Deontay Wilder vs Jimmy Young

I have no idea what you're saying.

George Foreman fought on a hot humid night in Puerto Rico and he got dehydrated to the point he was actually hallucinating. His team had to carry him to the shower in his dressing room. And he was screaming "There are nails in my hands where they crucified Jesus!" He was in the hospital for days.

The fact that he finished the fight at all, given how jacked up he was afterward, is the surprise. Many fighters that dehydrated never see the finish. If it had been scheduled for 15, he never would've made it. He would've collapsed in the ring like Ray Robinson.

 

I'm saying that I've heard before on this forum that the Young fight wasn't the only one Foreman fought dehydrated. That Foreman's people dried him out on more than one occasion, based on the false belief that this was helpful to his performance.

Young was just the one where he suffered the most side effects from dehydration; it was worse than usual for whatever reason.

 

?

I'm pretty sure that's the only time Foreman was hallucinating in the ring and the only time he was hospitalized after a fight for dehydration.

 

I'm not sure which aspect of my post this question mark is referring to.

EDIT: Just saw your edit adding stuff after the question mark.

 

If you know of another time Foreman was hospitalized for dehyrdration after a fight or another time when he was so dehydrated he was hallucinating ... feel free to post it.

That's the only time I know of.

 

But -- again per forum lore -- it wasn't the only time his trainers limited his water intake before fights. It's not surprising that Foreman eventually suffered severe effects in a fight from this policy.

 

I'm not saying he was hallucinating in any other fights. Not every dehydrated person is having hallucinations or delusions, AFAIK.

 

I know every dehydrated person doesn't have hallucinations. He did, though. To the extent that he freaking thought he "saw God" and quit the sport. Did you ever hear him talk about what he was seeing?

If the bell rang for a round 13 ... it would've been one of the wildest scenes in boxing history.

 

Oh, I agree that he was suffering more (and weirder) effects from dehydration than he'd had before.

My point is that 70s Foreman's vulnerability to dehydration may just have been baked into the cake, so to speak. It was a weakness waiting to be exploited. I wouldn't be surprised if Foreman had started having hallucinations if he'd survived into round 12 or 13 in Zaire, for example.

 

I think Fury's recovery ability makes Wilder somehow seem less dangerous than he is. He's got a reasonable chance here of taking Young's head off. If he doesn't, yes, he loses, but I have a hard time giving Wilder a low chance of success against anyone.

 

It should also be mentioned, on top of his dehydration, Foreman also had hardly any time to acclimatize to the environment as he'd arrived in Puerto Rico less than 24 hours before the bout. While I agree both of these attributed to this loss, as well as his adaption to a style that didn't suit him, all of these were Foreman's (or his camp's) faults entirely.

 

I understand what you are saying, the key thing is "forum lore." I would guess that Foreman was using water in whatever amounts other fighters of that time were, I doubt his team was much worse or better than the others. The evidence is not there that GF was "dehydrated" prior to fights by his team. He didn't look dehydrated and he had energy, being dehydrated is likely an excuse like being poisoned in Zaire.

 

If we are talking about water and 70's fighters, I'll bring up that Larry Holmes spent a while in his second book talking about hydration. He thought the conventional wisdom at the time of not actually drinking water during a fight was really dumb. Did GF drink water during that fight?

 

Even Patterson in his book recommends dehydrating to an extent leading up to a fight. He adds the caveat that it should be under the supervision of qualified coaches, but even so, it's surprising how that attitude survived among elite fighters for so long.

 

I can certainly confirm that Larry Holmes drinks a lot of water during fights.

Just watch him walk back to the corner at the end of the Holyfield fight. When he vomited water all over the place, all of us watching live went "Did you see that?"


Around 1:03.35 mark.

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