Wilder vs Breazeale: Tale of the tape

Deontay Wilder and Dominic Breazeale are set to let the bombs fly in tonight’s Showtime main event, with Wilder’s WBC heavyweight title at stake, and in the co-feature, Gary Russell Jr defends his WBC featherweight title against Kiko Martinez.

Here’s a look at how the big boys size up against one another in the main event:

Generally speaking, Wilder in his career is the taller man, but that hasn’t been the case in either of his last two fights. In December, Tyson Fury was actually a couple inches taller, an here, Breazeale can look him right in the eye.

Wilder has an inch-and-a-half in reach on the Californian, but Breazeale will have just over 30 pounds on Wilder. That is nothing new for Deontay, though, and in fact he came in over 10 pounds heavier here than he did against Wilder, perhaps looking to negate some of Breazeale’s strength advantages if they get in the clinch.

One thing really stands out: Wilder is 8-0-1 in title fights, Breazeale is 0-1. His only loss came to Anthony Joshua just under three years ago at London’s O2 Arena. The last time he stepped up to this level is the time Breazeale lost.

And now a look at Russell-Martinez:

This doesn’t necessarily deserve any extra look, but I resolved to do these for all world title fights, and Russell is defending the WBC featherweight title, so here we are.

As you can see, he’s top five for everyone, and arguably the only reason he isn’t No. 1 in the division is because he fights so infrequently, and then too frequently against inferior opposition.

The veteran Martinez is a former titleholder at 122 pounds, winning the IBF belt in 2013 with an upset of Jhonatan Romero, and then defending successfully against Jeffrey Mathebula and Hozumi Hasegawa before losing the belt to Carl Frampton. He then lost another 122-pound title fight to Scott Quigg in 2015, and a featherweight title shot against Leo Santa Cruz in 2016. Since losing to Santa Cruz, he’s gone 4-1-2 and won the European featherweight title, which is realistically about his level. There’s a lot of ground between beating Marc Vidal and competing with Gary Russell Jr.

Bad Left Hook has live coverage for Wilder vs Breazeale