door I had to put my hands up. I had to do something. Being in Tuscaloosa there wasn’t nothing to do. My dad was a minister. My grandmother a pastor. I was raised up in the church. I was shielded from things. We couldn’t listen to certain music, couldn’t see certain things on TV.
‘I was always a loner. I was always to myself. People would pick with you. They’d test you. They would see if you had the courage, if you had the heart.
‘If you went to the wrong neighbourhood you was going to fight. There weren’t no questions asked so you might as well be ready. People would say: “Why go to those neighbourhoods?” But sometimes that was where the best basketball players were.
‘I built up a reputation. People knew. If you tried to fight me I’d fight back.
‘I’m going to buy back the block. I’ve got many things I want to do. I want to build homes. I want to build different restaurants and businesses to bring revenue back over that way.’
Fury calls Wilder one-dimensional with a clumsy right hand he can see coming a mile away but there is something dazzling about his speed when you see it close up.
Wilder gets ready to spar. He is wearing golden gloves and a golden headguard. He is a showman again. One of his sparring partners, the veteran fighter Malik Scott, climbs into the ring and they begin to circle each other. Now and again, Wilder explodes into action. Much is made of Fury’s awkward style but Wilder is unconventional, too.
‘They both awkward,’ says Scott later, as he sits eating fried pickles in a sports bar up the road, ‘but Deontay’s more agile. Time and prime. It’s Deontay’s time and he’s in his prime. He’s the fastest in the world.’
They are almost ready to break camp. On Wednesday, they will pack up. On Thursday, they will celebrate Thanksgiving. On Friday, they will head to LA. Wilder sits in the office, quiet and calm, away from the bombast of the travelling roadshows with Fury. He says he likes the man he must beat on December 1.
‘I like him as a person,’ he says. ‘I’ll never deny that. Even if he doesn’t like me, I’ll still say I like him as a person. I see a lot of great things in him.
‘The Fury fight means everything to me. It’s my coming out party to America. This is my time.
‘Let him build the fight. He thinks he’s getting in my head but I’m enjoying him talking. All my career, I’ve had to carry the promotion and people don’t realise how stressful that is.
‘Fury is one of those fighters who tries to get in your head but you can’t get in my head. The things he says, I have heard over and over again and more as a child. It falls on deaf ears.’
Wilder is ready. His Bomb Zquad is ready. When he leaves Tuscaloosa on Friday, over the bridge, past the West Side, heading for LA and the bright lights, he will return to his children, he says, laden with greater glories than ever before.