The heavyweight’s comments after his loss to Tyson Fury are best euphemised as misjudged – but he is not the first boxer to be pilloried for offering up a bizarre excuse
Can anyone confirm whether there’s a possibility Deontay Wilder may have suffered a bump to the head of late? However outlandish that theory might initially seem, it is one we have to work on after the heavyweight addressed the circumstances of his loss to Tyson Fury in Las Vegas on Saturday night in an interview best euphemised as misjudged.
According to Wilder, whose team threw in the towel in the seventh round, he has an entirely understandable excuse. “He didn’t hurt me at all,” this ran. “But the simple fact is that my uniform was too heavy for me.” The reference is to Wilder’s ring-walk costume, which was a typically ornate affair, this time worn for Black History Month – and which, according to Wilder, weighed well over 40 pounds what with “the helmet and all the batteries”. He’d only tried it on for the first time the night before. “I didn’t have no legs from the beginning of the fight,” he reflected. “In the third round, my legs were just shot all the way through … I knew I didn’t have the legs because of my uniform.”
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