Whyte’s chance to be the Rocky of Gibraltar!
WHEN Alexander Povetkin offered Dillian Whyte a final handshake yesterday, he got a fist bump instead. Even in less germy times, this most brooding of heavyweights was never a great one for life’s pleasantries.
That he has found himself back in Povetkin’s company at all is tantamount to a career crisis, and for the same reason tonight’s reunion in Gibraltar can be fairly described as his most important fight to date.
If he wins this rematch, he will return to his former spot at the front of the slow-moving queue of heavyweight contenders.
But if he falls on the Iberian Peninsula, as he did in Eddie Hearn’s garden last August, his long-awaited world-title shot might never come. Against that backdrop, and in the shadow of another big lump of rock, there have been all manner of interpretations around the shocking defeat that pushed him to this place. But most theories tend to over-think what happened.
That is to say he was dominating and dropping a former world and Olympic champion across four rounds, then bumped into an uppercut from hell in the fifth.
In the heavyweights, often it isn’t any more complicated than that, but Hearn has since floated the possibility that some of Whyte’s nastiness and spite may have been sapped ahead of the first fight by a combination of his growing wealth and the unusual circumstances of the encounter.
Those included living in a Winnebago on the lawn of a Holiday Inn in Brentwood for a week, then being greeted each morning with a smile from the man he was going to punch.
Whyte himself has alluded to that latter issue, with the claim that his Russian opponent found a way to weaponise good manners.
In his usual style, Whyte, 32, explained it thus: ‘ Povetkin thinks he is smart and he likes to play this friendly game where he touches gloves before the fight and before every round — that’s what he was doing in the fight.
‘It is very hard to be nasty to someone who is being polite to you. But this time I don’t care, this time I don’t give a f***. If he wants to be friendly, I don’t care, I will punch him in his throat.’
On Hearn’s point around being softened up by wealth, Whyte, who will earn upwards of £2million for this pay-per-view fight, said: ‘ I don’t live nice, people will tell you. I don’t party or have an entourage. I could be living in a much bigger place but I keep my life humble. ‘I don’t show up with Louis Vuitton or things like that, I have never been that guy. ‘It’s Eddie Hearn who lives a comfortable life and he assumes I am, too. He asks me why I am not driving around in a Rolls-Royce, with all the money I have earned, but that is not me. ‘I am happy with an Audi and a Range Rover. The nastiness never left.’ For sure, he will need to be more decisive if faced with the sort of chances he held in the first fight — when Whyte twice dropped Povetkin but failed to finish him off. An area of intrigue this time is whether Povetkin, aged 41, has fully recovered from time spent in hospital with coronavirus, which caused the initial fight date in November to be postponed.
The lingering effects of the virus then led to a second postponement in January, so it has been a ropey preparation.
Indeed Povetkin looked a little fleshy on the scales.
At 16st 4lb, he was four pounds heavier than in August, while Whyte was relatively toned and five pounds down on his weight for the first fight, at 17st 9lb.
He will start as a decent favourite to regain his spot as the WBC mandatory challenger, a position he previously held for more than 1,000 days.
If he loses, title fights against Tyson Fury or Anthony Joshua will be further away than ever.
Meanwhile, Campbell Hatton weighed in at 9st 10lb for his lightweight debut on the undercard against Jesus Ruiz, a Spaniard with a 0-10 record.
The task for Hatton — 20-yearold son of Ricky, who is also his manager — would appear to be more straightforward than that facing Whyte.