Best prefight psychout in boxing!

I’m glad you brought this one up. I was telling someone about it last week.

I think it completely mind ****ed Wlad — he had to know at that point he was facing a crazy man.

And then the fight was in doubt up until hours before because Fury’s camp (rightly) complained about the mattress-thick padding on the ring designed to slow his footwork advantage and threatened to walk if it wasn’t replaced with normal padding.

All that weighed on Wlad and Fury played a nice hunt-and-peck game to upset him.

 

I know he is not popular on this forum but he gave people some really great fun moments.

His entrance in the White fight (the last of what remained of his prime) was simply spectacular!

 

I know a guy who was a bit of a nutter (and one of the funniest people I’ve ever known) from our gym who had a few amateur fights (before I began coaching, but I worked out there). With him it’s hard to know what might have been by design vs. what he just did without thinking as a natural reaction.

This was his first amateur fight. If you’ve ever been involved in amateur boxing (at least in the U.S.), outside of tournaments it kind of goes like this — you show up, you weigh in and the coaches have a meeting and put together matches. Like ‘I’ve got a middleweight 2 fights, he’s pretty strong and has a decent punch but he’s really raw.’ And some other coach says, ‘I’ve got a middleweight with six fights but he’s only won two.’ And they make the match.

So the fighters get there and as they go through the weigh-in and physical everybody is sizing each other up trying to figure out who they’re going to be fighting.

Well, the guy I know is a light heavyweight and there’s one other guy there who looks to be in the same neighborhood. So they’re in a side room where the scales are and the other light heavy kind of gingerly walks up to him and says, ‘So what do you weigh?’ And the guy I know looks at him for a second and screams: ‘DOES IT ****ING MATTER?’ Well that guy saw quickly that there wasn’t something right about the guy I know (which is true, haha) and he gets a scared look and just kind of shrinks and looks at the floor and walks away (while every fighter there is staring slack-jawed at this odd scene trying to figure what happened/what set him off.

Well of course they matched and the other guy fought completely scared and the guy I know won. It was over before they even made the match, much less before the got into the ring.

Not everyone can be intimidated by a tough-guy act, but basically everyone is scared of a crazy man. I think Ali going so overboard with his screaming and taunting and stalking Liston that Sonny thought he was insane, and I do think Ali got inside his head. If you want to win psychological warfare, crazy is the way to go.

 

Iran Barkley against Van Horn. This is the got caught in the wrong neighborhood give me your lunch money job.

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Ali spiking his blood pressure and heart rate

 

Yes, with his jailhouse mentality the only type of person to get to Sonny was one that he thought was crazier than a s*ithouse rat.

 

I hate to comment without having full info but there was a story in Boxing News years ago that I thought of on this subject matter. Apparently before a fight, Bunny Sterling was in a dressing room and someone in his camp could overhear the opponent talking next door in one corner of the room where the thin walls were the barest. And the opponent (this is where I'm unclear. The opponent may have been Mark Rowe but not sure) was extremely nervous. Well, the Sterling camp capitalized on this by acting all menacing and angry and savage when getting in the ring. What a perfect psych-out. I know Sterling won the fight but it annoys me that I can't recall the opponent. This appeared to be a well known story in Boxing News so if anyone across the pond remembers this, please chime in.