Wilder starting boxing earlier or with a different trainer would make no difference

He doesn't listen to his coach and doesn't believe that he needs to learn about things like footwork, so you are correct. Nothing would have made him any good.

 

Yeah you can only learn if you want to learn and Breland made it clear when he was still part of Wilder's team when he said, Wilder didn't want to work on his boxing skills, only wanted to train power. Wilder simply focused on what he already did well, he was never going to become a more well rounded fighter. It takes a certain mindset for any athlete to recognise weaknesses and be willing to work on them and Wilder never had it.

Wilder was lucky he was blessed with a hellacious punch and a management team who were willing to protect and pad his record.

 

Bull****. If he started out young like some of these guys and had a trainer strong enough to channel that natural headstronged-ness (is that a word?), he coulda been quite a bit better. Maybe a legit Champ. He certainly has showed some heart, much of a **** as he's been from time to time.

 

Maybe a few bad losses at earlier ages would've knocked some desire to learn into him... Or maybe he'd have quit and never gone anywhere.

Realistically, the problem was two-fold:
1) He didn't want to listen or learn.
2) He wasn't clever enough to really process and learn.

Even if you somehow fixed #1 (with or without starting younger), #2 would still prevent him from being much more than he was.

The physical gifts were all there, he just lacked the matter where it matters.

Run his career 10x over and odds are he wouldn't have "achieved" as much as he did... He rode his luck bigtime, got a very lucky break to get a belt and an even luckier break to be protected from guys who would've annihilated him - and breaks in Ortiz #1 and Fury #1 where he could very easily have lost, and probably should (not that Fury wasn't also lucky in a different sense in their first fight!).

 

I disagree slightly, but not in a way that matters.

It's for the trainer to recognize the weaknesses - what the fighter needs is the humility to listen and the drive to improve and submit to someone who knows better.

Wilder couldn't listen, didn't care about fixing his issues and wasn't humble enough to listen to a well respected trainer - it's no wonder he was a fraud.

 

Agreed it's for the trainer to recognise weaknesses also. But it's also the trainers job to teach the fighter to be able to think for themselves, they are not robots simply following instructions the coach gives to them.

I'm currently reading a book on coaching/teaching methods and the data is clear. It's not good to give students hints, tips, clues or shortcuts to finding answers which is the most common method of teaching. This is procedural teaching, it gives better short term gains in learning but in the long term it doesn't work as well as simply letting students figure out the problem themselves. This slower but superior method teaches the ability to problem solve, to think creatively and in more abstract ways and for people to sometimes come up with different solutions to the same problem.

So a good coach won't just tell his fighter how to stop getting caught with jabs, but simply tell him, you keep getting hit with jabs and expect the fighter to find his own solution. A boxer who is a procedural thinker can adapt in the ring if he's already been taught the answer previously but can't adapt to a problem he has never faced or been taught how to deal with. But a more expansive thinker can create a solution and adapt mid fight to problems he has never faced or bean shown how to deal with. That for me is the difference between a boxer with poor ring IQ and good ring IQ.

 

This is a great post.

On some level it definitely makes sense - so long as the fighter in question is capable of learning that way.

In Wilders case, he'd have had to be spoonfed anyway because he lacks the general intelligence to be encouraged to think with.

But then because he wouldn't listen, the only option would be for him to learn by putting him into positions he'd have to adapt to - but his limited IQ meant he couldn't learn to adapt...

I guess what I'm getting at is there was basically no way to make him any less limited than he was - or perhaps more succinctly, he actually was untrainable.

 

You can’t train a Chin. Eddie Futch and Ray Arcel combined wouldn’t have mattered. Wilder will always be a Glass Jawed fighter.

 

I've said it before and I'll do it again.

It seems to me that Wilder's whole shtick was being as wild as he was. Walking around kinda clueless, just looking for the opportunity to explode on you like f***ing re**rd (sorry for the expression, mods, it just makes me laugh).

It was surprising, unorthodox, instinctual, hard to prepare for and that's what got him through for so long. He was not Wlad, he was not Ali, not even someone like David Haye, who was also explosive with hayemakers but in a much more measured way.

If you tried to make him more othodox, he would probably be worse than he was. I remember Larry Metchant commenting on Bowe in the second Golota fight, that "Bowe who is a naturally agressive fighter was trying to be more measured" to jab and have a boxing match with Golota, implying it was a mistake. I know Bowe was incomparable technically better, but still...

Starting so late and probably not being that talented when it comes to the technical aspects of the game, he used what he was talented in, and it was probably the most effective thing he could do.

 

still would have had the iffy chin.

 

I agree with this. I think ironically Wilder stubbornly sticking to honing his power was the single best thing he could have done to stay somewhat relevant. He was so limited and far behind everyone else in every other category that it was always going to be like sinking resources into a black hole to try to improve him, and might well have weakened him by taking away from the one thing he did exceptionally well. Wilder was like the ultimate min max character in a video game who pumps all their points into power because all his other base stats are garbage, and rather than become a character with good power and mediocre everything else, he chose to become a character with great power and terrible everything else, and then fight with the sole aim of landing his money shot on his opponents no matter what. It was obviously a tactic that was going to get found wanting sooner or later, but it probably took him way further than he had any right to go.

 

It might sound like a bit of a dig at him considering he's now so obviously on the downslide of his career, but I really think he was in reality little better than an American David Price who in an alternate timeline might have got clocked by some random journeyman if his handlers weren't so shameless as to have him fighting absolute no hopers for so long. Had that happened I doubt we would be giving him a second thought at this stage, because the moment Wilder shipped a loss was the moment everything fell apart for him.

On the other side I sometimes wonder how Price himself would have done had his handlers kept him at British domestic level till he was thirty fights in and perfectly comfortable at bowling over puddings, then carefully manoeuvred him to a title shot and struck it lucky. You can point to Price's chin here and say it would have always been an issue, but I think to some degree his chin issues were exacerbated by his anxiety and lack of self-belief that had him tensing up and not adequately bracing for or rolling with shots he may have taken earlier in his career.

Anyway, don't mean to derail this discussion. Just think it's an interesting way to look at their careers and what could have been had a few things been different.

 

Wilder never wanted to learn the basics. He was hell bent on getting his right in. I think he would have done much better if he had started earlier, develope a better understanding of the sport and learn the fundamentals. Imagine if he had better footwork, balance, learned to use the jab to set up the offense, hook off the jab, feint. With that right. Yeah, I can see why some say he could have been an ATG.