“Styles make fights.”

“Don’t hook with a hooker.”

Boxing analysis is overloaded with clichés. As Deontay Wilder makes his return to the ring this Friday night, ending a 391-day layoff and trying to snap a two-fight losing streak, there’s one cliché in particular he’d better hope has some truth to it:

“Punching power is the last thing to go.”

The theory goes – and there’s certainly plenty of historical evidence to back it up – that even as reflexes dull, even as chins go soft, even as feet become less fleet, the ability to turn out another man’s lights with a properly placed punch can remain in place.

It overlaps with another boxing cliché, actually: “a puncher’s chance.”

And if there’s any aging boxer on the planet right now who enters every fight with at least a puncher’s chance, it’s Wilder.

At the end of 2019, “The Bronze Bomber” had a ridiculous record of 42-0-1 with 41 KOs. He’d been taken the 12-round distance by Bermane Stiverne in 2015, a blemish of sorts avenged with a first-round KO in their 2017 rematch. And he’d famously fought to a 12-round draw against Tyson Fury in 2018, a bout in which he was perhaps both lucky not to lose and unlucky not to get a knockout win.

Aside from those two fights, Wilder’s punching power had proven conclusive in every single one of his professional bouts from 2008-2019.

But the 2020s have been an entirely different story for him. Wilder has lost four of five fights. His monumental punch has produced just one inside-the-distance win.

Yes, 80% of his fights in the 2020s have ended in a knockout, but that’s because Wilder has been on the receiving end three times.

The power may or may not be gone. But in back-to-back losses to Joseph Parker and Zhilei Zhang in his last two fights, something was gone. Maybe several somethings that combined to prevent his power from announcing itself.

Heavy hands are all well and good, but they’re not much use without a delivery system.

On a closer look at the Parker and Zhang fights, certain patterns and subtleties emerge – details that weren’t necessarily as easy for viewers to recognize when watching live because we carried at the time the baggage of expectations.

Against Parker, on December 23, 2023, those expectations were substantial. In his last major fight before that, Parker had been stopped by Joe Joyce. Wilder was coming off a first-round KO win over Robert Helenius and had still only lost to one opponent: Fury. The Bronze Bomber was a huge favorite, ranging from -600 to -650.

But Wilder also had ring rust to shake off, as his two minutes and 57 seconds against Helenius were his only official in-ring action in the previous two years. He looked uncomfortable from the start against Parker, standing not just at distance, but at extreme distance, where the underdog from New Zealand couldn’t reach him and where even Wilder, with his 83-inch reach, couldn’t possibly touch Parker.

Wilder flinched on every Parker feint. He threw occasional jabs with no intention of landing them. The broadcasters observed that Parker was keeping his distance, but that’s one of those baggage-of-expectations things, influenced by the notion that he had to fear Wilder’s remarkable punching power. In actuality, Parker was confidently holding the center of the ring, while a circling Wilder was the one creating separation.

It was easy to think in the first couple of rounds that Wilder was just off to a slow start, due to that ring rust and to the knowledge that his power had bailed him out after slow starts before. But watching with the benefit of hindsight, we know it wasn’t just a slow start, and what stands out is how ineffective Wilder’s defense was all fight. 

He showed absolutely zero head movement. His entire defensive game plan was based on standing far away, trying to block shots with his arms and leaning back on occasion as a punch flew his way.

Offensively, when he let his hands go, Wilder more or less looked like himself. His jab was effective in spots. His hand speed didn’t appear diminished.

Unfortunately for Wilder, Parker had his weaponry brilliantly scouted. The Kiwi’s footwork was on point, and he was able to make Wilder’s bombs fall just short. And again, you see the fight through a different prism now – you understand the reality that Parker is one of the three or four best heavyweights in the world, and you can appreciate that his domination of Wilder wasn’t necessarily due to Wilder suddenly going over a cliff.

In Round 7, Parker telegraphed a right hand, and it didn’t matter; Wilder didn’t move his head an inch, and the punch landed flush. Parker went on to hurt Wilder late in the eighth with a right hand that also spoke to the American’s lack of head movement, and though his legs stiffened somewhat, he did manage to stay on his feet.

Wilder wasn’t setting his punches up. Rather, he was looking to turn things around with one big shot. And he kept trying through the final bell, but it just wasn’t happening. Parker knew exactly where to be and what to watch for, and Wilder has never been much of a “Plan B” guy.

Against Zhang on June 1, 2024, Wilder was again tentative at the outset, as one might expect when facing a 282-lbs southpaw. But his defensive reflexes were noticeably poor again, and his legs already looked a touch unsteady as he walked back to his corner at the end of the opening round.

In the third round, there was a moment when Wilder appeared to have a clear opening for his right hand equalizer, but he didn’t pull the trigger – maybe because he recognized that if it didn’t land, he’d be vulnerable to a left hand in return.

His punch output was worryingly low. Through three rounds, CompuBox tracked Wilder at just nine punches landed among 64 thrown – a per-round average of 3 for 21. Everyone knows that the key to beating Zhang is to tire him out. By barely punching, Wilder was doing nothing to push Zhang in that direction.

And the Bronze Bomber refused to throw a serious jab against a southpaw, the awkward angle leading him instead to merely reach and paw with it.

In Round 5, however, Wilder woke up. 

He landed a couple of sharp right hands, easily his best punches of the right. Emboldened by a bit of success, Wilder focused entirely on offense, held his left hand all the way down by his side as he loaded up for a theoretically heat-seeking right, and was wide open for Zhang’s southpaw right hook. The punch landed cleanly and spun Wilder around and, as the dazed fighter complained to the ref about something, a right hook found his chin – and that was that.

Conventional wisdom says the brutal trilogy with Fury, which included two stoppage losses, diminished Wilder. But was he actually appreciably worse in his last two fights than he had been in previous outings? Or were Parker and Zhang the wrong opponents at the wrong times?

By most reasonable assessments, Parker is the second-best opponent of Wilder’s pro career – behind Fury – and Zhang is either the third- or fourth-best, depending on how you rate him relative to Luis “King Kong” Ortiz. From there, it’s a steep drop-off to the B-listers, C-listers and D-listers (aside from Ortiz) against whom Wilder built his remarkable knockout percentage.

So maybe Wilder hasn’t slipped so terribly. Maybe he slipped just enough to make it a bad idea to take on two of the most capable opponents of his career. (And, it follows, maybe much of his run in the 2010s was the smoke-and-mirrors born of deliberate matchmaking that some identified it as at the time.)

To these eyes, Wilder wasn’t a substantially worse fighter in those last two defeats. His defense was lousy – nothing new there – his offense looked more or less the same as always, just without a decisive punch ever finding the target.

Which, yes, that’s the whole point of the endeavor if you’re Deontay Wilder: to find the target with that punch. But a sample size of 17 rounds against two of the most capable opponents of your career is hardly proof that you can’t find the target anymore.

As his fight with Tyrrell Herndon this Friday in Wichita, Kansas, nears, Wilder has gone on a mini-press tour, and it’s been interesting to hear him attempt to explain his last two defeats in articles and on podcasts.

He’s mentioned a shoulder injury that required surgery. He’s spoken about seeing a sports psychologist. He’s hinted at other outside-the-ring distractions that he declines to detail. He admitted to losing his confidence.

There’s little to separate excuse-making from healthy rationalization from desperate rationalization from utter delusion. They can easily mix and mingle and overlap.

At the end of Wilder’s fight with Parker, as they heard the scores being read – 120-108, 118-110, and 118-111 – Wilder raised his arms as if fully expecting to hear his own name. That could easily be defined as delusion.

But everything else seems potentially, to one degree or another, constructive.

Derrick James, the 2022 BWAA Trainer of the Year and a man with some experience in the upper reaches of the heavyweight division, having worked recently with the talented but ever-teetering Anthony Joshua, believes Wilder “still has a lot left” and says the key is restoring his confidence.

“I think that the idea is to get him fights to build his confidence,” James told BoxingScene – and certainly the meeting with Herndon, who has been stopped in four of his losses and DQ’d in the fifth, is intended to do that. “He should not necessarily be looking for easy fights just to get wins, because if you’re not learning and developing and gaining confidence from that, then there’s no purpose in taking those type of fights. His goal should be to get the rounds in and build his confidence at the same time, because it’s all about evolution. Boxing is evolving.

“The person that he is right now, he can’t be that individual and fight a top-level fighter. So he has to get in there, get the wins, get the confidence. You have to experience that what you’re doing works.”

Even though Wilder is 39 years old, James feels it’s not too late for him to learn and add to his game.

“I would like to see him try to set up the right hand more,” James said. “You don’t get away from using that right hand and try to become a pure boxer or something. But I think you can find other ways to land the right hand. He can use more of the jab or more of the hook to set up the right. I think Deontay still has a lot of desire, so if he’s truly dedicated, and is willing to adjust his strategy and his game plan, he can still be successful.”

All it takes is one or two vintage, violent Wilder knockouts, and the fan interest will instantly return.

Especially for one particular matchup. It’s nowhere near as big a fight as it once could have been, but if Wilder gets some of his own confidence back and gets the fans to share in that confidence, an overdue meeting with him and James’ former charge Joshua will always be marketable.

Ya know, they say the punch is the last thing to go.

In actuality, the marketability of a once-great puncher outlasts everything else. (See: Tyson, Mike.)

Deontay Wilder needs to be matched properly, and he needs to get back to fighting on a regular basis. If he does those things, he may have one more meaningful run in him. And he could absolutely have one more massive payday available to him.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of and the author of 2014’s . He can be reached on , , or , or via email at [email protected].